What a well-lived life. Enjoy.
The New York Times
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April 30, 2006
A Cajun Craftsman Preserves the Hallowed Ping of History
By JON PARELES
SCOTT, La., April 26 — The triangle may seem like a humble instrument: nothing more than a bent steel rod hit with a steel stick, merrily clanging away behind the fiddle and accordion of a traditional Cajun band. Visitors here in the bayou country of Acadiana often buy them as souvenirs at tourist stops.
But there are triangles, and then there are the triangles made by Dieu Donné Montoucet, an 80-year-old Cajun who goes by Don and whose hand-forged, antique-steel, virtually indestructible triangles are prized by musicians for the way they ring.
"They have a lot of volume, they have a lot of clarity and they have a lot of sustain," said Barry Ancelet, a professor of Francophone studies at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette who is a historian of Cajun music and a triangle player. "On a final note they'll continue ringing like a church bell."
The simple triangle paces traditional Cajun music, and its peal echoes beyond the bayou. While Cajun music's stronghold is around Lafayette, about 130 miles west of New Orleans, its two-step beat and high, tense vocal style have made their way into American music like country and New Orleans rhythm and blues.
Cajun music is a staple of the annual New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival. [The 37th edition started on Friday and runs through next Sunday.] Advance ticket sales alone have topped 100,000. Among its headliners are Bruce Springsteen, Paul Simon and Dave Matthews. But the lineup also includes hundreds of Louisiana bands, among them traditionalist Cajun bands like Steve Riley and the Mamou Playboys, who use Mr. Montoucet's triangles.
Hurricane Katrina did not reach Acadiana, and Cajun music may be making new inroads in the 21st century, since many New Orleans residents — musicians included — evacuated west into Cajun country.
A small printed sign on Mr. Montoucet's workshop reads, "Don Montoucet, Lafayette — Lafayette Parish, Triangles — Cajun." His workbench and his office occupy one corner of his son-in-law's furniture warehouse. Inside, a dozen triangles hang on the wall; there's also a deer head, a stuffed raccoon and some birdhouses made from old license plates. A larger sign announces that Mr. Montoucet does Louisiana state vehicle inspections, his day job.
Mr. Montoucet has never had just one job. He drove a school bus for 45 years and began fixing cars at his own Don's Garage in 1940. From 1968 to 1996 he played accordion in his own Cajun band, Don Montoucet and the Wandering Aces. It changed its name to Don Montoucet and the Mulate Playboys when it became the house band at the well-known Mulate's restaurants in Breaux Bridge, Baton Rouge and New Orleans.
There's history in Mr. Montoucet's triangles. It's an old instrument; Mr. Ancelet says that triangles are described in accounts of medieval and Renaissance music. His triangles have a distinctive tight, flat loop at each end. He copied the design from a set — triangle and beater — that he inherited from his grandfather, a blacksmith who came to Louisiana from France. He made his first set around 40 years ago for a friend who knew he did ironwork.
Soon word got around, not just to Acadiana but to Canada and beyond. He sells the triangles himself in his workshop; they are also sold at the Savoy Music Center in Eunice, La., a stronghold of Acadian traditional music founded in 1960 by the musician and accordion builder Marc Savoy. They cost $35.
Mr. Montoucet makes the triangles from the U-shaped tines of salvaged old hayrakes: huge wheeled contraptions pulled by horses or tractors. The tines are springy and patinaed with rust from sitting in wet fields. He does not shine them up. "They can't be too rusty," he said. "The first thing that people ask me is, 'Is that the old iron?' They don't want to hear nothing else."
With an acetylene torch — he used to use a coal furnace — Mr. Montoucet heats the tines to straighten them, then cuts them to the right length. (One tine makes a triangle and its beater.) He heats them again to bend them into shape and keeps them red-hot to make the loops at the end. "It takes 250 licks of that big forge hammer to make one," he said.
The key to the sound, he says, is in the final stage: the tempering that heats and cools the steel for strength. He said: "If you heat them too hot, or not enough, it makes a difference. I can show you how to temper them, but if you don't have it here ..." He pointed to his head.
The hayrakes were collected through the years by a friend who works as a trucker. There is no new supply. "The iron is getting scarce," Mr. Montoucet said. "A lot of these farmers, they were glad to get rid of these hayrakes and glad to get them out of the way. But they got no more, pardner. I have a few of them left. My oldest son says, 'Dad, what you going to do when you can't get any more steel?' I say, 'Don't you think it's time for me to retire?' "
The triangles are guaranteed for life against the walloping a Cajun musician will give them. In the days before amplification, the triangle might have been the only thing heard by dancers at the far edges of a party. Mr. Montoucet knows of only one of his triangles that has broken: one that he made for Christine Balfa, the daughter of the great Cajun fiddler Dewey Balfa. After a forensic examination of the pieces, Mr. Montoucet found that there had been a hairline crack in the original hayrake tine.
Although Mr. Montoucet makes triangles in set sizes — usually from 8 to 12 inches on a side — they are anything but standardized. Mr. Montoucet played a few of his 9-inch triangles: each had a different note and a different ring.
"One day a lady came in and said: 'How come they're all different sounds? Why can't you make them all the same sound?' We were five or six men here, and I said, 'Lady, it's like this: if all us men liked the same woman, it wouldn't work.' Everybody likes different things. Some people like gumbo, some people don't like gumbo, but I don't know too many people who don't like gumbo."
Cajun musicians do not simply hit the triangle. A Cajun two-step or waltz is defined by a quick-changing ping and clank that vary depending on how the triangle is gripped: with a few fingers, an open palm, a closed fist. Mr. Montoucet smiled as a visitor attempted to coordinate the rhythmic tapping, clasping and unclasping.
"You ought to see my little 18-month-old great-grandchild doing that," he said. "He comes, and he gets all my tools, and then he picks up the triangle. His father says, 'He's probably going to be a mechanic.' And I say, 'He might be a musician too.' "
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Sunday, April 30, 2006
Saturday, April 29, 2006
Gassed
hmmmmm. methinks the oil guys got us by the short hairs !!! Enjoy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 30, 2006
As Gas Prices Go Up, Impact Trickles Down
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
The End of Fun and Games
Gas prices are not doing much for the love life of Fernanda Tapia.
A student at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., Ms. Tapia, 21, is among the untold number of money-strapped college students who have been grounded by the pumps.
Ms. Tapia's red 2004 Dodge Neon was supposed to be a ticket to freedom when her brother passed it down to her in January. She had planned to drive to Manhattan each weekend to visit her boyfriend at New York University, and also dreamed of going out to restaurants and making day trips with friends.
But the car has been nothing but a money-guzzler, she said, leaving her so short of cash that the car often sits in the parking lot outside her apartment.
"When I first got the car it was all fun and games, but I found out it's pretty expensive to fill the tank," Ms. Tapia said. "I don't even want to put gas in my car right now."
Unexpectedly high gas prices are also putting a crimp in the summer plans.
J. R. Cowan, a history major at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., said he decided against a cross-country summer trip because "gas would cost double what I budgeted for when I started dreaming about California last year."
When Amanda Early, a junior at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., accepted a four-day-a-week summer job in public relations near the campus, she did not realize it would amount to a sentence of spending an entire summer in New Jersey. Ms. Early had planned to drive home to Connecticut every weekend, but she said gas prices would force her to remain in New Jersey in the house she shares with four other girls.
"This is a college town," Ms. Early said, "and it is nowhere near as much fun in the summer."
A sophomore at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who declined to give his name because he did not want to risk angering a prospective employer, said he might turn down a summer job delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy in a Boston suburb. The $10 hourly wage was acceptable, he said, but not the requirement that he drive his own car and pay for gas.
KATIE ZEZIMA
Defending Big Oil
John C. Felmy, the chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute in Washington, the main trade association for the oil business, sounds frustrated.
As an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University, he said, he drove to Boston with his debate team during the Arab oil embargo. More than 30 years later, he can recite the topic for 1973-74 without hesitation: "Resolved, the federal government should control the supply and utilization of energy in the United States."
On the drive back, Mr. Felmy recalled, his group was almost stranded in Connecticut because no gas was available, a result, he said, of government misallocation. Government, Mr. Felmy said, can make energy problems worse.
"I thought we'd learned from bad energy policy by now," he said, although there are days when he is not so sure. Those are the days when his computer flashes with hate e-mail from people who blame the American oil industry for the rise in oil prices.
"People just simply don't know the facts," he said, "but they accuse you of everything you can imagine."
Mr. Felmy's organization has been arguing to anyone who will listen that over the long haul, oil company profits are almost identical to the average for manufacturers in the United States, and that since 1982, the price of petroleum products is up less than the price of pulp and paper or lumber, and only about one-third as much as drugs and pharmaceuticals. But it has been tough going, with the public and with legislators, he said.
"The politicians are reading all the polls, they know how concerned consumers are, and they are trying to figure out what to do about it," he said. "Some are lashing out, attacking the industry, using information that is simply inaccurate."
Mr. Felmy said he was proud of what he did for a living, and he called institute members "honorable companies."
"They're doing what they should do, what is legally required for their shareholders, unlike other companies you've heard about in the news," he said. "They are managing their business properly, keeping fuels flowing to consumers, even though we're operating in places where sometimes people are shooting at us."
His industry, Mr. Felmy said, is "1.4 million Americans working to keep your gas tank full 24 hours a day."
MATTHEW L. WALD
Driving Guzzlers for a Living
Few drivers feel the pain of soaring gas prices as acutely as the New York City cabbie stuck behind the wheel of a Crown Victoria sedan with a thirsty, overworked eight-cylinder engine.
At the entrance to the Checker Management taxi depot in the Long Island City section of Queens is a trio of old, battered pumps where returning cabbies refill their bottomless tanks after their 12-hour shifts.
The old pumps offer only regular unleaded, and for the very modern price of $3.15 and nine-tenths of a cent per gallon. It is still lower than prices in Manhattan, where most of these cabbies go through a full tank of gas lurching and screeching around traffic-clogged streets for 12 hours.
Back at the depot, they replenish their tanks, shaking their heads in disgust as the pumps' rusty digit counters spin.
"We drive 12 hours a day, so we feel it more than anyone," said one driver, Peter Lee, 54, who began driving cabs in New York in 1972. He pointed to the depot's fleet of Fords, mostly Crown Victoria sedans.
"These things get about 10 miles per gallon in the city, 8 miles if the customer wants the air-conditioner on," he said, adding that gas mileage was made worse by the choppy gas-brake-gas-brake driving style required in New York City. "New York people are always late and telling you to drive fast, so you have to keep gunning the engine and then braking, which uses more gas."
The drivers at the depot, just across the East River from Midtown, are almost all immigrants, and all kinds of languages, dialects and accents can be heard in the tight locker room. They wolf down home-cooked meals — whether couscous, curry or rice and beans — before their shifts. With the Manhattan skyline looming to the west, they gather in the parking lot and grouse about gas prices.
Drivers often log 150 miles a shift and spend almost $50 in gas, Mr. Lee said, about $20 more per day than a year ago. He recommended that the city order a 50-cent surcharge for each fare to compensate cabbies for price increases.
Most drivers at the depot rent their cabs for 12 hours at a time, usually paying more than $100. They pay up front in cash and get a key to a cab with a full tank of gas; they must refill it when they return the cab.
"Compared to a year ago, I pay $15 more a day in gas," said Miguel Gonzalez, 67, of Queens. "I only take home $100 a day, so that's my lunch and dinner right there."
Lesly Richardson, 50, a Haitian immigrant from Brooklyn, nodded in agreement.
"That's $100 a week," he said. "That's your grocery bill."
COREY KILGANNON
New Hope for Ethanol
These are happy days for an ethanol man.
The price of grain-alcohol fuel is up sharply as demand has surged, and Colorado's newest ethanol plant is almost ready to open after four years of preparation and sweat by Dan R. Sanders and his family.
"It's great for us," said Mr. Sanders, 28, as he watched one of the first loads of corn — ethanol's main ingredient — arrive on Friday morning from a farm in northeastern Colorado.
When Mr. Sanders's company, Front Range Energy, begins shipping next month from this $60 million factory in Windsor, Colo., an hour north of Denver, it will just about double Colorado's ethanol production, adding 40 million gallons a year to the pipeline. And at least two other plants around the state are in planning.
Ethanol, which is essentially identical to the old corn liquor of moonshine fame, is increasingly blended with gas to reduce emissions and replace other additives like MTBE, or methyl tertiary butyl ether, which is a suspected carcinogen.
But more and more vehicles are also able to burn commercially available ethanol fuels like E85 — 85 percent grain alcohol — and kits can also be bought that allow cars to burn an even higher percentage of ethanol. All this has further increased the demand, and the price. In most parts of the country, E85 sells for 30 cents to 60 cents a gallon less than regular unleaded gasoline, but most cars get fewer miles to the gallon burning ethanol.
Ethanol has its critics. Some economists say that farm subsidies blur the fuel's real cost, making it a less than perfect long-term alternative in thinking about the world after oil.
But here in Colorado, people like Mr. Sanders say the economics make more sense than ever. Until recently, ethanol could only make money if distilled close to its fuel source, he said. That is why corn-country Iowa dominates the nation's production.
Increasing demand is shattering that boundary, making factories feasible closer to where the product gets sold. About half of Front Range's output, Mr. Sanders said, will go no further than Denver.
The Sanderses have also lined up local buyers for the waste. The left-over corn mash will be sold as cattle feed, while the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation will be made into dry ice and sold in the Denver market.
But operations like this are still small potatoes by the scale of big oil. On a day when the Chevron Corporation was announcing $4 billion in profits, Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jana, and their 2-year-old daughter, Ellie, were watching the corn arrive. And Ellie was not even very interested.
KIRK JOHNSON
Cutting Into Travel and Food
Jeremy Cole looks at the black numbers on the blue Marathon Gas sign in Kirtland, Ohio — $2.87 for a gallon of regular — and thinks of his broken vow.
For two years, Mr. Cole, 19, had given his girlfriend a gift on the 25th of each month, to commemorate the day they met — Jan. 25, 2002 — at Willow Hill Baptist Church in Willoughby, Ohio.
But for the past three months he has missed the date as gas prices have risen.
This month, Mr. Cole bought her a rose and a pink wind chime, because she loves to hang pink things from the ceiling of her bedroom.
The fuel warning light in his 1993 Honda Accord was glowing. It was a 25-mile drive to her house in Chardon, and Mr. Cole, who studies computers at Lakeland Community College and earns $8.18 an hour working in a factory that heat-treats metal, did not have money for gas. So he stayed home.
"I won't be able to see her till I get paid," he said. "Ever since gas prices went up, it's like I'm barely able to see her."
Until this year, Mr. Cole said, he always filled his tank. On one recent day, though, he bought only five gallons for $14.35, barely enough to drive to school, work and straight back home.
A guitar lies across his back seat, and his trunk is filled with amplifiers. Mr. Cole plays in a band called In All His Ruin. Before gas prices jumped, band members drove separately to practice at the drummer's house in Chesterland, 15 miles away. Now they all meet at Mr. Cole's house and carpool, squeezing themselves and their equipment into a different member's car every week.
On the way home, Mr. Cole used to stop at Wendy's and order the No. 6 combo meal: spicy chicken sandwich, medium Dr. Pepper, medium fries. Now he orders junior hamburgers from the dollar menu.
"It's not a gourmet meal anymore," he says. "French fries are an extravagance now. It makes me angry that I have to change my whole life because of gas prices."
CHRISTOPHER MAAG
At $2.39 a Gallon, a Bargain
Cheap gas prices are in the eye of the beholder.
At the Flying J Travel Plaza in Casper, Wyo., a gallon of regular unleaded gas sold this week for $2.39, about as low as anywhere in the country and more than $1 less than some places in California and Hawaii.
But gratitude at the pumps? Forget it.
"Gas prices don't seem low to me," said Dick Gilbert, a tow truck operator, who was out $170 filling his vehicle's two tanks. "And they just keep going higher."
Mr. Gilbert was preparing to burn most of the gas on a 250-mile round trip to retrieve a broken-down truck. He will charge his customer $2.50 a mile, but even so, he said rising gas prices were eating into his profits.
In an adjoining gas lane, Cindy Wright spoke of the pain high gas prices cause the single mothers who make up many of the clients at the public health clinic in Torrington, where she is a nurse.
"They can't afford to drive," she said. In another sign of the times, Ms. Wright said, a relative who owns an auto repair shop arrived at work one morning recently to find that thieves had siphoned gas from vehicles left there overnight.
DOUG MCINNIS
Caught in the Middle
Pity the people who sell gas in San Francisco or lease franchise stations from the oil companies. No, really. As if working around fumes and grime were not enough, now customers are rude — even hostile — about the sudden escalation in gas prices, which in San Francisco are among the highest in the country.
"Someone today threw the money down, and said, 'This is ridiculous,' " said Stella Liu, 51, who leases a 76 gas station from Conoco and runs an adjacent automotive repair business. Other customers scream at her cashier before jumping into their cars and tearing away from the station.
Ms. Liu, though, is sympathetic. She too has to buy gas to fuel her 50-minute commute (one way) from the suburbs. "If I were making the money, I wouldn't be here," she said, "We are all in the same boat."
Prices may fluctuate, Ms. Liu said, but even when gas is $3.36 for a gallon of regular, as it was on Friday at her station in the Potrero Hill neighborhood, her profit is unchanged because she is paying more to her supplier.
"It's the same for me as it is for the customer, maybe worse," she said. Business is down because people are buying less gas — choosing a quarter or a half a tank — and then paying by credit card. "We have to pay insurance and workers compensation, the rent," she said. "We are making the same money we did years ago. Only now, it barely covers the cost of our overhead."
Many customers understand the dealers are not at fault, but others simply rage at the nearest target.
She advises angry customers to contact Conoco.
"I tell people, I'm just the dealer. I have no control over the price. I don't even know why the price is going up."
CAROLYN MARSHALL
Trying to Share the Pain
In a region where buses advertise that "Gas isn't expensive if you don't buy any," Matt Mulholland of Lynwood, Wash., assumed it would be easy to arrange a carpool for his daily commute, especially as gas approached — and passed — $3 a gallon.
"Let's save time and gas!! yes yes YES please," Mr. Mulholland wrote on the Craigslist Web site.
A month later, Mr. Mulholland, 32, still drives alone. No one responded to repeated pleas to share the 40-mile round trip from his home north of Seattle to Bellevue, a city east of Lake Washington. He is disappointed, not least because, with a passenger, he could zip into Interstate 405's high-occupancy vehicle lanes and prune his hourlong commute.
"I look at cars around me and they always have one person," said Mr. Mulholland, who works as an estimator for an auto body company. "I thought I'd probably have more chance of getting somebody interested now, when they're talking about prices peaking at $4 by the end of the summer."
But so far, the shock of $3 gas has not persuaded many commuters to change their behavior.
There has been no increase in registration for the Rideshare program, which arranges carpools and vanpools for the county that includes Seattle and Bellevue, said Cathy Blumenthal, the program's coordinator for King County Metro Transit.
By contrast, 5,000 people — a 62 percent increase over the previous year — signed up to share rides last fall after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita drove local gas prices toward $3.
While Mrs. Blumenthal wonders if people are waiting — either for prices to surge or recede — before they alter their driving habits, Mr. Mulholland is more pessimistic.
Complaints about gas prices are "hype, a hot button," he said. "People talk without doing anything."
JESSICA KOWAL
This article was written and reported by Kirk Johnson in Windsor, Colo.; Corey Kilgannon in New York; Jessica Kowal in Lynwood, Wash.; Christopher Maag in Kirtland, Ohio; Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco; Doug McInnis in Casper, Wyo.; Matthew L. Wald in Washington; and Katie Zezima in Boston.
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April 30, 2006
As Gas Prices Go Up, Impact Trickles Down
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
The End of Fun and Games
Gas prices are not doing much for the love life of Fernanda Tapia.
A student at Brandeis University in Waltham, Mass., Ms. Tapia, 21, is among the untold number of money-strapped college students who have been grounded by the pumps.
Ms. Tapia's red 2004 Dodge Neon was supposed to be a ticket to freedom when her brother passed it down to her in January. She had planned to drive to Manhattan each weekend to visit her boyfriend at New York University, and also dreamed of going out to restaurants and making day trips with friends.
But the car has been nothing but a money-guzzler, she said, leaving her so short of cash that the car often sits in the parking lot outside her apartment.
"When I first got the car it was all fun and games, but I found out it's pretty expensive to fill the tank," Ms. Tapia said. "I don't even want to put gas in my car right now."
Unexpectedly high gas prices are also putting a crimp in the summer plans.
J. R. Cowan, a history major at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn., said he decided against a cross-country summer trip because "gas would cost double what I budgeted for when I started dreaming about California last year."
When Amanda Early, a junior at Seton Hall University in South Orange, N.J., accepted a four-day-a-week summer job in public relations near the campus, she did not realize it would amount to a sentence of spending an entire summer in New Jersey. Ms. Early had planned to drive home to Connecticut every weekend, but she said gas prices would force her to remain in New Jersey in the house she shares with four other girls.
"This is a college town," Ms. Early said, "and it is nowhere near as much fun in the summer."
A sophomore at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., who declined to give his name because he did not want to risk angering a prospective employer, said he might turn down a summer job delivering prescriptions for a pharmacy in a Boston suburb. The $10 hourly wage was acceptable, he said, but not the requirement that he drive his own car and pay for gas.
KATIE ZEZIMA
Defending Big Oil
John C. Felmy, the chief economist of the American Petroleum Institute in Washington, the main trade association for the oil business, sounds frustrated.
As an undergraduate at Pennsylvania State University, he said, he drove to Boston with his debate team during the Arab oil embargo. More than 30 years later, he can recite the topic for 1973-74 without hesitation: "Resolved, the federal government should control the supply and utilization of energy in the United States."
On the drive back, Mr. Felmy recalled, his group was almost stranded in Connecticut because no gas was available, a result, he said, of government misallocation. Government, Mr. Felmy said, can make energy problems worse.
"I thought we'd learned from bad energy policy by now," he said, although there are days when he is not so sure. Those are the days when his computer flashes with hate e-mail from people who blame the American oil industry for the rise in oil prices.
"People just simply don't know the facts," he said, "but they accuse you of everything you can imagine."
Mr. Felmy's organization has been arguing to anyone who will listen that over the long haul, oil company profits are almost identical to the average for manufacturers in the United States, and that since 1982, the price of petroleum products is up less than the price of pulp and paper or lumber, and only about one-third as much as drugs and pharmaceuticals. But it has been tough going, with the public and with legislators, he said.
"The politicians are reading all the polls, they know how concerned consumers are, and they are trying to figure out what to do about it," he said. "Some are lashing out, attacking the industry, using information that is simply inaccurate."
Mr. Felmy said he was proud of what he did for a living, and he called institute members "honorable companies."
"They're doing what they should do, what is legally required for their shareholders, unlike other companies you've heard about in the news," he said. "They are managing their business properly, keeping fuels flowing to consumers, even though we're operating in places where sometimes people are shooting at us."
His industry, Mr. Felmy said, is "1.4 million Americans working to keep your gas tank full 24 hours a day."
MATTHEW L. WALD
Driving Guzzlers for a Living
Few drivers feel the pain of soaring gas prices as acutely as the New York City cabbie stuck behind the wheel of a Crown Victoria sedan with a thirsty, overworked eight-cylinder engine.
At the entrance to the Checker Management taxi depot in the Long Island City section of Queens is a trio of old, battered pumps where returning cabbies refill their bottomless tanks after their 12-hour shifts.
The old pumps offer only regular unleaded, and for the very modern price of $3.15 and nine-tenths of a cent per gallon. It is still lower than prices in Manhattan, where most of these cabbies go through a full tank of gas lurching and screeching around traffic-clogged streets for 12 hours.
Back at the depot, they replenish their tanks, shaking their heads in disgust as the pumps' rusty digit counters spin.
"We drive 12 hours a day, so we feel it more than anyone," said one driver, Peter Lee, 54, who began driving cabs in New York in 1972. He pointed to the depot's fleet of Fords, mostly Crown Victoria sedans.
"These things get about 10 miles per gallon in the city, 8 miles if the customer wants the air-conditioner on," he said, adding that gas mileage was made worse by the choppy gas-brake-gas-brake driving style required in New York City. "New York people are always late and telling you to drive fast, so you have to keep gunning the engine and then braking, which uses more gas."
The drivers at the depot, just across the East River from Midtown, are almost all immigrants, and all kinds of languages, dialects and accents can be heard in the tight locker room. They wolf down home-cooked meals — whether couscous, curry or rice and beans — before their shifts. With the Manhattan skyline looming to the west, they gather in the parking lot and grouse about gas prices.
Drivers often log 150 miles a shift and spend almost $50 in gas, Mr. Lee said, about $20 more per day than a year ago. He recommended that the city order a 50-cent surcharge for each fare to compensate cabbies for price increases.
Most drivers at the depot rent their cabs for 12 hours at a time, usually paying more than $100. They pay up front in cash and get a key to a cab with a full tank of gas; they must refill it when they return the cab.
"Compared to a year ago, I pay $15 more a day in gas," said Miguel Gonzalez, 67, of Queens. "I only take home $100 a day, so that's my lunch and dinner right there."
Lesly Richardson, 50, a Haitian immigrant from Brooklyn, nodded in agreement.
"That's $100 a week," he said. "That's your grocery bill."
COREY KILGANNON
New Hope for Ethanol
These are happy days for an ethanol man.
The price of grain-alcohol fuel is up sharply as demand has surged, and Colorado's newest ethanol plant is almost ready to open after four years of preparation and sweat by Dan R. Sanders and his family.
"It's great for us," said Mr. Sanders, 28, as he watched one of the first loads of corn — ethanol's main ingredient — arrive on Friday morning from a farm in northeastern Colorado.
When Mr. Sanders's company, Front Range Energy, begins shipping next month from this $60 million factory in Windsor, Colo., an hour north of Denver, it will just about double Colorado's ethanol production, adding 40 million gallons a year to the pipeline. And at least two other plants around the state are in planning.
Ethanol, which is essentially identical to the old corn liquor of moonshine fame, is increasingly blended with gas to reduce emissions and replace other additives like MTBE, or methyl tertiary butyl ether, which is a suspected carcinogen.
But more and more vehicles are also able to burn commercially available ethanol fuels like E85 — 85 percent grain alcohol — and kits can also be bought that allow cars to burn an even higher percentage of ethanol. All this has further increased the demand, and the price. In most parts of the country, E85 sells for 30 cents to 60 cents a gallon less than regular unleaded gasoline, but most cars get fewer miles to the gallon burning ethanol.
Ethanol has its critics. Some economists say that farm subsidies blur the fuel's real cost, making it a less than perfect long-term alternative in thinking about the world after oil.
But here in Colorado, people like Mr. Sanders say the economics make more sense than ever. Until recently, ethanol could only make money if distilled close to its fuel source, he said. That is why corn-country Iowa dominates the nation's production.
Increasing demand is shattering that boundary, making factories feasible closer to where the product gets sold. About half of Front Range's output, Mr. Sanders said, will go no further than Denver.
The Sanderses have also lined up local buyers for the waste. The left-over corn mash will be sold as cattle feed, while the carbon dioxide produced by fermentation will be made into dry ice and sold in the Denver market.
But operations like this are still small potatoes by the scale of big oil. On a day when the Chevron Corporation was announcing $4 billion in profits, Mr. Sanders and his wife, Jana, and their 2-year-old daughter, Ellie, were watching the corn arrive. And Ellie was not even very interested.
KIRK JOHNSON
Cutting Into Travel and Food
Jeremy Cole looks at the black numbers on the blue Marathon Gas sign in Kirtland, Ohio — $2.87 for a gallon of regular — and thinks of his broken vow.
For two years, Mr. Cole, 19, had given his girlfriend a gift on the 25th of each month, to commemorate the day they met — Jan. 25, 2002 — at Willow Hill Baptist Church in Willoughby, Ohio.
But for the past three months he has missed the date as gas prices have risen.
This month, Mr. Cole bought her a rose and a pink wind chime, because she loves to hang pink things from the ceiling of her bedroom.
The fuel warning light in his 1993 Honda Accord was glowing. It was a 25-mile drive to her house in Chardon, and Mr. Cole, who studies computers at Lakeland Community College and earns $8.18 an hour working in a factory that heat-treats metal, did not have money for gas. So he stayed home.
"I won't be able to see her till I get paid," he said. "Ever since gas prices went up, it's like I'm barely able to see her."
Until this year, Mr. Cole said, he always filled his tank. On one recent day, though, he bought only five gallons for $14.35, barely enough to drive to school, work and straight back home.
A guitar lies across his back seat, and his trunk is filled with amplifiers. Mr. Cole plays in a band called In All His Ruin. Before gas prices jumped, band members drove separately to practice at the drummer's house in Chesterland, 15 miles away. Now they all meet at Mr. Cole's house and carpool, squeezing themselves and their equipment into a different member's car every week.
On the way home, Mr. Cole used to stop at Wendy's and order the No. 6 combo meal: spicy chicken sandwich, medium Dr. Pepper, medium fries. Now he orders junior hamburgers from the dollar menu.
"It's not a gourmet meal anymore," he says. "French fries are an extravagance now. It makes me angry that I have to change my whole life because of gas prices."
CHRISTOPHER MAAG
At $2.39 a Gallon, a Bargain
Cheap gas prices are in the eye of the beholder.
At the Flying J Travel Plaza in Casper, Wyo., a gallon of regular unleaded gas sold this week for $2.39, about as low as anywhere in the country and more than $1 less than some places in California and Hawaii.
But gratitude at the pumps? Forget it.
"Gas prices don't seem low to me," said Dick Gilbert, a tow truck operator, who was out $170 filling his vehicle's two tanks. "And they just keep going higher."
Mr. Gilbert was preparing to burn most of the gas on a 250-mile round trip to retrieve a broken-down truck. He will charge his customer $2.50 a mile, but even so, he said rising gas prices were eating into his profits.
In an adjoining gas lane, Cindy Wright spoke of the pain high gas prices cause the single mothers who make up many of the clients at the public health clinic in Torrington, where she is a nurse.
"They can't afford to drive," she said. In another sign of the times, Ms. Wright said, a relative who owns an auto repair shop arrived at work one morning recently to find that thieves had siphoned gas from vehicles left there overnight.
DOUG MCINNIS
Caught in the Middle
Pity the people who sell gas in San Francisco or lease franchise stations from the oil companies. No, really. As if working around fumes and grime were not enough, now customers are rude — even hostile — about the sudden escalation in gas prices, which in San Francisco are among the highest in the country.
"Someone today threw the money down, and said, 'This is ridiculous,' " said Stella Liu, 51, who leases a 76 gas station from Conoco and runs an adjacent automotive repair business. Other customers scream at her cashier before jumping into their cars and tearing away from the station.
Ms. Liu, though, is sympathetic. She too has to buy gas to fuel her 50-minute commute (one way) from the suburbs. "If I were making the money, I wouldn't be here," she said, "We are all in the same boat."
Prices may fluctuate, Ms. Liu said, but even when gas is $3.36 for a gallon of regular, as it was on Friday at her station in the Potrero Hill neighborhood, her profit is unchanged because she is paying more to her supplier.
"It's the same for me as it is for the customer, maybe worse," she said. Business is down because people are buying less gas — choosing a quarter or a half a tank — and then paying by credit card. "We have to pay insurance and workers compensation, the rent," she said. "We are making the same money we did years ago. Only now, it barely covers the cost of our overhead."
Many customers understand the dealers are not at fault, but others simply rage at the nearest target.
She advises angry customers to contact Conoco.
"I tell people, I'm just the dealer. I have no control over the price. I don't even know why the price is going up."
CAROLYN MARSHALL
Trying to Share the Pain
In a region where buses advertise that "Gas isn't expensive if you don't buy any," Matt Mulholland of Lynwood, Wash., assumed it would be easy to arrange a carpool for his daily commute, especially as gas approached — and passed — $3 a gallon.
"Let's save time and gas!! yes yes YES please," Mr. Mulholland wrote on the Craigslist Web site.
A month later, Mr. Mulholland, 32, still drives alone. No one responded to repeated pleas to share the 40-mile round trip from his home north of Seattle to Bellevue, a city east of Lake Washington. He is disappointed, not least because, with a passenger, he could zip into Interstate 405's high-occupancy vehicle lanes and prune his hourlong commute.
"I look at cars around me and they always have one person," said Mr. Mulholland, who works as an estimator for an auto body company. "I thought I'd probably have more chance of getting somebody interested now, when they're talking about prices peaking at $4 by the end of the summer."
But so far, the shock of $3 gas has not persuaded many commuters to change their behavior.
There has been no increase in registration for the Rideshare program, which arranges carpools and vanpools for the county that includes Seattle and Bellevue, said Cathy Blumenthal, the program's coordinator for King County Metro Transit.
By contrast, 5,000 people — a 62 percent increase over the previous year — signed up to share rides last fall after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita drove local gas prices toward $3.
While Mrs. Blumenthal wonders if people are waiting — either for prices to surge or recede — before they alter their driving habits, Mr. Mulholland is more pessimistic.
Complaints about gas prices are "hype, a hot button," he said. "People talk without doing anything."
JESSICA KOWAL
This article was written and reported by Kirk Johnson in Windsor, Colo.; Corey Kilgannon in New York; Jessica Kowal in Lynwood, Wash.; Christopher Maag in Kirtland, Ohio; Carolyn Marshall in San Francisco; Doug McInnis in Casper, Wyo.; Matthew L. Wald in Washington; and Katie Zezima in Boston.
###
Thursday, April 27, 2006
Rest in Peace
Mom died last Aug. 6th at 3:20 p.m. How she would have loved this whole "MySpace" phenomenon. Enjoy !
The New York Times
April 27, 2006
Web Sites Set Up to Celebrate Life Recall Lives Lost
By WARREN ST. JOHN
Like many other 23-year-olds, Deborah Lee Walker loved the beach, discovering bands, making new friends and keeping up with old ones, often through the social networking site MySpace.com, where she listed her heroes as "my family, and anyone serving in the military — thank you!"
So only hours after she died in an automobile accident near Valdosta, Ga., early on the morning of Feb. 27, her father, John Walker, logged onto her MySpace page with the intention of alerting her many friends to the news. To his surprise, there were already 20 to 30 comments on the page lamenting his daughter's death. Eight weeks later, the comments are still coming.
"Hey Lee! It's been a LONG time," a friend named Stacey wrote recently. "I know that you will be able to read this from Heaven, where I'm sure you are in charge of the parties. Please rest in peace and know that it will never be the same here without you!"
Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users in recent years, especially the young, who use them to expand their personal connections and to tell the wider world about their lives.
Inevitably, some of these young people have died — prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems — and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time.
The pages offer often wrenching views of young lives interrupted, and in the process have created a dilemma for bereaved parents, who find themselves torn between the comfort derived from having access to their children's private lives and staying in contact with their friends, and the unease of grieving in a public forum witnessed by anyone, including the ill-intentioned.
"The upside is definitely that we still have some connection with her and her friends," said Bob Shorkey, a graphic artist in North Carolina whose 24-year-old stepdaughter, Katie Knudson, was killed on Feb. 23 in a drive-by shooting in Fort Myers, Fla. "But because it's public, your life is opened up to everyone out there, and that's definitely the downside."
It's impossible to know how many people with pages on social networking sites have died; 74 million people have registered with MySpace alone, according to the company, which said it does not delete pages for inactivity. But a glib and sometimes macabre site called MyDeathSpace.com has documented at least 116 people with profiles on MySpace who have died. There are additions to the list nearly every day.
Last Thursday, for example, a 17-year-old from Vancouver, Wash., named Anna Svidersky was stabbed to death while working at a McDonald's there. As word of the crime spread among her extended network of friends on MySpace, her page was filled with posts from distraught friends and affected strangers. A separate page set up by Ms. Svidersky's friends after her death received about 1,200 comments in its first three days.
"Anna, you were a great girl and someone very special," one person wrote. "I enjoyed having you at our shows and running into you at the mall. You will be missed greatly ... rest in peace."
Tom Anderson, the president of MySpace, said in an e-mail message that out of concern for privacy, the company did not allow people to assume control of the MySpace accounts of users after their deaths.
"MySpace handles each incident on a case-by-case basis when notified, and will work with families to respect their wishes," Mr. Anderson wrote, adding that at the request of survivors the company would take down pages of deceased users.
Friends of MySpace users who have died said they had been comforted by the messages left by others and by the belief or hope that their dead friends might somehow be reading from another realm. And indeed many of the posts are written as though the recipient were still alive.
"I still believe that even though she's not the one on her MySpace page, that's a way I can reach out to her," said Jenna Finke, 23, a close friend of Ms. Walker, the young woman who died in Georgia. "Her really close friends go on there every day. It means a lot to know people aren't forgetting about her."
More formal online obituary services have been available for a number of years. An Illinois company called Legacy.com has deals with many newspapers, including The New York Times, to create online guest books for obituaries the papers publish on the Web, and offers multimedia memorials called Living Tributes starting at $29. But Web pages on social networking sites are more personal, the online equivalent of someone's room, and maintaining them has its complications. Some are frustratingly mundane.
Amanda Presswood, whose 23-year-old friend Michael Olsen was killed in a fire in Galesburg, Ill., on Jan. 23, said none of his friends or family members knew or could guess the password to his MySpace account, which he signed onto the day before he died. That made it impossible to accept some new messages.
"There's a lot of pictures on there that people haven't seen," Ms. Presswood said. "His parents have been coming to me for help because they know I know about the Internet. They even asked if I could hack it so I could keep the page going."
The Walkers correctly guessed the password to their daughter's page, and used it to alert her friends to details of her memorial service. They also used it to access photographs and stories about their daughter they had missed out on.
"It's a little weird to say as a parent, but the site has been a source for us to get to know her better," Mr. Walker said. "We didn't understand the breadth and scope of the network she had built as an individual, and we got to see that through MySpace. It helped us to understand the impact she's had on other people."
At the same time, Ms. Walker's mother, Julie, wrote in an e-mail message, the family was overwhelmed by unsolicited e-mail messages from strangers offering platitudes and seeking to advise them on how to handle their grief. The family found such offerings unwelcome, however well intentioned.
"The grief of our own friends and family is almost more than we can bear on top of our own, and we don't need anyone else's on our shoulders," Mrs. Walker wrote.
Mr. Shorkey said he and his wife remained in touch with their daughter's friends through MySpace. And they visit her Web page daily.
"Some days it makes me feel she's still there," he said. "And some days it reminds me I can never have that contact again."
###
The New York Times
April 27, 2006
Web Sites Set Up to Celebrate Life Recall Lives Lost
By WARREN ST. JOHN
Like many other 23-year-olds, Deborah Lee Walker loved the beach, discovering bands, making new friends and keeping up with old ones, often through the social networking site MySpace.com, where she listed her heroes as "my family, and anyone serving in the military — thank you!"
So only hours after she died in an automobile accident near Valdosta, Ga., early on the morning of Feb. 27, her father, John Walker, logged onto her MySpace page with the intention of alerting her many friends to the news. To his surprise, there were already 20 to 30 comments on the page lamenting his daughter's death. Eight weeks later, the comments are still coming.
"Hey Lee! It's been a LONG time," a friend named Stacey wrote recently. "I know that you will be able to read this from Heaven, where I'm sure you are in charge of the parties. Please rest in peace and know that it will never be the same here without you!"
Just as the Web has changed long-established rituals of romance and socializing, personal Web pages on social networking sites that include MySpace, Xanga.com and Facebook.com are altering the rituals of mourning. Such sites have enrolled millions of users in recent years, especially the young, who use them to expand their personal connections and to tell the wider world about their lives.
Inevitably, some of these young people have died — prematurely, in accidents, suicides, murders and from medical problems — and as a result, many of their personal Web pages have suddenly changed from lighthearted daily dairies about bands or last night's parties into online shrines where grief is shared in real time.
The pages offer often wrenching views of young lives interrupted, and in the process have created a dilemma for bereaved parents, who find themselves torn between the comfort derived from having access to their children's private lives and staying in contact with their friends, and the unease of grieving in a public forum witnessed by anyone, including the ill-intentioned.
"The upside is definitely that we still have some connection with her and her friends," said Bob Shorkey, a graphic artist in North Carolina whose 24-year-old stepdaughter, Katie Knudson, was killed on Feb. 23 in a drive-by shooting in Fort Myers, Fla. "But because it's public, your life is opened up to everyone out there, and that's definitely the downside."
It's impossible to know how many people with pages on social networking sites have died; 74 million people have registered with MySpace alone, according to the company, which said it does not delete pages for inactivity. But a glib and sometimes macabre site called MyDeathSpace.com has documented at least 116 people with profiles on MySpace who have died. There are additions to the list nearly every day.
Last Thursday, for example, a 17-year-old from Vancouver, Wash., named Anna Svidersky was stabbed to death while working at a McDonald's there. As word of the crime spread among her extended network of friends on MySpace, her page was filled with posts from distraught friends and affected strangers. A separate page set up by Ms. Svidersky's friends after her death received about 1,200 comments in its first three days.
"Anna, you were a great girl and someone very special," one person wrote. "I enjoyed having you at our shows and running into you at the mall. You will be missed greatly ... rest in peace."
Tom Anderson, the president of MySpace, said in an e-mail message that out of concern for privacy, the company did not allow people to assume control of the MySpace accounts of users after their deaths.
"MySpace handles each incident on a case-by-case basis when notified, and will work with families to respect their wishes," Mr. Anderson wrote, adding that at the request of survivors the company would take down pages of deceased users.
Friends of MySpace users who have died said they had been comforted by the messages left by others and by the belief or hope that their dead friends might somehow be reading from another realm. And indeed many of the posts are written as though the recipient were still alive.
"I still believe that even though she's not the one on her MySpace page, that's a way I can reach out to her," said Jenna Finke, 23, a close friend of Ms. Walker, the young woman who died in Georgia. "Her really close friends go on there every day. It means a lot to know people aren't forgetting about her."
More formal online obituary services have been available for a number of years. An Illinois company called Legacy.com has deals with many newspapers, including The New York Times, to create online guest books for obituaries the papers publish on the Web, and offers multimedia memorials called Living Tributes starting at $29. But Web pages on social networking sites are more personal, the online equivalent of someone's room, and maintaining them has its complications. Some are frustratingly mundane.
Amanda Presswood, whose 23-year-old friend Michael Olsen was killed in a fire in Galesburg, Ill., on Jan. 23, said none of his friends or family members knew or could guess the password to his MySpace account, which he signed onto the day before he died. That made it impossible to accept some new messages.
"There's a lot of pictures on there that people haven't seen," Ms. Presswood said. "His parents have been coming to me for help because they know I know about the Internet. They even asked if I could hack it so I could keep the page going."
The Walkers correctly guessed the password to their daughter's page, and used it to alert her friends to details of her memorial service. They also used it to access photographs and stories about their daughter they had missed out on.
"It's a little weird to say as a parent, but the site has been a source for us to get to know her better," Mr. Walker said. "We didn't understand the breadth and scope of the network she had built as an individual, and we got to see that through MySpace. It helped us to understand the impact she's had on other people."
At the same time, Ms. Walker's mother, Julie, wrote in an e-mail message, the family was overwhelmed by unsolicited e-mail messages from strangers offering platitudes and seeking to advise them on how to handle their grief. The family found such offerings unwelcome, however well intentioned.
"The grief of our own friends and family is almost more than we can bear on top of our own, and we don't need anyone else's on our shoulders," Mrs. Walker wrote.
Mr. Shorkey said he and his wife remained in touch with their daughter's friends through MySpace. And they visit her Web page daily.
"Some days it makes me feel she's still there," he said. "And some days it reminds me I can never have that contact again."
###
Wednesday, April 26, 2006
TRY THIS
NEW BROWSER FOR INTERENT !!!
The New York Times
pril 27, 2006
David Pogue
New Tricks of a Browser Look Familiar
ABOUT 85 percent of the Internet population uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to surf the Web, even though it's relatively ancient, crusty with neglect and about as secure as a screen door. In what other industry would 85 percent of consumers choose such a product — when better ones, also free, were also available?
Trick question. Those consumers aren't actually choosing Internet Explorer; in fact, they're not choosing. They just use what came on their Windows computers. Thanks to this built-in following, Microsoft hasn't felt much need to keep Internet Explorer current. Version 6 has been creaking along for five years — an eternity in Internet time.
But hope is in the air. Earlier this week, Microsoft took the wraps off IE 7. The new version is a public beta — Beta 2 — and therefore technically unfinished. Still, Microsoft feels that this release is ready for average people to try out; you can download it from www.microsoft.com/ie. Phone help is available, and you can easily restore Version 6 if necessary.
How this new browser measures up depends on the ruler you're using. If you've never used anything but Internet Explorer, you won't be able to wipe the grin off your face.
But next to rivals like Firefox, Opera and Safari, IE 7 is a catch-up and patch-up job. Some of its "new" features have been available in rival browsers for years.
For example, IE may be the last Web browser on earth to offer tabbed browsing. This useful feature lets you keep several Web sites open on the screen simultaneously — not in a hopeless mess of overlapping windows, but all in one window. File-folder index tabs at the top of the window keep them straight.
Truth is, Microsoft's version of tabbed browsing offers some very nice features. (And yes, dear e-mail correspondents, I'm aware that many of them also made their debut in other browsers.)
For example, you can summon a sheet of Web page miniatures, offering a handy, visual, clickable table of contents for your open tabs. IE 7 can also memorize a fleet of open tabs, saving them as a single bookmark. Later, one click opens them all again, arrayed just as you had them. Similarly, when you quit the browser, it offers to memorize the current open-tab setup, so that later you can pick up where you left off.
SCREEN real estate has been given a priority in Internet Explorer 7, too. ("Say goodbye to bulky toolbars," says the IE Web site — never mind that Microsoft gave us those bulky toolbars in the first place.)
The menu bar (File, Edit, View and so on) is gone, having been replaced by tiny pop-up menus at the right side of the window. (Those feeling disoriented can still summon the menu bar by tapping the Alt key.) And a single, noncustomizable toolbar contains the address bar, Back and Forward buttons, and the welcome new Search box, which can be programmed to use Google, Ask.com, MSN Search or whatever you like. Even with the added height of tabs, Microsoft has conserved so much space that you can see an additional inch or so of Web goodness without scrolling.
R.S.S. feeds represent another major new feature — new to Internet Explorer, anyway. R.S.S. (for Really Simple Syndication) is the Web's version of home delivery: instead of having to slog on over to your favorite sites, you are sent their latest articles and news automatically. To receive these convenient, free "subscriptions," though, you used to need a piece of software called an R.S.S. reader, which you had to download and configure yourself. No wonder R.S.S. doesn't yet play in Peoria.
But IE now joins the list of browsers with built-in R.S.S. readers. Whenever you visit a Web site that offers an R.S.S. subscription, a special logo lights up in IE; click it to see a sample of the R.S.S. broadcast (usually one-paragraph summary blurbs), and click Subscribe if you like what you see. The reading window offers a useful assortment of searching and sorting controls.
Other IE 7 enhancements include a Shrink to Fit printing option that eliminates chopped-off printouts; a print-preview mode whose draggable margins let you print only the useful parts of Web pages; a pop-up menu that magnifies the entire Web page (not just the text); and a single Delete Browsing History dialogue box that can erase all your tracks at once: History list, saved cookies and passwords, Web form data and temp files. (Who will find this feature useful? You know who you are.)
Now, if you currently use IE 6, those are all good reasons to upgrade, perhaps when the final version becomes available this summer. But the most important reason is mostly invisible: security.
As a bulwark against frauds, viruses and spyware, Internet Explorer has been about as solid as a sieve. It was such a fat target for Internet bad guys that using it was like hanging a blinking neon Hackers' Entrance sign on your PC.
Internet Explorer 7 is a different story. Not many people beyond engineers will find its 15-page list of patches compelling reading; it's about stuff like Cross-Domain Script Protection, IDN Display Protections and Enhanced Validation SSL.
But some of the security measures are comprehensible even to laymen, and they sound reassuring indeed. For example, any files that you download go into a Temporary Internet Files folder that prevents them from running automatically, in that way thwarting the installation of many evil programs. Spyware can no longer enter your machine by piggybacking on some piece of innocent software, either.
Most welcome of all, a sophisticated phishing detector warns you, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, whenever you open a fraudulent phishing page. (An example of a phishing fraud is an e-mail message that says, "Your eBay account will soon be closed; click here for details." Worried, you click the provided link and confirm your account information. Unfortunately, you've just handed over your credit card and account numbers to the Internet baddies, who have set up a fake eBay screen just for suckers like you.)
All those desperate swindlers, spammers and phishers will, no doubt, devise even more nefarious ways to invade PC's and trick their owners. But Internet Explorer 7 will make their job a heck of a lot harder.
Compared against Internet Explorers past, the new version is more secure, better looking and more efficient. There are, however, a few strings attached.
For example, it works only with Windows XP with Service Pack 2. (It will also work with next year's Windows Vista, of course — in fact, that version will offer an additional feature or two, including excellent parental controls.) The installation process is somewhat eccentric, and requires a restart of the PC.
Note, too, that Internet Explorer still offers no Autofill button that completes online order forms with a single click. The new placement of controls will baffle veterans of almost any browser — for example, the Back/Forward, Refresh, Home and Stop buttons are no longer near each other.
Finally, Microsoft says IE 7's better compliance with behind-the-scenes Web technology standards will delight Web designers. Still, some Web sites won't look or work right until they're rejiggered to accommodate the new browser. Thousands of lazy designers, for example, deny access to their sites to anyone not using Internet Explorer 6.
If you want the best browser on the market, several million fans will recommend that you look at programs like Firefox or Opera.
But without question, Internet Explorer 7 represents a big, long-awaited step in the direction of modernization. Millions of people still consider Internet Explorer their window into the Internet — and the sooner they leave the 1990's, the better.
###
The New York Times
pril 27, 2006
David Pogue
New Tricks of a Browser Look Familiar
ABOUT 85 percent of the Internet population uses the Microsoft Internet Explorer browser to surf the Web, even though it's relatively ancient, crusty with neglect and about as secure as a screen door. In what other industry would 85 percent of consumers choose such a product — when better ones, also free, were also available?
Trick question. Those consumers aren't actually choosing Internet Explorer; in fact, they're not choosing. They just use what came on their Windows computers. Thanks to this built-in following, Microsoft hasn't felt much need to keep Internet Explorer current. Version 6 has been creaking along for five years — an eternity in Internet time.
But hope is in the air. Earlier this week, Microsoft took the wraps off IE 7. The new version is a public beta — Beta 2 — and therefore technically unfinished. Still, Microsoft feels that this release is ready for average people to try out; you can download it from www.microsoft.com/ie. Phone help is available, and you can easily restore Version 6 if necessary.
How this new browser measures up depends on the ruler you're using. If you've never used anything but Internet Explorer, you won't be able to wipe the grin off your face.
But next to rivals like Firefox, Opera and Safari, IE 7 is a catch-up and patch-up job. Some of its "new" features have been available in rival browsers for years.
For example, IE may be the last Web browser on earth to offer tabbed browsing. This useful feature lets you keep several Web sites open on the screen simultaneously — not in a hopeless mess of overlapping windows, but all in one window. File-folder index tabs at the top of the window keep them straight.
Truth is, Microsoft's version of tabbed browsing offers some very nice features. (And yes, dear e-mail correspondents, I'm aware that many of them also made their debut in other browsers.)
For example, you can summon a sheet of Web page miniatures, offering a handy, visual, clickable table of contents for your open tabs. IE 7 can also memorize a fleet of open tabs, saving them as a single bookmark. Later, one click opens them all again, arrayed just as you had them. Similarly, when you quit the browser, it offers to memorize the current open-tab setup, so that later you can pick up where you left off.
SCREEN real estate has been given a priority in Internet Explorer 7, too. ("Say goodbye to bulky toolbars," says the IE Web site — never mind that Microsoft gave us those bulky toolbars in the first place.)
The menu bar (File, Edit, View and so on) is gone, having been replaced by tiny pop-up menus at the right side of the window. (Those feeling disoriented can still summon the menu bar by tapping the Alt key.) And a single, noncustomizable toolbar contains the address bar, Back and Forward buttons, and the welcome new Search box, which can be programmed to use Google, Ask.com, MSN Search or whatever you like. Even with the added height of tabs, Microsoft has conserved so much space that you can see an additional inch or so of Web goodness without scrolling.
R.S.S. feeds represent another major new feature — new to Internet Explorer, anyway. R.S.S. (for Really Simple Syndication) is the Web's version of home delivery: instead of having to slog on over to your favorite sites, you are sent their latest articles and news automatically. To receive these convenient, free "subscriptions," though, you used to need a piece of software called an R.S.S. reader, which you had to download and configure yourself. No wonder R.S.S. doesn't yet play in Peoria.
But IE now joins the list of browsers with built-in R.S.S. readers. Whenever you visit a Web site that offers an R.S.S. subscription, a special logo lights up in IE; click it to see a sample of the R.S.S. broadcast (usually one-paragraph summary blurbs), and click Subscribe if you like what you see. The reading window offers a useful assortment of searching and sorting controls.
Other IE 7 enhancements include a Shrink to Fit printing option that eliminates chopped-off printouts; a print-preview mode whose draggable margins let you print only the useful parts of Web pages; a pop-up menu that magnifies the entire Web page (not just the text); and a single Delete Browsing History dialogue box that can erase all your tracks at once: History list, saved cookies and passwords, Web form data and temp files. (Who will find this feature useful? You know who you are.)
Now, if you currently use IE 6, those are all good reasons to upgrade, perhaps when the final version becomes available this summer. But the most important reason is mostly invisible: security.
As a bulwark against frauds, viruses and spyware, Internet Explorer has been about as solid as a sieve. It was such a fat target for Internet bad guys that using it was like hanging a blinking neon Hackers' Entrance sign on your PC.
Internet Explorer 7 is a different story. Not many people beyond engineers will find its 15-page list of patches compelling reading; it's about stuff like Cross-Domain Script Protection, IDN Display Protections and Enhanced Validation SSL.
But some of the security measures are comprehensible even to laymen, and they sound reassuring indeed. For example, any files that you download go into a Temporary Internet Files folder that prevents them from running automatically, in that way thwarting the installation of many evil programs. Spyware can no longer enter your machine by piggybacking on some piece of innocent software, either.
Most welcome of all, a sophisticated phishing detector warns you, with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer, whenever you open a fraudulent phishing page. (An example of a phishing fraud is an e-mail message that says, "Your eBay account will soon be closed; click here for details." Worried, you click the provided link and confirm your account information. Unfortunately, you've just handed over your credit card and account numbers to the Internet baddies, who have set up a fake eBay screen just for suckers like you.)
All those desperate swindlers, spammers and phishers will, no doubt, devise even more nefarious ways to invade PC's and trick their owners. But Internet Explorer 7 will make their job a heck of a lot harder.
Compared against Internet Explorers past, the new version is more secure, better looking and more efficient. There are, however, a few strings attached.
For example, it works only with Windows XP with Service Pack 2. (It will also work with next year's Windows Vista, of course — in fact, that version will offer an additional feature or two, including excellent parental controls.) The installation process is somewhat eccentric, and requires a restart of the PC.
Note, too, that Internet Explorer still offers no Autofill button that completes online order forms with a single click. The new placement of controls will baffle veterans of almost any browser — for example, the Back/Forward, Refresh, Home and Stop buttons are no longer near each other.
Finally, Microsoft says IE 7's better compliance with behind-the-scenes Web technology standards will delight Web designers. Still, some Web sites won't look or work right until they're rejiggered to accommodate the new browser. Thousands of lazy designers, for example, deny access to their sites to anyone not using Internet Explorer 6.
If you want the best browser on the market, several million fans will recommend that you look at programs like Firefox or Opera.
But without question, Internet Explorer 7 represents a big, long-awaited step in the direction of modernization. Millions of people still consider Internet Explorer their window into the Internet — and the sooner they leave the 1990's, the better.
###
Monday, April 24, 2006
Cell networks
I love this stuff. The origin of the way the life force has organized itself over the past few million years is a fascinating subject. Enjoy.
The New York Times
April 25, 2006
Studies Find Elusive Key to Cell Fate in Embryo
By NICHOLAS WADE
For three billion years, life on earth consisted of single-celled organisms like bacteria or algae. Only 600 million years ago did evolution hit on a system for making multicellular organisms like animals and plants.
The key to the system is to give the cells that make up an organism a variety of different identities so that they can perform many different roles.
So even though all the cells carry the same genome, each type of cell must be granted access to only a few of the genes in the genome, with all the others permanently denied to it.
People, for instance, have at least 260 different types of cells, each specialized for a different tissue or organ, but presumably each type can activate only some of the 22,500 genes in the human genome.
The nature of the system that assigns cells their various identities is a central mystery of animal existence, one that takes place at the earliest moments of life when the all-purpose cells of the early embryo are directed to follow different fates. Biologists at the Broad and Whitehead Institutes in Cambridge, Mass., have now delved deep into this process and uncovered what seems to be a crucial feature of how a cell's fate is determined, even though much remains to be understood.
They have discovered a striking new feature of the chromatin, the specialized protein molecules that protect and control the giant molecules of DNA that lie at the center of every chromosome.
The feature explains how embryonic cells are kept in a poised state so that all of the genome's many developmental programs are blocked, yet each is ready to be executed if the cell is assigned to that developmental path.
The developmental programs, directing a cell to become a neuron, say, or a liver cell, are initiated by master regulator genes. These genes have the power to reshape a cell's entire form and function because they control many lower genes.
They do so by producing proteins known as transcription factors that bind to special sites on the DNA and control the activity of the lower-level target genes.
A question of interest for biologists studying cell identity is what regulates the master regulator genes. The answer has long been assumed to lie in the chromatin, which determines which genes are accessible to the cell and which are excluded. The chromatin consists essentially of millions of miniature protein spools around each of which the DNA strand is looped some one and half times.
The spools, however, are not mere packaging. They can lock up the DNA they are carrying so that it is inaccessible.
Or they can unwind a little, so that the strand becomes accessible to the transcription factors seeking to copy a gene on the DNA and generate the protein it specifies.
Working backward from that knowledge, biologists have spent much effort trying to learn how the state of the spools is determined.
They have learned there are protein complexes — essentially sophisticated cellular machines — that travel along the chromosome and mark the spools with chemical tags placed at various sites on the spool.
A complex known as polycomb — the name comes from the anatomy of fruit flies, in which it was first discovered — tags spools at a site called K27.
This is a signal for another set of proteins to make the spools wrap DNA tight and keep it inaccessible.
Another complex tags spools at their K4 site, which has the opposite effect of making them loosen their hold on the DNA.
The chromosomes of the body's mature cells are known to have long stretches of K27-tagged spools, where genes are off limits, and other regions where the spools are tagged on K4, allowing the cell to activate the local genes.
The Broad Institute scientists have made use of new techniques that let them visualize which spools along a chromosome carry the K27 or K4 tags.
They decided to map the tags in embryonic cells because of the interest of seeing how the process of determining cell fate is initiated.
In the current issue of Cell, a team led by Bradley E. Bernstein and Eric S. Lander reports that they looked at the chromatin covering the regions where the master regulator genes are sited.
They found to their surprise that these stretches of chromatin carried both kinds of tags, as if the underlying genes were being simultaneously silenced and readied for action.
These bivalent domains, as the biologists called the ambiguously tagged stretches of chromatin, were puzzling at first but make sense in terms of what embryonic cells are meant to do.
Each cell must avoid being committed to any particular fate for the time being, so all its master regulator genes must be repressed by tight winding of the spools that hold their DNA. But the cell must be ready at any moment to activate one specific master regulator as soon as its fate is determined.
The Broad team then looked at the chromatin state of the master regulator genes in several kinds of mature cell.
As was now predictable, they found that the bivalent domains had resolved into carrying just one type of mark, mostly the K27 tag, indicating the master genes there were permanently repressed.
But in each kind of mature cell one or more of the domains had switched over to carrying just the K4 tags, within which genes would be active.
"We think the bivalent state is keeping the embryonic cells poised," Dr. Bernstein said. "It's very special; we didn't see it in any other kind of cell."
Dr. Bernstein's team worked with mouse cells, but its findings have been confirmed in human embryonic stem cells by Tong Ihn Lee and Richard A. Young of the Whitehead Institute.
They and their colleagues started not with the bivalent domains but with the polycomb complex that gives the spools their K27 tag.
Working with human embryonic stem cells, the Lee-Young team mapped where a component of the polycomb complex was attached to the chromatin.
They found it had sought out some 200 sites where many of the master regulator genes of human cells are located. The Whitehead team's article, also published in the current Cell, indicates that in mice and people, just as in fruit flies, the same ancient mechanism is used to make the crucial decisions that determine cell fate.
"This is a very nice piece of work and will be widely interesting because it is fundamental," said Allan Spradling, an expert on embryonic development at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, referring to both teams' findings.
The new findings raise the question of how the embryonic cell knows where on its chromosomes the bivalent domains should be established. Dr. Bernstein and Dr. Lander believe that the answer lies in the structure of the DNA itself.
The bivalent domains occur at regions on the chromosome where some of the DNA sequence is highly conserved, meaning the same sequence is found in widely differing species.
Because DNA is always subject to mutation, a highly conserved sequence is a sure sign of DNA that plays some vital role. These particular sequences, however, do not contain genes, so must be conserved for some other reason.
The highly conserved non-gene sequences were first detected in the dog genome, which was decoded last year. It was in trying to figure out what these regions did that the Broad team stumbled across the bivalent domains.
Although only half of the highly conserved regions contain master regulator genes, something in their DNA structure may be the signal that tells the cell where to create the bivalent domains. This is the crucial step before cells differentiate and take on their various specialized roles.
"We don't know the trigger for differentiation — that is our next step — but I think we now have the key set of genes to look at," Dr. Young said.
Dr. Young's team has studied another aspect of embryonic stem cells which ties into the new finding about bivalent domains. Three genes, known as oct4, sox2 and nanog, are known to be particularly active in the cells and are regarded as a hallmark of the embryonic state.
Dr. Young showed last year that the genes make transcription factors that act on each other's control sites in ways that in effect form a circuitry for controlling the master regulator genes.
He has now found that these transcription factors bind at many of the bivalent domains created by the polycomb complex.
Though it's not yet clear how the whole system works, it seems that the settings on the chromatin spools determine in general what genes are accessible while at a lower level of control the transcription factors control which of the accessible genes are in fact activated.
Because human and other cells can assume so many roles and identities, biologists have long wondered how the status of a cell should be defined, but the new findings may begin to offer a definition.
"This is about as fundamental as you can get," Dr. Spradling said. "We don't really understand what we mean when we say cell state — it hasn't been converted to an understanding in terms of molecular biology."
But a working definition of cell status may be almost at hand, in Dr. Lander's view, in terms of a cell's chromatin state and the transcription factors that can bind to its available genes.
This, after all, is what determines the identities of the various cell types central to an animal's existence. "We are just beginning to get a glimpse of how that central mystery plays out," he said.
###
The New York Times
April 25, 2006
Studies Find Elusive Key to Cell Fate in Embryo
By NICHOLAS WADE
For three billion years, life on earth consisted of single-celled organisms like bacteria or algae. Only 600 million years ago did evolution hit on a system for making multicellular organisms like animals and plants.
The key to the system is to give the cells that make up an organism a variety of different identities so that they can perform many different roles.
So even though all the cells carry the same genome, each type of cell must be granted access to only a few of the genes in the genome, with all the others permanently denied to it.
People, for instance, have at least 260 different types of cells, each specialized for a different tissue or organ, but presumably each type can activate only some of the 22,500 genes in the human genome.
The nature of the system that assigns cells their various identities is a central mystery of animal existence, one that takes place at the earliest moments of life when the all-purpose cells of the early embryo are directed to follow different fates. Biologists at the Broad and Whitehead Institutes in Cambridge, Mass., have now delved deep into this process and uncovered what seems to be a crucial feature of how a cell's fate is determined, even though much remains to be understood.
They have discovered a striking new feature of the chromatin, the specialized protein molecules that protect and control the giant molecules of DNA that lie at the center of every chromosome.
The feature explains how embryonic cells are kept in a poised state so that all of the genome's many developmental programs are blocked, yet each is ready to be executed if the cell is assigned to that developmental path.
The developmental programs, directing a cell to become a neuron, say, or a liver cell, are initiated by master regulator genes. These genes have the power to reshape a cell's entire form and function because they control many lower genes.
They do so by producing proteins known as transcription factors that bind to special sites on the DNA and control the activity of the lower-level target genes.
A question of interest for biologists studying cell identity is what regulates the master regulator genes. The answer has long been assumed to lie in the chromatin, which determines which genes are accessible to the cell and which are excluded. The chromatin consists essentially of millions of miniature protein spools around each of which the DNA strand is looped some one and half times.
The spools, however, are not mere packaging. They can lock up the DNA they are carrying so that it is inaccessible.
Or they can unwind a little, so that the strand becomes accessible to the transcription factors seeking to copy a gene on the DNA and generate the protein it specifies.
Working backward from that knowledge, biologists have spent much effort trying to learn how the state of the spools is determined.
They have learned there are protein complexes — essentially sophisticated cellular machines — that travel along the chromosome and mark the spools with chemical tags placed at various sites on the spool.
A complex known as polycomb — the name comes from the anatomy of fruit flies, in which it was first discovered — tags spools at a site called K27.
This is a signal for another set of proteins to make the spools wrap DNA tight and keep it inaccessible.
Another complex tags spools at their K4 site, which has the opposite effect of making them loosen their hold on the DNA.
The chromosomes of the body's mature cells are known to have long stretches of K27-tagged spools, where genes are off limits, and other regions where the spools are tagged on K4, allowing the cell to activate the local genes.
The Broad Institute scientists have made use of new techniques that let them visualize which spools along a chromosome carry the K27 or K4 tags.
They decided to map the tags in embryonic cells because of the interest of seeing how the process of determining cell fate is initiated.
In the current issue of Cell, a team led by Bradley E. Bernstein and Eric S. Lander reports that they looked at the chromatin covering the regions where the master regulator genes are sited.
They found to their surprise that these stretches of chromatin carried both kinds of tags, as if the underlying genes were being simultaneously silenced and readied for action.
These bivalent domains, as the biologists called the ambiguously tagged stretches of chromatin, were puzzling at first but make sense in terms of what embryonic cells are meant to do.
Each cell must avoid being committed to any particular fate for the time being, so all its master regulator genes must be repressed by tight winding of the spools that hold their DNA. But the cell must be ready at any moment to activate one specific master regulator as soon as its fate is determined.
The Broad team then looked at the chromatin state of the master regulator genes in several kinds of mature cell.
As was now predictable, they found that the bivalent domains had resolved into carrying just one type of mark, mostly the K27 tag, indicating the master genes there were permanently repressed.
But in each kind of mature cell one or more of the domains had switched over to carrying just the K4 tags, within which genes would be active.
"We think the bivalent state is keeping the embryonic cells poised," Dr. Bernstein said. "It's very special; we didn't see it in any other kind of cell."
Dr. Bernstein's team worked with mouse cells, but its findings have been confirmed in human embryonic stem cells by Tong Ihn Lee and Richard A. Young of the Whitehead Institute.
They and their colleagues started not with the bivalent domains but with the polycomb complex that gives the spools their K27 tag.
Working with human embryonic stem cells, the Lee-Young team mapped where a component of the polycomb complex was attached to the chromatin.
They found it had sought out some 200 sites where many of the master regulator genes of human cells are located. The Whitehead team's article, also published in the current Cell, indicates that in mice and people, just as in fruit flies, the same ancient mechanism is used to make the crucial decisions that determine cell fate.
"This is a very nice piece of work and will be widely interesting because it is fundamental," said Allan Spradling, an expert on embryonic development at the Carnegie Institution of Washington, referring to both teams' findings.
The new findings raise the question of how the embryonic cell knows where on its chromosomes the bivalent domains should be established. Dr. Bernstein and Dr. Lander believe that the answer lies in the structure of the DNA itself.
The bivalent domains occur at regions on the chromosome where some of the DNA sequence is highly conserved, meaning the same sequence is found in widely differing species.
Because DNA is always subject to mutation, a highly conserved sequence is a sure sign of DNA that plays some vital role. These particular sequences, however, do not contain genes, so must be conserved for some other reason.
The highly conserved non-gene sequences were first detected in the dog genome, which was decoded last year. It was in trying to figure out what these regions did that the Broad team stumbled across the bivalent domains.
Although only half of the highly conserved regions contain master regulator genes, something in their DNA structure may be the signal that tells the cell where to create the bivalent domains. This is the crucial step before cells differentiate and take on their various specialized roles.
"We don't know the trigger for differentiation — that is our next step — but I think we now have the key set of genes to look at," Dr. Young said.
Dr. Young's team has studied another aspect of embryonic stem cells which ties into the new finding about bivalent domains. Three genes, known as oct4, sox2 and nanog, are known to be particularly active in the cells and are regarded as a hallmark of the embryonic state.
Dr. Young showed last year that the genes make transcription factors that act on each other's control sites in ways that in effect form a circuitry for controlling the master regulator genes.
He has now found that these transcription factors bind at many of the bivalent domains created by the polycomb complex.
Though it's not yet clear how the whole system works, it seems that the settings on the chromatin spools determine in general what genes are accessible while at a lower level of control the transcription factors control which of the accessible genes are in fact activated.
Because human and other cells can assume so many roles and identities, biologists have long wondered how the status of a cell should be defined, but the new findings may begin to offer a definition.
"This is about as fundamental as you can get," Dr. Spradling said. "We don't really understand what we mean when we say cell state — it hasn't been converted to an understanding in terms of molecular biology."
But a working definition of cell status may be almost at hand, in Dr. Lander's view, in terms of a cell's chromatin state and the transcription factors that can bind to its available genes.
This, after all, is what determines the identities of the various cell types central to an animal's existence. "We are just beginning to get a glimpse of how that central mystery plays out," he said.
###
Remembrances of New Orleans Food
Only remembrances of Madelaines in Paris could possible be better than this. Enjoy.
The New York Times
April 23, 2006
Food: Eat, Memory
Rémoulade of Things Past
By PETER FEIBLEMAN
A few months ago I was sitting in a New York deli, dunking a bagel into a cup of coffee, when something on the counter across the room caught my eye. It was only a bowl of Jell-O, but for a while I had trouble swallowing, as a memory of my youth came swimming back to me. I almost choked.
I grew up in New Orleans in the 1930's, when people referred to the city by five main districts: uptown, downtown, front of town, back of town and out of town. We lived in the French Quarter, downtown, and after that in my grandparents' house, uptown, while my father found an architect to build us a house in the suburb of Metairie, out of town.
My paternal grandfather owned a department store downtown and was known to everybody, there and uptown, as the Boss. He and my grandmother, Nora, lived in an antebellum house on Dufossat Street that seemed to me dark and gloomy, despite a screened gallery lush with plants. But I was fond of them both, and I loved the Boss's brother, my great-uncle Max, because he loved my mother as I did. By the time I knew him, Max was a handsome and rather dapper gentleman of the old school, having been in his youth a poor Jewish immigrant from Mannheim, Germany, like my grandfather. Max always had his own table at Antoine's Restaurant, and starting when I was 10, he took me there for dinner once a month. Among the lessons Uncle Max taught me was the benefit of drinking wine with meals rather than water, a fact I was already familiar with, my Creole nurse having put me to sleep every night with a glass of watered wine. He often ordered two or three gin martinis first, so he was well oiled by the time the food came, and I always ordered the same thing: shrimp rémoulade, chicken Rochambeau and ambrosia.
Nora, also a fan of my mother, was a second-generation Southern aristocrat, a highborn, bird-boned woman of tiny proportions with a tread like an elephant, who believed that it was incumbent upon her never to be seen doing anything with "undue haste": she never hurried anywhere, she never touched her diamonds before dark and she never wore jet before noon. Known around town as a maven of Jewish society, Nora lived her life simply and well, up to her ears in good taste. Every sixth Sunday she gave a formal family lunch, served at a long table with well-prepared Creole dishes, usually including turtle soup or gumbo. She always sat me next to her.
Like all upper-class people, Nora eschewed euphemisms, but she had rigid vocabulary rules of her own. One of them came back to me in the New York deli because she had made it so clear to me at lunch. Though all profanities were disagreeable to her, Nora said, certain mild ones were acceptable under certain conditions; but under no circumstances was I ever allowed to use the word "Jell-O" in her presence. Jell-O, she explained, was a contemptible substance — a preciosity, a mauvaise honte — an imitation food that was artificial in flavor, artificial in texture, artificial in color and vulgar.
The day before one of her Sunday lunches, the Boss, who had a good deal of mischief in him, sneaked out to the kitchen and instructed their cook to prepare a large silver platter of bright red Jell-O for dessert, molded into the shape of a recumbent Venus. When it was carried in, quivering, my grandmother rose from the table very slowly, with great dignity. Using one finger to steady herself on the back of her chair, she straightened her spine, assumed a look of tragic implications and stalked up the winding marble staircase to her bedroom in such a stricken and echoing silence that everyone in the dining room could hear her door click shut on the second floor. She never forgave the Boss his transgression, not till the day he died, after which she took to sherry in a way that made Uncle Max look like an amateur Dixie barfly.
Beneath her attitude of disapproval, Nora was secretly in love with her husband for their whole married life, and she stayed in mourning for the rest of hers, becoming what she called "indisposed" almost every evening, so that she spent her mornings in bed with the blinds drawn, dipping a lace-edged handkerchief into a bottle of colorless liquid, a preparation that she devised. She somehow managed to leave the recipe for it to a friend, who relayed it to Adelaide Brennan, whose sister Ella ran Commander's Palace, where I ate stuffed crab once a week until I left New Orleans. I wormed the recipe out of Adelaide many years later (it appears below). Nora stayed in her bedroom, wafting the handkerchief under her nose until the late sun touched the camphor tree outside her window, an event that she celebrated with what she called "un soupçon de Xérès."
Sitting in the deli, I realized that it wasn't the bowl of Jell-O across the room that had caught me off guard; it was the bagel: my great-uncle Max often brought me a bagel when he came back from his regular visits to New York, and the taste was so familiar that it triggered a whole flood of memories. But what made me choke suddenlyandspit thebagel into the coffee was something else: knowing that it was an ordinary bagel.
It wasn't a madeleine. It was a bagel.
Proust was Jewish, too. But Proust had taste.
New Orleans Hangover Remedy
4 parts ethyl alcohol
1 part ether
A few drops of your favorite perfume.
Stir and sniff.
Stuffed Crab
1 tablespoon butter, softened, plus 7 tablespoons butter cut into ½ -inch cubes
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons soft crumbs from a baguette or similar bread, pulverized in a blender
¼ cup fish stock or clam broth
¼ cup finely chopped onion
¾ pound fresh or frozen crab meat, drained
½ cup finely chopped scallions
2 tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
½ teaspoon cayenne
½ teaspoon salt.
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spread the softened butter over the bottoms of 6 medium-size natural or ceramic crab or scallop shells. In a large bowl, mix 2 cups of the bread crumbs with the fish stock and set aside.
2. In a heavy, 10-inch skillet, melt 4 tablespoons of the butter cubes over moderate heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring often, until they are translucent, about 5 minutes. Transfer the onion mixture to the bowl of moistened bread crumbs. Add the crab meat, scallions, parsley, cayenne and salt, and mix well.
3. Mound the crabmeat mixture into the buttered shells. Sprinkle the remaining 2 tablespoons of bread crumbs and remaining 3 tablespoons of butter cubes over the tops and lay the shells on a large, shallow baking dish. Bake in the upper third of the oven for 15 minutes, then put under the broiler for 30 seconds or so to brown the tops. Serve hot in the shells. Serves 6 as a first course.
Shrimp Rémoulade
2 tablespoons Creole (brown) mustard, preferably Zatarain's
1 tablespoon paprika
½ teaspoon cayenne
2½ teaspoons salt
¼ cup tarragon vinegar
½ cup plus 3 tablespoons olive oil
¾ cup chopped scallions, including 2 to 3 inches of the green tops
¼ cup minced celery
¼ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
3 pounds raw medium shrimp
1 head iceberg lettuce, sliced ¼ -inch thick.
1. Whisk together the mustard, paprika, cayenne and 1½ teaspoons salt in a deep bowl. Beat in the vinegar. Whisking constantly, pour in the oil in a slow, thin stream and beat until smooth and thick. Add the scallions, celery and parsley and mix well. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature for at least 4 hours.
2. Shell and devein the shrimp. Rinse them under cold water. Bring 2 quarts of water to a simmer in a large pot. Add the remaining salt. Drop in the shrimp and cook, uncovered, for 3 to 5 minutes, until pink and firm. Drain, let cool, then chill until ready to serve.
3. Mound the shredded lettuce on individual chilled plates. Arrange the shrimp on top, spoon some of the sauce over them — reserving the rest for another use — and serve immediately. Serves 6 to 8.
Ambrosia
6 oranges, peeled and sliced into ¼ -inch rounds
1 banana, peeled and thinly sliced
½ cup sweetened shredded coconut
1 cup orange juice
3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons honey (optional)
Splash of Cointreau (optional).
In a glass serving bowl, form a single layer of orange slices and top with a few slices of banana. Sprinkle a thin layer of coconut over the top. Repeat layering until all of these ingredients are finished, reserving a tablespoon of the coconut. Stir together the juices and honey, if using, and pour over the fruit. Follow with the Cointreau, if desired, and a final sprinkling of coconut. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate for several hours. Serves 6 to 8. Recipes adapted from Peter Feibleman.
Peter Feibleman is a novelist and playwright currently at work on a memoir.
###
The New York Times
April 23, 2006
Food: Eat, Memory
Rémoulade of Things Past
By PETER FEIBLEMAN
A few months ago I was sitting in a New York deli, dunking a bagel into a cup of coffee, when something on the counter across the room caught my eye. It was only a bowl of Jell-O, but for a while I had trouble swallowing, as a memory of my youth came swimming back to me. I almost choked.
I grew up in New Orleans in the 1930's, when people referred to the city by five main districts: uptown, downtown, front of town, back of town and out of town. We lived in the French Quarter, downtown, and after that in my grandparents' house, uptown, while my father found an architect to build us a house in the suburb of Metairie, out of town.
My paternal grandfather owned a department store downtown and was known to everybody, there and uptown, as the Boss. He and my grandmother, Nora, lived in an antebellum house on Dufossat Street that seemed to me dark and gloomy, despite a screened gallery lush with plants. But I was fond of them both, and I loved the Boss's brother, my great-uncle Max, because he loved my mother as I did. By the time I knew him, Max was a handsome and rather dapper gentleman of the old school, having been in his youth a poor Jewish immigrant from Mannheim, Germany, like my grandfather. Max always had his own table at Antoine's Restaurant, and starting when I was 10, he took me there for dinner once a month. Among the lessons Uncle Max taught me was the benefit of drinking wine with meals rather than water, a fact I was already familiar with, my Creole nurse having put me to sleep every night with a glass of watered wine. He often ordered two or three gin martinis first, so he was well oiled by the time the food came, and I always ordered the same thing: shrimp rémoulade, chicken Rochambeau and ambrosia.
Nora, also a fan of my mother, was a second-generation Southern aristocrat, a highborn, bird-boned woman of tiny proportions with a tread like an elephant, who believed that it was incumbent upon her never to be seen doing anything with "undue haste": she never hurried anywhere, she never touched her diamonds before dark and she never wore jet before noon. Known around town as a maven of Jewish society, Nora lived her life simply and well, up to her ears in good taste. Every sixth Sunday she gave a formal family lunch, served at a long table with well-prepared Creole dishes, usually including turtle soup or gumbo. She always sat me next to her.
Like all upper-class people, Nora eschewed euphemisms, but she had rigid vocabulary rules of her own. One of them came back to me in the New York deli because she had made it so clear to me at lunch. Though all profanities were disagreeable to her, Nora said, certain mild ones were acceptable under certain conditions; but under no circumstances was I ever allowed to use the word "Jell-O" in her presence. Jell-O, she explained, was a contemptible substance — a preciosity, a mauvaise honte — an imitation food that was artificial in flavor, artificial in texture, artificial in color and vulgar.
The day before one of her Sunday lunches, the Boss, who had a good deal of mischief in him, sneaked out to the kitchen and instructed their cook to prepare a large silver platter of bright red Jell-O for dessert, molded into the shape of a recumbent Venus. When it was carried in, quivering, my grandmother rose from the table very slowly, with great dignity. Using one finger to steady herself on the back of her chair, she straightened her spine, assumed a look of tragic implications and stalked up the winding marble staircase to her bedroom in such a stricken and echoing silence that everyone in the dining room could hear her door click shut on the second floor. She never forgave the Boss his transgression, not till the day he died, after which she took to sherry in a way that made Uncle Max look like an amateur Dixie barfly.
Beneath her attitude of disapproval, Nora was secretly in love with her husband for their whole married life, and she stayed in mourning for the rest of hers, becoming what she called "indisposed" almost every evening, so that she spent her mornings in bed with the blinds drawn, dipping a lace-edged handkerchief into a bottle of colorless liquid, a preparation that she devised. She somehow managed to leave the recipe for it to a friend, who relayed it to Adelaide Brennan, whose sister Ella ran Commander's Palace, where I ate stuffed crab once a week until I left New Orleans. I wormed the recipe out of Adelaide many years later (it appears below). Nora stayed in her bedroom, wafting the handkerchief under her nose until the late sun touched the camphor tree outside her window, an event that she celebrated with what she called "un soupçon de Xérès."
Sitting in the deli, I realized that it wasn't the bowl of Jell-O across the room that had caught me off guard; it was the bagel: my great-uncle Max often brought me a bagel when he came back from his regular visits to New York, and the taste was so familiar that it triggered a whole flood of memories. But what made me choke suddenlyandspit thebagel into the coffee was something else: knowing that it was an ordinary bagel.
It wasn't a madeleine. It was a bagel.
Proust was Jewish, too. But Proust had taste.
New Orleans Hangover Remedy
4 parts ethyl alcohol
1 part ether
A few drops of your favorite perfume.
Stir and sniff.
Stuffed Crab
1 tablespoon butter, softened, plus 7 tablespoons butter cut into ½ -inch cubes
2 cups plus 2 tablespoons soft crumbs from a baguette or similar bread, pulverized in a blender
¼ cup fish stock or clam broth
¼ cup finely chopped onion
¾ pound fresh or frozen crab meat, drained
½ cup finely chopped scallions
2 tablespoons finely chopped flat-leaf parsley
½ teaspoon cayenne
½ teaspoon salt.
1. Preheat oven to 400 degrees. Spread the softened butter over the bottoms of 6 medium-size natural or ceramic crab or scallop shells. In a large bowl, mix 2 cups of the bread crumbs with the fish stock and set aside.
2. In a heavy, 10-inch skillet, melt 4 tablespoons of the butter cubes over moderate heat. Add the onions and cook, stirring often, until they are translucent, about 5 minutes. Transfer the onion mixture to the bowl of moistened bread crumbs. Add the crab meat, scallions, parsley, cayenne and salt, and mix well.
3. Mound the crabmeat mixture into the buttered shells. Sprinkle the remaining 2 tablespoons of bread crumbs and remaining 3 tablespoons of butter cubes over the tops and lay the shells on a large, shallow baking dish. Bake in the upper third of the oven for 15 minutes, then put under the broiler for 30 seconds or so to brown the tops. Serve hot in the shells. Serves 6 as a first course.
Shrimp Rémoulade
2 tablespoons Creole (brown) mustard, preferably Zatarain's
1 tablespoon paprika
½ teaspoon cayenne
2½ teaspoons salt
¼ cup tarragon vinegar
½ cup plus 3 tablespoons olive oil
¾ cup chopped scallions, including 2 to 3 inches of the green tops
¼ cup minced celery
¼ cup chopped flat-leaf parsley
3 pounds raw medium shrimp
1 head iceberg lettuce, sliced ¼ -inch thick.
1. Whisk together the mustard, paprika, cayenne and 1½ teaspoons salt in a deep bowl. Beat in the vinegar. Whisking constantly, pour in the oil in a slow, thin stream and beat until smooth and thick. Add the scallions, celery and parsley and mix well. Cover tightly with plastic wrap and let rest at room temperature for at least 4 hours.
2. Shell and devein the shrimp. Rinse them under cold water. Bring 2 quarts of water to a simmer in a large pot. Add the remaining salt. Drop in the shrimp and cook, uncovered, for 3 to 5 minutes, until pink and firm. Drain, let cool, then chill until ready to serve.
3. Mound the shredded lettuce on individual chilled plates. Arrange the shrimp on top, spoon some of the sauce over them — reserving the rest for another use — and serve immediately. Serves 6 to 8.
Ambrosia
6 oranges, peeled and sliced into ¼ -inch rounds
1 banana, peeled and thinly sliced
½ cup sweetened shredded coconut
1 cup orange juice
3 tablespoons lemon juice
2 tablespoons honey (optional)
Splash of Cointreau (optional).
In a glass serving bowl, form a single layer of orange slices and top with a few slices of banana. Sprinkle a thin layer of coconut over the top. Repeat layering until all of these ingredients are finished, reserving a tablespoon of the coconut. Stir together the juices and honey, if using, and pour over the fruit. Follow with the Cointreau, if desired, and a final sprinkling of coconut. Serve immediately or cover and refrigerate for several hours. Serves 6 to 8. Recipes adapted from Peter Feibleman.
Peter Feibleman is a novelist and playwright currently at work on a memoir.
###
Sunday, April 23, 2006
New Orleans Mayor's Race
Mitch Landrieu (left) will face Ray Nagin (right) May 20thRace of the Century in New Orleans (but this century is young) . We watch with bated breath what the outcome will be. Enjoy.
The New York Times
April 23, 2006
Runoff Election Is Set for New Orleans Mayor's Race
By ADAM NOSSITER
NEW ORLEANS, April 22 — Mayor C. Ray Nagin made a strong showing Saturday in the city's first mayoral election since Hurricane Katrina but failed to escape a runoff election next month in which he will face Louisiana's lieutenant governor, Mitch Landrieu.
With 94 percent of the city's 442 precincts reporting, Mr. Nagin had 39 percent of the vote, ahead of Mr. Landrieu, who had 28 percent. A third leading candidate, Ron Forman, a local businessman, had 17 percent.
Because no candidate got more than 50 percent of the vote, Mr. Nagin and Mr. Landrieu will compete in a runoff on May 20.
Mr. Landrieu's showing Saturday put him in a strong position to become the first white mayor of New Orleans since his father, Moon Landrieu, left office in 1978. He is likely to pick up most of Mr. Forman's vote, almost exclusively concentrated in white precincts. In addition, Mr. Landrieu apparently picked up as much as 20 percent of the vote in black precincts, according to analysts on local television stations.
Mr. Nagin, however, the only major black candidate, polled better than expected, setting up what is likely to be an intense campaign between the two men over the next month.
With turnout apparently low in black precincts, Mr. Nagin appealed for unity after the results were in.
"If we don't come together as men and women, we will perish as fools," he said. "We must become comfortable with one another."
Some black voters interviewed here Saturday, dissatisfied with the slow pace of recovery, said they were supporting Mr. Landrieu.
"We have no direction right now," said Marvin Keelen, who had journeyed from Baton Rouge to vote. "We can't make any decisions."
Nonetheless, it appeared that Mr. Nagin, who had not previously been popular in black neighborhoods, would pick up a large share of the black vote.
Mr. Landrieu, in a speech to supporters Saturday night, invoked his biracial support. He said the city's different racial and ethnic groups "almost in equal measure came forward to propel this campaign," and he promised to "push off the forces of division."
His campaign hopes to draw on the popularity of his political family among black and white voters. Mr. Landrieu's sister, Mary, is a Democratic United States senator from Louisiana.
State officials went to elaborate lengths to involve the tens of thousands of people still displaced from this damaged city. But for months, civil rights groups have challenged the very notion of holding an election now. Officials accepted ballots mailed and faxed in at the last minute, and the state set up voting places all around Louisiana.
Throughout the day, New Orleans citizens streamed past piles of debris to vote in improvised polling places. The hurricane's floodwaters had destroyed dozens of voting sites, forcing state officials to cobble together giant makeshift ones.
Some had traveled hundreds of miles to cast their ballots, piling into buses in Atlanta for an overnight trip, or getting into cars bleary-eyed for a long morning voyage from the rural hinterlands.
Many came to a giant warehouse on Chef Menteur Highway in flood-ravaged eastern New Orleans, where officials had combined 50 precincts and 27 voting places into the biggest of the makeshift precincts. Citizens cast their ballots under signs bearing the names of destroyed voting places in the Ninth Ward: "7925 Alabama St.," or "St. Mary's Academy," or "Schaumberg Elementary School."
In a festive atmosphere, voters greeted relatives and friends they had not seen since the storm and spoke of what they said was the imperative of appearing in person to vote.
"This is New Orleans; this is my home," said Frank Echols, who said he had driven all morning from Mississippi, over 100 miles. His home in eastern New Orleans was heavily damaged in the flooding.
"I could have voted by mail, but I wanted to be part of this," said Mr. Echols, a retired official with the city's mass-transit agency. "We don't know what the future is going to hold, but we're going to be part of it."
Melva Pichon had driven nearly eight hours from Conroe, Tex. "This determines the future of our city," Ms. Pichon said. Saying she had opted for the incumbent, she added: "I want to make sure that the person who gets in has experienced this before."
State election officials described turnout as steady all day. Before Saturday, some 20,000 people had already voted by mail or at early voting centers set up throughout the state.
With the massive task of reconstruction here stalled, citizens said repeatedly before Saturday's tally that they were looking for the city's chief executive to present a clear way forward.
Throughout the truncated mayoral campaign, the leading candidates largely avoided confronting the central issue: whether some neighborhoods were so inherently vulnerable to flooding that they should not be rebuilt. That issue, so tied up with sensitive questions of race and class, seemed too hot to handle in the current campaign, though analysts speculated it might now be taken up in the runoff.
###
Tuesday, April 18, 2006
Sleep tight
Ah - but the changing of an ingrained habit is thte single most diffcult thing to change in the world. Inertia trumps everything. Enjoy anyway.
The New York Times
April 18, 2006
Personal Health
A Slight Change in Habits Could Lull You to Sleep
By JANE E. BRODY
Faith Sullivan of Minneapolis was having a really hard time getting a good night's sleep. For years, she had slept about seven hours a night. Then, in her late 50's, something changed. After going to bed at 10 or 11 p.m., she would wake up around 3 a.m., unable to fall back to sleep.
No, neither depression nor hot flashes were disrupting her night's rest. It was caffeine. She never drank caffeinated coffee in the evening, but she often had it as a midafternoon pick-me-up. Though she found it hard to believe that coffee at 4 p.m. could disturb her sleep at 3 a.m., at the suggestion of a friend she tried cutting it out. The result was striking. Within a day, she was back to sleeping seven hours a night.
While not every insomniac's problem is so easily solved, many if not most of the millions of Americans who now rely on sleeping pills could cure their insomnia simply by changing their living and sleeping habits.
Food, Drink and Drugs
Caffeine is not just in coffee. It's in tea, colas and other soft drinks, some herbal teas, chocolate and some medications (Anacin and Excedrin, for example). There's even a little caffeine in decaffeinated coffee and tea. For people highly sensitive to caffeine, its stimulant effects can last as long as 20 hours. Even decaffeinated coffee in the evening can keep me awake.
Alcohol is a sedative. It's O.K. with dinner but ill-advised as a nightcap. When broken down by the body, alcohol lightens sleep and can cause early awakening.
Likewise, a large meal before bed makes many people sleepy initially, but can result in disrupted sleep. This is not to suggest you should go to bed hungry. Rather, stick to a light snack, preferably one high in carbohydrates or the amino acid tryptophan, the precursor of serotonin, which reduces anxiety and relaxes the brain.
Good choices include warm milk, turkey, chicken, whole-grain bread or crackers, cereal with milk and banana, and low-calorie popcorn. But at bedtime avoid spicy and fatty foods, which can cause indigestion.
Of course, there are many excellent health reasons for quitting smoking. But for the insomniac, the stimulant effects of nicotine may prove most persuasive. Nicotine raises blood pressure and heart rate and stimulates the brain, countering the slowdown you need to get a good night's sleep.
If you are on medication (prescribed or over-the-counter) and having trouble sleeping, check with your doctor to see if a drug could be the cause. Often, another medication that does not disrupt sleep can be substituted.
Several over-the-counter pain remedies, like Excedrin and Tylenol, come in a "PM" version free of caffeine but with an antihistamine that makes people sleepy.
Sometimes sleep environment is the problem: noise from the street or a neighbor, or a snoring bed mate. Try using earplugs, a white noise machine or a fan that hums to block out the disruptive sounds. If you can get a snorer to sleep on a side instead of the back, it may get rid of the raucous noise.
Is your bed comfortable? Remember the three bears? Although firm mattresses are often recommended for back support, some people sleep better on a mattress that conforms more to their bodies. Also choose a pillow that supports your head in a position that does not strain your neck.
Good sleepers can do anything they want in bed. But those with insomnia are advised to use their beds only for sleeping and sex. No watching television, reading, knitting or what-have-you. The bed should be associated with sleep.
Select a comfortable blanket with the appropriate warmth and weight. I find it almost impossible to sleep well under a heavy cover, a blanket that is too hot, or any blanket or sheet that is tucked in at the foot or side. Consider the sheets as well. Is the fabric irritating?
Keep the room cool. A sleeping temperature of 60 to 65 degrees is best for most people, even in the dead of winter. In hot weather, use a floor or ceiling fan to create a breeze, or an air-conditioner set at about 70 degrees.
Light can be more disruptive than many people realize. Even the dial of a luminous clock can disturb some people's sleep. Cover or move the clock, use blinds or dark shades or drapes on bedroom windows if they are exposed to street lights or passing headlights, or wear an eye mask.
However, if you are likely to get up during the night to use the bathroom, use a flashlight or night light to reduce the risk of falling.
If you know you have to get up at a special time, perhaps earlier than usual, set an alarm clock or timer lest your anxiety awaken you several times during the night to see what time it is.
Sleep Schedule
People who have trouble sleeping do best if they maintain a consistent sleep schedule, going to bed and getting up at about the same time every day, including weekends and holidays. This keeps your body programmed with a predictable sleep-wake cycle. But if you stay up until 2 a.m. and sleep until noon on Sunday, you may have a hard time falling asleep at 11 Sunday night and getting up at 6 or 7 Monday morning.
Despite the known rejuvenating value of a "power nap" for ordinary people, those with insomnia are advised not to nap during the day lest they disrupt a hard-won sleep-wake cycle. A nap is no substitute for a full night of restful sleep.
Go to bed only when you feel sleepy and allow yourself 15 or 20 minutes to fall asleep. If sleep won't come, get up and do something relaxing: — take a warm bath, read a dull book, have a glass of warm milk. Go back to bed when you feel sleepy again.
The worst thing to do when you can't sleep is to worry about the fact that you're not sleeping. Instead, try to envision a relaxing scene or activity, like basking in the sun or watching waves, or count sheep sleeping in a meadow.
Exercise regularly, but not within three hours of bedtime.
Nondrug Treatments
If the above remedies are insufficient, there are a few medically directed treatments that steer clear of drugs. Perhaps the most popular is progressive relaxation therapy, which teaches the patient first to recognize tense muscles and then learn how to relax them one by one, starting at the toes and working up to the head.
Another approach is guided imagery and meditation. With it, patients learn to focus on pleasant, nonstimulating images. Or biofeedback may be used to achieve muscle relaxation.
A third technique may seem counterintuitive to someone who is already not getting enough sleep. It's called sleep restriction therapy, and its goal is to exhaust patients until sleep is inevitable. Patients are allowed to sleep for only a few hours at first, with the time gradually increased as insomnia wanes.
If all this fails to cure your insomnia, the final option is to consult a sleep specialist. The National Sleep Foundation — at 1522 K Street NW, Suite 500, Washington, 20005, at (202) 347-3471, or on its Web site, sleepfoundation.org, can help you find a nearby sleep center.
This is the second of two columns on insomnia.
###
The New York Times
April 18, 2006
Personal Health
A Slight Change in Habits Could Lull You to Sleep
By JANE E. BRODY
Faith Sullivan of Minneapolis was having a really hard time getting a good night's sleep. For years, she had slept about seven hours a night. Then, in her late 50's, something changed. After going to bed at 10 or 11 p.m., she would wake up around 3 a.m., unable to fall back to sleep.
No, neither depression nor hot flashes were disrupting her night's rest. It was caffeine. She never drank caffeinated coffee in the evening, but she often had it as a midafternoon pick-me-up. Though she found it hard to believe that coffee at 4 p.m. could disturb her sleep at 3 a.m., at the suggestion of a friend she tried cutting it out. The result was striking. Within a day, she was back to sleeping seven hours a night.
While not every insomniac's problem is so easily solved, many if not most of the millions of Americans who now rely on sleeping pills could cure their insomnia simply by changing their living and sleeping habits.
Food, Drink and Drugs
Caffeine is not just in coffee. It's in tea, colas and other soft drinks, some herbal teas, chocolate and some medications (Anacin and Excedrin, for example). There's even a little caffeine in decaffeinated coffee and tea. For people highly sensitive to caffeine, its stimulant effects can last as long as 20 hours. Even decaffeinated coffee in the evening can keep me awake.
Alcohol is a sedative. It's O.K. with dinner but ill-advised as a nightcap. When broken down by the body, alcohol lightens sleep and can cause early awakening.
Likewise, a large meal before bed makes many people sleepy initially, but can result in disrupted sleep. This is not to suggest you should go to bed hungry. Rather, stick to a light snack, preferably one high in carbohydrates or the amino acid tryptophan, the precursor of serotonin, which reduces anxiety and relaxes the brain.
Good choices include warm milk, turkey, chicken, whole-grain bread or crackers, cereal with milk and banana, and low-calorie popcorn. But at bedtime avoid spicy and fatty foods, which can cause indigestion.
Of course, there are many excellent health reasons for quitting smoking. But for the insomniac, the stimulant effects of nicotine may prove most persuasive. Nicotine raises blood pressure and heart rate and stimulates the brain, countering the slowdown you need to get a good night's sleep.
If you are on medication (prescribed or over-the-counter) and having trouble sleeping, check with your doctor to see if a drug could be the cause. Often, another medication that does not disrupt sleep can be substituted.
Several over-the-counter pain remedies, like Excedrin and Tylenol, come in a "PM" version free of caffeine but with an antihistamine that makes people sleepy.
Sometimes sleep environment is the problem: noise from the street or a neighbor, or a snoring bed mate. Try using earplugs, a white noise machine or a fan that hums to block out the disruptive sounds. If you can get a snorer to sleep on a side instead of the back, it may get rid of the raucous noise.
Is your bed comfortable? Remember the three bears? Although firm mattresses are often recommended for back support, some people sleep better on a mattress that conforms more to their bodies. Also choose a pillow that supports your head in a position that does not strain your neck.
Good sleepers can do anything they want in bed. But those with insomnia are advised to use their beds only for sleeping and sex. No watching television, reading, knitting or what-have-you. The bed should be associated with sleep.
Select a comfortable blanket with the appropriate warmth and weight. I find it almost impossible to sleep well under a heavy cover, a blanket that is too hot, or any blanket or sheet that is tucked in at the foot or side. Consider the sheets as well. Is the fabric irritating?
Keep the room cool. A sleeping temperature of 60 to 65 degrees is best for most people, even in the dead of winter. In hot weather, use a floor or ceiling fan to create a breeze, or an air-conditioner set at about 70 degrees.
Light can be more disruptive than many people realize. Even the dial of a luminous clock can disturb some people's sleep. Cover or move the clock, use blinds or dark shades or drapes on bedroom windows if they are exposed to street lights or passing headlights, or wear an eye mask.
However, if you are likely to get up during the night to use the bathroom, use a flashlight or night light to reduce the risk of falling.
If you know you have to get up at a special time, perhaps earlier than usual, set an alarm clock or timer lest your anxiety awaken you several times during the night to see what time it is.
Sleep Schedule
People who have trouble sleeping do best if they maintain a consistent sleep schedule, going to bed and getting up at about the same time every day, including weekends and holidays. This keeps your body programmed with a predictable sleep-wake cycle. But if you stay up until 2 a.m. and sleep until noon on Sunday, you may have a hard time falling asleep at 11 Sunday night and getting up at 6 or 7 Monday morning.
Despite the known rejuvenating value of a "power nap" for ordinary people, those with insomnia are advised not to nap during the day lest they disrupt a hard-won sleep-wake cycle. A nap is no substitute for a full night of restful sleep.
Go to bed only when you feel sleepy and allow yourself 15 or 20 minutes to fall asleep. If sleep won't come, get up and do something relaxing: — take a warm bath, read a dull book, have a glass of warm milk. Go back to bed when you feel sleepy again.
The worst thing to do when you can't sleep is to worry about the fact that you're not sleeping. Instead, try to envision a relaxing scene or activity, like basking in the sun or watching waves, or count sheep sleeping in a meadow.
Exercise regularly, but not within three hours of bedtime.
Nondrug Treatments
If the above remedies are insufficient, there are a few medically directed treatments that steer clear of drugs. Perhaps the most popular is progressive relaxation therapy, which teaches the patient first to recognize tense muscles and then learn how to relax them one by one, starting at the toes and working up to the head.
Another approach is guided imagery and meditation. With it, patients learn to focus on pleasant, nonstimulating images. Or biofeedback may be used to achieve muscle relaxation.
A third technique may seem counterintuitive to someone who is already not getting enough sleep. It's called sleep restriction therapy, and its goal is to exhaust patients until sleep is inevitable. Patients are allowed to sleep for only a few hours at first, with the time gradually increased as insomnia wanes.
If all this fails to cure your insomnia, the final option is to consult a sleep specialist. The National Sleep Foundation — at 1522 K Street NW, Suite 500, Washington, 20005, at (202) 347-3471, or on its Web site, sleepfoundation.org, can help you find a nearby sleep center.
This is the second of two columns on insomnia.
###
Sacramento the next New Orleans ?
Strange ! Having been to Sacramewnto many times, I never would have guessed this. Enjoy.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
April 18, 2006
A Conversation With Jeffrey Mount
Giving Sacramento Good Reason to Have New Orleans on Its Mind
By CLAUDIA DREIFUS
Like many Californians, Jeffrey Mount, a geologist, has done a lot of thinking about water.
He grew up in Los Angeles and remembers trying to save neighbors' homes with sandbags during winter floods in 1969. As a young professor at the University of California, Davis, he watched a severe 1986 storm inundate Yuba City and Marysville.
"The surface of the earth is shaped by flood events," Dr. Mount, 51, said in an interview at this year's meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in St. Louis. "However, it's mighty inconvenient when that water comes rushing through your backyard."
Avoidance of such calamities has been a central focus for Dr. Mount. In 1995, the University of the California Press published a textbook highly critical of river management practices in his state. Five years later, Dr. Mount became a maverick member of California State Reclamation Board, which oversees parts of the state levee system.
Last fall, after Dr. Mount publicly suggested that the city of Sacramento might be vulnerable to a Hurricane Katrina-like disaster, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger dismissed all the board members, Dr. Mount said. None had been appointed by him.
Appointments "are at the pleasure of the governor," said Sabrina Demayo Lockhart, deputy press secretary for the governor, adding that he had named "a wide variety of individuals who have extensive knowledge about California's water management."
Q. If you were making a bet, where would you say the next New Orleans will be?
A. I'd say the Sacramento area. The common denominator is concentrated urban development in the shadow of flooding and levees.
You have around 400,000 people at risk from flooding, and the number will grow in the next few years because of intense development.
The city's main problem is that it is situated between the American and the Sacramento Rivers and at the base of the 12,000 foot Sierra Nevada range. Both rivers are prone to flooding. Additionally, powerful storms come in from the Pacific, slam against the mountains and dump heavy precipitation that ends up very quickly in the rivers.
Yet, around Sacramento — the capital of the seventh largest economy in the world — there's intense building on the flood plains.
Twenty miles downstream is the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta, a maze of leveed islands and channels that flow into San Francisco Bay. Because of past agricultural practices, the delta is sinking. Parts are 20 feet below sea level, lower than anything in New Orleans. Still, there are proposals to put up 130,000 new homes in the delta.
Q. Why is there so much development in risky places?
A. Because the new gold rush in California is real estate. Moreover, local governments are often reluctant to exert controls over developers because of the tax revolution.
Do you remember Proposition 13 in 1978, which limited increases in property taxes on existing homes? It decimated the ability of localities to fund services. So money for basic services that people expect is now raised through growth.
Many municipalities have become very aggressive about development. I heard a Northern California county supervisor say that his county needed development on its flood plain to fund flood control projects.
Q. New Orleans was inundated after its levee system was breached by floodwaters. How strong are the levees around Sacramento?
A. They offer a very low level of flood protection, probably the lowest for any major metropolitan area in the country. That assessment comes from the Army Corps of Engineers.
The New Orleans levees were rated as having a 200-year level of flood protection. That's a 1 in 200 chance that the levees will be overwhelmed in a given year. Sacramento's levees are rated at less than half of that.
Q. You are a geologist by trade. How did you get appointed to the California State Reclamation Board?
A. About 10 years ago, I wrote a textbook, "California Rivers and Streams." In it, I discussed some of the unwise ways we try to manage our rivers in my home state. I think the book may have been part of why, in 2001, Gray Davis appointed me to the board. It oversees flood control for roughly half the state.
Once there, I questioned the wisdom of putting so much new housing behind levees and onto flood plains. My colleagues and I did something that Reclamation Board members hadn't before done: we asked to see environmental impact statements for some of these developments.
We said, "If you're going to build all these houses in flood-prone areas, show us your flood protection plans." I was especially concerned about planned housing developments in the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta because a large part of California's water supply flows through it. If you had a disaster there, the drinking water of 23 million Californians would be at risk.
No one in the governor's office — not Davis or Schwarzenegger — ever told us to shut up.
But after a while you heard local officials and developers grumbling that our board was antigrowth.
Q. Are you still a member of this Reclamation Board?
A. Nope. We got terminated by the Terminator, all six board members.
After Hurricane Katrina, I got media calls, asking, "Could this happen here?" I answered, "We have much in common with New Orleans — except Sacramento has less than half the level of flood protection that New Orleans supposedly had."
Q. Weren't you appointed by Governor Schwarzenegger's predecessor?
A. Yes. And the governor certainly has the right to appoint his own people to state entities.
Interestingly, since Katrina he's been speaking about the need for strengthening the levee system, which I take as a sign that the board's questioning did get some issues into the public square.
Q. Do you believe that strengthening the levees is a good idea?
A. In principle, yes. A lot of our levees are in terrible shape — full of beavers and squirrels and rot. They were originally put up to protect farms. They were never built to protect big population centers. I am concerned, however, that strengthening the levees might spur the development of environments that probably should be left alone — like the delta.
When prospective homeowners see levees behind property, they feel satisfied that someone has addressed flooding dangers. They naïvely believe that the government wouldn't let them live where it wasn't safe.
Few comprehend that the levees don't prevent flooding; they just reduce its frequency. Levees often give people a false sense of security.
Q. Do you regret your service on the Reclamation Board?
A. Not at all. We've got to get more scientists involved in this sort of thing. Before I sat on this board, I had no idea how flood policy worked. I thought I did, but everyday reality is very different. It's a series of compromises. It's messy.
And it's good for scientists to get into that. If nothing else, it's good for scientists to be present when the professional staff comes before the board and gives the facts, as they know them. Scientists can ask the technical questions that might not otherwise get raised. So regrets? Nope! Besides, I still have my day job at the University of California, Davis. There, I've got tenure!
###
Sunday, April 16, 2006
Big Baby
Having been the father of a two week-old son (now in his 12th year), I not only enjoyed reading this piece but also lived through it myself 11.5 years ago. Enjoy.
The New York Times
April 16, 2006
The Funny Pages | True-Life Tales
Big Baby
By ETGAR KERET
When I was a kid, my parents took me to Europe. The high point of the trip wasn't Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower but the flight from Israel to London — specifically, the meal. There on the tray was a tiny can of Coca-Cola and, next to it, a box of cornflakes not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes.
My surprise at the miniature packages didn't turn into genuine excitement until I opened them and discovered that the Coke tasted like the Coke in regular-size cans and that the cornflakes were real, too. It's hard to explain where that excitement actually came from. All we're talking about is a soft drink and a breakfast cereal in much smaller packages, but when I was 7, I was sure that I was witnessing a miracle.
And today, 30 years later, sitting in my living room in Tel Aviv and looking at my 2-week-old son, I have exactly the same feeling: here's a man who weighs no more than 10 pounds — but inside he's angry, bored, frightened and serene, just like any other man on this planet. Put a three-piece suit and a Rolex on him, stick a tiny attaché case in his hand and send him out into the world, and he'll negotiate, do battle and close deals without even blinking. He doesn't talk, that's true. He also soils himself as if there were no tomorrow. I'm the first to admit that he has a thing or two to learn before he can be shot into space or allowed to fly an F-16. But in principle, he's a complete person wrapped in a 19-inch package, and not just any person, but a very extreme one, an eccentric, a character. The kind you respect but may not completely understand. Because, like all complex people, regardless of their height or weight, he has many sides.
My son, the enlightened: As someone who has read a lot about Buddhism and has listened to two or three lectures given by gurus and even once had diarrhea in India, I have to say that my baby son is the first enlightened person I have ever met. He truly lives in the present: he never bears a grudge, never fears the future. He's totally ego-free. He never tries to defend his honor or take credit. His grandparents, by the way, have already opened a savings account for him, and every time they rock him in his cradle, Grandpa tells him about the excellent interest rate he managed to get for him and how much money, at an anticipated single-digit average inflation rate, he'll get in 21 years when the account comes due. The little one makes no reply. But then Grandpa calculates the percentages against the prime interest rate, and I notice a few wrinkles appearing on my son's forehead — the first cracks in the wall of his nirvana.
My son, the junkie: I'd like to apologize to all the addicts and reformed addicts reading this, but with all due respect to them and their suffering, nobody's jones can touch my son's. Like every true addict, he doesn't have the same options others do when it comes to spending his leisure time — those familiar choices of a good book, an evening stroll or the N.B.A. playoffs. For him, there are only two possibilities: a breast or hell. "Soon you'll discover the world — girls, alcohol, illegal online gambling," I say, trying to soothe him. But until that happens, we both know that only the breast will exist. Lucky for him, and for us, he has a mother equipped with two. In the worst-case scenario, if one breaks down, there's always a spare.
My son, the psychopath: Sometimes when I wake up at night and see his little figure shaking next to me in the bed like a toy burning through its batteries, producing strange guttural noises, I can't help comparing him in my imagination to Chucky in the horror movie "Child's Play." They're the same height, they have the same temperament and neither holds anything sacred. That's the truly unnerving thing about my 2-week-old son: he doesn't have a drop of morality, not an ounce. Racism, inequality, insensitivity, discrimination — he couldn't care less. He has no interest in anything beyond his immediate drives and desires. As far as he's concerned, other people can go to hell or join Greenpeace. All he wants now is some good milk or relief for his diaper rash, and if the world has to be destroyed for him to get it, just show him the button. He'll press it without a second thought.
My son, the self-hating Jew.. . .
"Don't you think that's enough?" my wife says, cutting in. "Maybe instead of dreaming up hysterical accusations against your adorable son, you could do something useful and change him?"
"O.K.," I tell her. "O.K. I was just finishing up."
Etgar Keret, an author and filmmaker, lives in Tel Aviv. His latest collection of short stories, "The Nimrod Flipout," was just published in English. This column was translated by Sondra Silverstone from the Hebrew.
###
The New York Times
April 16, 2006
The Funny Pages | True-Life Tales
Big Baby
By ETGAR KERET
When I was a kid, my parents took me to Europe. The high point of the trip wasn't Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower but the flight from Israel to London — specifically, the meal. There on the tray was a tiny can of Coca-Cola and, next to it, a box of cornflakes not much bigger than a pack of cigarettes.
My surprise at the miniature packages didn't turn into genuine excitement until I opened them and discovered that the Coke tasted like the Coke in regular-size cans and that the cornflakes were real, too. It's hard to explain where that excitement actually came from. All we're talking about is a soft drink and a breakfast cereal in much smaller packages, but when I was 7, I was sure that I was witnessing a miracle.
And today, 30 years later, sitting in my living room in Tel Aviv and looking at my 2-week-old son, I have exactly the same feeling: here's a man who weighs no more than 10 pounds — but inside he's angry, bored, frightened and serene, just like any other man on this planet. Put a three-piece suit and a Rolex on him, stick a tiny attaché case in his hand and send him out into the world, and he'll negotiate, do battle and close deals without even blinking. He doesn't talk, that's true. He also soils himself as if there were no tomorrow. I'm the first to admit that he has a thing or two to learn before he can be shot into space or allowed to fly an F-16. But in principle, he's a complete person wrapped in a 19-inch package, and not just any person, but a very extreme one, an eccentric, a character. The kind you respect but may not completely understand. Because, like all complex people, regardless of their height or weight, he has many sides.
My son, the enlightened: As someone who has read a lot about Buddhism and has listened to two or three lectures given by gurus and even once had diarrhea in India, I have to say that my baby son is the first enlightened person I have ever met. He truly lives in the present: he never bears a grudge, never fears the future. He's totally ego-free. He never tries to defend his honor or take credit. His grandparents, by the way, have already opened a savings account for him, and every time they rock him in his cradle, Grandpa tells him about the excellent interest rate he managed to get for him and how much money, at an anticipated single-digit average inflation rate, he'll get in 21 years when the account comes due. The little one makes no reply. But then Grandpa calculates the percentages against the prime interest rate, and I notice a few wrinkles appearing on my son's forehead — the first cracks in the wall of his nirvana.
My son, the junkie: I'd like to apologize to all the addicts and reformed addicts reading this, but with all due respect to them and their suffering, nobody's jones can touch my son's. Like every true addict, he doesn't have the same options others do when it comes to spending his leisure time — those familiar choices of a good book, an evening stroll or the N.B.A. playoffs. For him, there are only two possibilities: a breast or hell. "Soon you'll discover the world — girls, alcohol, illegal online gambling," I say, trying to soothe him. But until that happens, we both know that only the breast will exist. Lucky for him, and for us, he has a mother equipped with two. In the worst-case scenario, if one breaks down, there's always a spare.
My son, the psychopath: Sometimes when I wake up at night and see his little figure shaking next to me in the bed like a toy burning through its batteries, producing strange guttural noises, I can't help comparing him in my imagination to Chucky in the horror movie "Child's Play." They're the same height, they have the same temperament and neither holds anything sacred. That's the truly unnerving thing about my 2-week-old son: he doesn't have a drop of morality, not an ounce. Racism, inequality, insensitivity, discrimination — he couldn't care less. He has no interest in anything beyond his immediate drives and desires. As far as he's concerned, other people can go to hell or join Greenpeace. All he wants now is some good milk or relief for his diaper rash, and if the world has to be destroyed for him to get it, just show him the button. He'll press it without a second thought.
My son, the self-hating Jew.. . .
"Don't you think that's enough?" my wife says, cutting in. "Maybe instead of dreaming up hysterical accusations against your adorable son, you could do something useful and change him?"
"O.K.," I tell her. "O.K. I was just finishing up."
Etgar Keret, an author and filmmaker, lives in Tel Aviv. His latest collection of short stories, "The Nimrod Flipout," was just published in English. This column was translated by Sondra Silverstone from the Hebrew.
###
Thursday, April 13, 2006
PRESS HERE
Got Lucky Wednesday April 12, 2006.
A very complimentary article about me appeared in a Lafayette-and-surrounding-area publication named La Gazette des 't Villages.
Thanks to reporter Debbie Butler for doing a remarkable job of getting the quotes straight, piecing together a wide variety of information from an even wider variety of sources (how'd she find out all that?) and presenting the whole story in an easy-to-understand style.
Howd'ya do that, Debbie?
No matter.
Thank you !
p.s. Get a copy at many area businesses in the Lafayette, Iberia, St. Martin, & Vermilion parishes. Especially convenience stores, grocery stores, and gas stations.
A very complimentary article about me appeared in a Lafayette-and-surrounding-area publication named La Gazette des 't Villages.
Thanks to reporter Debbie Butler for doing a remarkable job of getting the quotes straight, piecing together a wide variety of information from an even wider variety of sources (how'd she find out all that?) and presenting the whole story in an easy-to-understand style.
Howd'ya do that, Debbie?
No matter.
Thank you !
p.s. Get a copy at many area businesses in the Lafayette, Iberia, St. Martin, & Vermilion parishes. Especially convenience stores, grocery stores, and gas stations.
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The Truth About Race
Why am i so amazed and intrigued and awe-struck by news such as this ? This article establishes yet another proof that "race" is a conjured, artificial , pseudo-distinction. We are all cousins. Enjoy !
The New York Times
April 12, 2006
The DNA Age
Seeking Ancestry in DNA Ties Uncovered by Tests
By AMY HARMON
Alan Moldawer's adopted twins, Matt and Andrew, had always thought of themselves as white. But when it came time for them to apply to college last year, Mr. Moldawer thought it might be worth investigating the origins of their slightly tan-tinted skin, with a new DNA kit that he had heard could determine an individual's genetic ancestry.
The results, designating the boys 9 percent Native American and 11 percent northern African, arrived too late for the admissions process. But Mr. Moldawer, a business executive in Silver Spring, Md., says they could be useful in obtaining financial aid.
"Naturally when you're applying to college you're looking at how your genetic status might help you," said Mr. Moldawer, who knows that the twins' birth parents are white, but has little information about their extended family. "I have three kids going now, and you can bet that any advantage we can take we will."
Genetic tests, once obscure tools for scientists, have begun to influence everyday lives in many ways. The tests are reshaping people's sense of themselves — where they came from, why they behave as they do, what disease might be coming their way.
It may be only natural then that ethnic ancestry tests, one of the first commercial products to emerge from the genetic revolution, are spurring a thorough exploration of the question, What is in it for me?
Many scientists criticize the ethnic ancestry tests as promising more than they can deliver. The legacy of an ancestor several generations back may be too diluted to show up. And the tests have a margin of error, so results showing a small amount of ancestry from one continent may not actually mean someone has any.
Given the tests' speculative nature, it seems unlikely that colleges, governments and other institutions will embrace them. But that has not stopped many test-takers from adopting new DNA-based ethnicities — and a sense of entitlement to the privileges typically reserved for them.
Prospective employees with white skin are using the tests to apply as minority candidates, while some with black skin are citing their European ancestry in claiming inheritance rights.
One Christian is using the test to claim Jewish genetic ancestry and to demand Israeli citizenship, and Americans of every shade are staking a DNA claim to Indian scholarships, health services and casino money.
"This is not just somebody's desire to go find out whether their grandfather is Polish," said Troy Duster, a sociologist at New York University who has studied the social impact of the tests. "It's about access to money and power."
Driving the pursuit of genetic bounty are start-up testing companies with names like DNA Tribes and Ethnoancestry. For $99 to $250, they promise to satisfy the human hunger to learn about one's origins — and sometimes much more. On its Web site, a leader in this cottage industry, DNA Print Genomics, once urged people to use it "whether your goal is to validate your eligibility for race-based college admissions or government entitlements."
Tony Frudakis, the research director at DNAPrint, said the three-year-old company had coined the term American Indian Princess Syndrome to describe the insistent pursuit of Indian roots among many newly minted genetic genealogists. If the tests fail to turn up any, Mr. Frudakis added, "this type of customer is frequently quite angry."
DNAPrint calls the ethnic ancestry tests "recreational genomics" to distinguish them from the more serious medical and forensic applications of genetics. But as they ignite a debate over a variety of genetic birthrights, their impact may be further-reaching than anyone anticipated.
Some social critics fear that the tests could undermine programs meant to compensate those legitimately disadvantaged because of their race. Others say they highlight an underlying problem with labeling people by race in an increasingly multiracial society.
"If someone appears to be white and then finds out they are not, they haven't experienced the kinds of things that affirmative action is supposed to remedy," said Lester Monts, senior vice provost for student affairs at the University of Michigan, which won the right to use race as a factor in admissions in a 2003 Supreme Court decision.
Still, Michigan, like most other universities, relies on how students choose to describe themselves on admissions applications when assigning racial preferences.
Ashley Klett's younger sister marked the "Asian" box on her college applications this year, after the elder Ms. Klett, 20, took a DNA test that said she was 2 percent East Asian and 98 percent European.
Whether it mattered they do not know, but she did get into the college of her choice.
"And they gave her a scholarship," Ashley said.
Pearl Duncan has grander ambitions: she wants a castle.
A descendant of Jamaican slaves, Ms. Duncan had already identified the Scottish slave owner who was her mother's great-great-grandfather through archival records. But the DNA test confirming her 10 percent British Isles ancestry gave her the nerve to contact the Scottish cousins who had built an oil company with his fortune.
"It's one thing to feel satisfied to know something about your heritage, it's another to claim it," said Ms. Duncan, a writer in Manhattan. "There's a kind of checkmateness to the DNA."
The family's 11 castles, Ms. Duncan noted, were obtained with the proceeds of her African ancestors' labor. Perhaps they could spare one for her great-great-great-grandfather's black heirs? In case the paper records she had gathered were not persuasive, she invited male family members to take a DNA test that can identify a genetic signature passed from father to son. So far, no one has taken her up on the offer. Her appeal, Ms. Duncan said, is mostly playful. Less so is her insistence that the Scots stop referring to their common ancestors as simply "Virginia and West India merchants."
"By acknowledging me, the Scots are beginning to acknowledge that these guys were slaveholders," she said.
Other slave descendants, known as the Freedmen, see DNA as bolstering their demand to be reinstated as members of the Indian tribes that once owned their ancestors. Under a treaty with the United States, the "Five Civilized Tribes" — Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, Seminoles and Cherokees — freed their African slaves and in most cases made them citizens in the mid-1800's. More recently, the tribes have sought to exclude the slaves' descendants, depriving them of health benefits and other services.
At a meeting in South Coffeyville, Okla., last month, members of the Freedmen argued that DNA results revealing their Indian ancestry underscore the racism of the tribe's position that their ancestors were never true Indians.
"Here's this DNA test that says yes, these people can establish some degree of Indian blood," said Marilyn Vann, a Cherokee Freedwoman who is suing for tribal citizenship in federal court. "It's important to combat those who want to oppress people of African descent in their own tribe."
As the assets of some tribes have swelled in the wake of the 1988 federal law allowing them to build casinos, there has been no shortage of petitioners stepping forward to assert their right to citizenship and a share of the wealth. Now, many of them are wielding genetic ancestry tests to bolster their claim.
"It used to be 'someone said my grandmother was an Indian,' " says Joyce Walker, the enrollment clerk who regularly turns away DNA petitioners for the Mashantucket Pequot tribe, which operates the lucrative Foxwoods Resort Casino in Connecticut. "Now it's 'my DNA says my grandmother was an Indian.' "
Recognizing the validity of DNA ancestry tests, some Indians say, would undermine tribal sovereignty. They say membership requires meeting the criteria in a tribe's constitution, which often requires documenting blood ties to a specific tribal member. DNA tests cannot pinpoint to which tribe an individual's ancestor belonged.
But if tribes are perceived as blocking legitimate DNA applicants to limit payouts of casino money, experts say, it could damage their standing to enforce the treaties conferring the financial benefits so many covet.
"Ancestry DNA tests are playing a part in the evolution of what the American public thinks matters," said Kim Tallbear, an American Indian studies professor at Arizona State University. "And tribes are dependent on the American public's good will, so they may have to bend."
Under no such pressure, Israeli authorities have so far denied John Haedrich what he calls his genetic birthright to citizenship without converting to Judaism. Under Israel's "law of return," only Jews may immigrate to Israel without special dispensation.
Mr. Haedrich, a nursing home director who was raised a Christian, found through a DNA ancestry test that he bears a genetic signature commonly found among Jews. He says his European ancestors may have hidden their faith for fear of persecution.
Rabbis, too, have disavowed the claim: "DNA, schmeeNA," Mr. Haedrich, 44, said the rabbi at a local synagogue in Los Angeles told him when he called to discuss it.
Undeterred, Mr. Haedrich has hired a lawyer to sue the Israeli government. As in America, he argues, DNA is widely accepted as evidence in forensics and paternity cases, so why not immigration?
"Because I was raised a gentile does not change the fact that I am," Mr. Haedrich wrote in a full-page advertisement in The Jerusalem Post, "a Jew by birth."
Shonda Brinson, an African-American college student, is still trying to figure out how best to apply her DNA results on employment forms.
In some cases, she has chosen to write in her actual statistics — 89 percent sub-Saharan African, 6 percent European and 5 percent East Asian. But she figures her best bet may be just checking all relevant boxes.
"That way, of the three categories they won't be able to determine which percentage is bigger," Ms. Brinson said.
###
Tuesday, April 11, 2006
Regrow your own
Our grandchildren's grandchildren will see this come to fruition. Enjoy.
The New York Times
April 11, 2006
Regrow Your Own
By NICHOLAS WADE
Stem cell therapy has long captured the limelight as a way to the goal of regenerative medicine, that of repairing the body with its own natural systems. But a few scientists, working in a relatively obscure field, believe another path to regenerative medicine may be as likely to succeed. The less illustrious approach is promising, in their view, because it is the solution that nature itself has developed for repairing damaged limbs or organs in a wide variety of animals.
Many species, notably amphibians and certain fish, can regenerate a wide variety of their body parts. The salamander can regenerate its limbs, its tail, its upper and lower jaws, the lens and the retina of its eye, and its intestine. The zebra fish will regrow fins, scales, spinal cord and part of its heart.
Mammals, too, can renew damaged parts of their body. All can regenerate the liver. Deer regrow their antlers, some at the rate of 2 centimeters a day, said to be the fastest rate of organ growth in animals. In many of these cases, regeneration begins when the mature cells at the site of a wound start to revert to an immature state. The clump of immature cells, known as a blastema, then regrows the missing part, perhaps by tapping into the embryogenesis program that first formed the animal.
Initiation of a blastema and the formation of the embryo are obviously separate biological programs, but "the processes must converge at some point," says Jeremy Brockes, a leading regeneration researcher at University College London.
The blastema seems to derive its instructions from the wound-site cells from which it was formed, and is quite impervious to cues from new surrounding tissue if it is transplanted. If a blastema made by sectioning a salamander's limb at the wrist is transplanted elsewhere in the body it will still grow just a wrist and paw, while a shoulder blastema will regrow the whole limb. People, of course, cannot regrow their limbs like newts, and do not form blastemas, so the relevance of regeneration to medicine has long seemed remote. But the capacity for regeneration exists in such a wide variety of species that it is unlikely to have evolved independently in each, regeneration researchers believe.
Rather, they say, the machinery for regeneration must be a basic part of animal genetic equipment, but the genes have for some reason fallen into disuse in many species.
In support of this notion, people are not wholly lacking in regenerative powers.
There are reports that the tip of the finger can occasionally be regenerated, if the cut is above the last joint. And people can vigorously repair damage to the liver. Even after 75 percent has been removed in surgery, the liver regains its original mass in two to three weeks. It is not certain why other organs and limbs have lost this useful capacity, but perhaps only the liver was damaged often enough during its owner's lifetime to make a repair system worth the cost. "I believe that the reason is the extensive and recurring injury that the liver was exposed to in evolution: rotten food, plant toxins, viruses," says Markus Grompe, a liver expert at the Oregon Health and Science University.
The liver can regenerate itself, when all else fails, from stem cells, the versatile cells that produce the mature cells of many organs and tissues. But usually it relies on its own mature cells, which, like those of a blastema, possess a remarkable power to divide and multiply, even though they can only restore the organ's mass, not its original structure.
A more specific reason for thinking regeneration is not a wholly lost ability comes from genes. Last December, Mark Keating, who studies regeneration in zebra fish, identified a gene that is essential for initiating blastema formation when the fish's fin is cut. Both this gene, called fgf20, and another he has found, hsp60, also exist in people, suggesting the genetic basis for regeneration may still be in place even though the body can no longer evoke it.
Dr. Keating, a vice president at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., believes stem cells can ordinarily undertake only very limited repairs of organs like the liver and heart, and that the scarring often seen in these tissues is a fallback mechanism put in place when the stem cells' capacities are exceeded.
If the genes that boot up the zebra fish blastema also exist in people but are not switched on, perhaps some drug might be developed that goads them into action. Once a blastema had been induced at some wound site in the body, regeneration researchers suggest, it might regrow the missing limb or organ with no further intervention required. "Maybe there are residual abilities that could be enhanced" in mammals, says Shannon Odelberg, a researcher at the University of Utah. He studies regeneration in the newt, with the eventual goal of inducing blastemas to form in mammals.
Regeneration is studied in only a few laboratories. It was not even on the agenda of the research planning meeting held last October by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which was dominated by stem cell biologists.
One reason for this orphan status is that the model animals used by most biologists, like the roundworm, the fruitfly and the mouse, happen to be ones that do not regenerate.
The genetics of regenerating animals, like the salamander, are largely unknown. Hence the process of regeneration has received little attention from research biologists. But there is a group of vertebrates that can regenerate very successfully, said Dr. Brockes. "It would be rather surprising if there weren't some interesting and important lessons one could learn from them."
"Regeneration is the result of an evolutionary experiment that nature has already done for us," said Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, a Hughes Institute researcher who studies flatworm regeneration at the University of Utah The blastema, he notes, performs the difficult task — one not faced by the embryo — of integrating new and existing tissues.
Many proponents of regeneration, while conceding they have a great deal more to learn, believe stem cell therapy too may not be as close to clinical use as its advocates sometimes suggest. Dr. Brockes noted that the blastema's reliance on internal information contrasts with a principal assumption of stem cell therapy, that stem cells inserted into a damaged tissue will use local cues to behave appropriately and integrate into the surrounding tissue.
Stem cell therapists assume that injected cells can replace missing tissue with guidance from the invisible template supplied by chemical signals from nearby cells. That is the solution a human engineer might logically think of, Dr. Brockes said, but evolution has chosen a different one.
The basic biology of regeneration is not yet fully understood, but nor is that of stem cells. Indeed, it may be premature to start thinking about how to use stem cells therapeutically, said Dr. Sánchez Alvarado.
"Translating a biological process you don't understand into technology is like trying to translate hieroglyphs without a Rosetta Stone," he said.
Dr. Grompe, the expert on liver regeneration, said that getting stem cells to behave properly in a patient's body "is a very, very difficult problem." With transplanted stem cells, the usual outcome is "nonfunctional at best and cancerous at the worst because the local environment is not able to modulate the behavior," he said. "I think that cell therapy of the nervous system will be extremely difficult because of that. So much for stem cells curing Alzheimer's."
Dr. Keating believes that the expense of stem cell therapy, should it work, is a major consideration. "I would never begin to guess that the whole stem cell approach has no chance of working," he said. But even if it does, developing cells for every patient who needs them would be very expensive. Switching on the regenerative process with drugs, should that prove possible, would be cheap by comparison, he said.
Scientists who work on stem cells reject the idea that the blastema mechanism is the only way to repair the body's tissues. "I agree that blastema regeneration models might have something to tell us, but I wouldn't give up on normal stem cell regeneration," said Irving Weissman, a leading expert on blood stem cells at Stanford University. The stem cells involved in bone marrow transplants "can regenerate drastic loss of tissue," he said.
Bone marrow transplantation is the big success story on which much of the hope for stem cell therapy is based. But regeneration researchers believe the bone-marrow example may be misleading because blood is not an organized tissue, and the marrow's blood-making stem cells are not required to do anything much beyond their usual function.
In disagreement with this view, Dr. Weissman said that blood-making stem cells are highly versatile and have the ability to home in on the marrow and set up shop in their proper niche there, and that neural stem cells appear to have a similar degree of versatility. Human neural stem cells, when put into embryonic mice, will migrate through the mouse's brain and add insulation to mouse neurons that lack it.
Robert Weinberg, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, said therapeutic regeneration was "decades away" because the cells of animals that regenerate are so different from those of people.
But there is great hope of taking embryonic stem cells, he said, and making them yield primitive adult stem cells that still possess regenerative capability. He placed less confidence in using fully mature adult stem cells, which may have lost the ability to build new tissue. "I think the notion of trying to extract adult stem cells from adult tissues is possibly a fool's errand," he said.
In the light of new knowledge, some stem cell biologists are making more guarded predictions about the imminence of stem cell therapy. Ron McKay, an expert on neural stem cells at the National Institutes of Health, noted that stem cells inserted into the developing brain of a fetal animal "become incorporated in an extraordinary way, as if local cues were controlling their behavior."
But in the adult brain, he said, nothing happens, suggesting that the concept of using stem cells to treat Alzheimer's disease is illusory.
Stem cells head the hierarchy of cells with which nature organizes animal tissues, but so much remains to be understood that it is hard to tell which aspect of their biology may hold therapeutic promise. "I think the idea of cell therapy per se will not be that powerful a tool for most diseases," Dr. McKay said. "But stem cell biology will be a hugely important tool."
Regeneration and stem cell therapy are promising aspects of regenerative medicine but both are still at the research stage. "I'm very bullish on regenerative medicine," said Dr. Keating, alluding to both types. "I think it's going to happen and it will be a revolution, but it will take time. It would be a mistake to oversell it and promise too much too early."###
The New York Times
April 11, 2006
Regrow Your Own
By NICHOLAS WADE
Stem cell therapy has long captured the limelight as a way to the goal of regenerative medicine, that of repairing the body with its own natural systems. But a few scientists, working in a relatively obscure field, believe another path to regenerative medicine may be as likely to succeed. The less illustrious approach is promising, in their view, because it is the solution that nature itself has developed for repairing damaged limbs or organs in a wide variety of animals.
Many species, notably amphibians and certain fish, can regenerate a wide variety of their body parts. The salamander can regenerate its limbs, its tail, its upper and lower jaws, the lens and the retina of its eye, and its intestine. The zebra fish will regrow fins, scales, spinal cord and part of its heart.
Mammals, too, can renew damaged parts of their body. All can regenerate the liver. Deer regrow their antlers, some at the rate of 2 centimeters a day, said to be the fastest rate of organ growth in animals. In many of these cases, regeneration begins when the mature cells at the site of a wound start to revert to an immature state. The clump of immature cells, known as a blastema, then regrows the missing part, perhaps by tapping into the embryogenesis program that first formed the animal.
Initiation of a blastema and the formation of the embryo are obviously separate biological programs, but "the processes must converge at some point," says Jeremy Brockes, a leading regeneration researcher at University College London.
The blastema seems to derive its instructions from the wound-site cells from which it was formed, and is quite impervious to cues from new surrounding tissue if it is transplanted. If a blastema made by sectioning a salamander's limb at the wrist is transplanted elsewhere in the body it will still grow just a wrist and paw, while a shoulder blastema will regrow the whole limb. People, of course, cannot regrow their limbs like newts, and do not form blastemas, so the relevance of regeneration to medicine has long seemed remote. But the capacity for regeneration exists in such a wide variety of species that it is unlikely to have evolved independently in each, regeneration researchers believe.
Rather, they say, the machinery for regeneration must be a basic part of animal genetic equipment, but the genes have for some reason fallen into disuse in many species.
In support of this notion, people are not wholly lacking in regenerative powers.
There are reports that the tip of the finger can occasionally be regenerated, if the cut is above the last joint. And people can vigorously repair damage to the liver. Even after 75 percent has been removed in surgery, the liver regains its original mass in two to three weeks. It is not certain why other organs and limbs have lost this useful capacity, but perhaps only the liver was damaged often enough during its owner's lifetime to make a repair system worth the cost. "I believe that the reason is the extensive and recurring injury that the liver was exposed to in evolution: rotten food, plant toxins, viruses," says Markus Grompe, a liver expert at the Oregon Health and Science University.
The liver can regenerate itself, when all else fails, from stem cells, the versatile cells that produce the mature cells of many organs and tissues. But usually it relies on its own mature cells, which, like those of a blastema, possess a remarkable power to divide and multiply, even though they can only restore the organ's mass, not its original structure.
A more specific reason for thinking regeneration is not a wholly lost ability comes from genes. Last December, Mark Keating, who studies regeneration in zebra fish, identified a gene that is essential for initiating blastema formation when the fish's fin is cut. Both this gene, called fgf20, and another he has found, hsp60, also exist in people, suggesting the genetic basis for regeneration may still be in place even though the body can no longer evoke it.
Dr. Keating, a vice president at the Novartis Institutes for Biomedical Research in Cambridge, Mass., believes stem cells can ordinarily undertake only very limited repairs of organs like the liver and heart, and that the scarring often seen in these tissues is a fallback mechanism put in place when the stem cells' capacities are exceeded.
If the genes that boot up the zebra fish blastema also exist in people but are not switched on, perhaps some drug might be developed that goads them into action. Once a blastema had been induced at some wound site in the body, regeneration researchers suggest, it might regrow the missing limb or organ with no further intervention required. "Maybe there are residual abilities that could be enhanced" in mammals, says Shannon Odelberg, a researcher at the University of Utah. He studies regeneration in the newt, with the eventual goal of inducing blastemas to form in mammals.
Regeneration is studied in only a few laboratories. It was not even on the agenda of the research planning meeting held last October by the California Institute of Regenerative Medicine, which was dominated by stem cell biologists.
One reason for this orphan status is that the model animals used by most biologists, like the roundworm, the fruitfly and the mouse, happen to be ones that do not regenerate.
The genetics of regenerating animals, like the salamander, are largely unknown. Hence the process of regeneration has received little attention from research biologists. But there is a group of vertebrates that can regenerate very successfully, said Dr. Brockes. "It would be rather surprising if there weren't some interesting and important lessons one could learn from them."
"Regeneration is the result of an evolutionary experiment that nature has already done for us," said Alejandro Sánchez Alvarado, a Hughes Institute researcher who studies flatworm regeneration at the University of Utah The blastema, he notes, performs the difficult task — one not faced by the embryo — of integrating new and existing tissues.
Many proponents of regeneration, while conceding they have a great deal more to learn, believe stem cell therapy too may not be as close to clinical use as its advocates sometimes suggest. Dr. Brockes noted that the blastema's reliance on internal information contrasts with a principal assumption of stem cell therapy, that stem cells inserted into a damaged tissue will use local cues to behave appropriately and integrate into the surrounding tissue.
Stem cell therapists assume that injected cells can replace missing tissue with guidance from the invisible template supplied by chemical signals from nearby cells. That is the solution a human engineer might logically think of, Dr. Brockes said, but evolution has chosen a different one.
The basic biology of regeneration is not yet fully understood, but nor is that of stem cells. Indeed, it may be premature to start thinking about how to use stem cells therapeutically, said Dr. Sánchez Alvarado.
"Translating a biological process you don't understand into technology is like trying to translate hieroglyphs without a Rosetta Stone," he said.
Dr. Grompe, the expert on liver regeneration, said that getting stem cells to behave properly in a patient's body "is a very, very difficult problem." With transplanted stem cells, the usual outcome is "nonfunctional at best and cancerous at the worst because the local environment is not able to modulate the behavior," he said. "I think that cell therapy of the nervous system will be extremely difficult because of that. So much for stem cells curing Alzheimer's."
Dr. Keating believes that the expense of stem cell therapy, should it work, is a major consideration. "I would never begin to guess that the whole stem cell approach has no chance of working," he said. But even if it does, developing cells for every patient who needs them would be very expensive. Switching on the regenerative process with drugs, should that prove possible, would be cheap by comparison, he said.
Scientists who work on stem cells reject the idea that the blastema mechanism is the only way to repair the body's tissues. "I agree that blastema regeneration models might have something to tell us, but I wouldn't give up on normal stem cell regeneration," said Irving Weissman, a leading expert on blood stem cells at Stanford University. The stem cells involved in bone marrow transplants "can regenerate drastic loss of tissue," he said.
Bone marrow transplantation is the big success story on which much of the hope for stem cell therapy is based. But regeneration researchers believe the bone-marrow example may be misleading because blood is not an organized tissue, and the marrow's blood-making stem cells are not required to do anything much beyond their usual function.
In disagreement with this view, Dr. Weissman said that blood-making stem cells are highly versatile and have the ability to home in on the marrow and set up shop in their proper niche there, and that neural stem cells appear to have a similar degree of versatility. Human neural stem cells, when put into embryonic mice, will migrate through the mouse's brain and add insulation to mouse neurons that lack it.
Robert Weinberg, a biologist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, said therapeutic regeneration was "decades away" because the cells of animals that regenerate are so different from those of people.
But there is great hope of taking embryonic stem cells, he said, and making them yield primitive adult stem cells that still possess regenerative capability. He placed less confidence in using fully mature adult stem cells, which may have lost the ability to build new tissue. "I think the notion of trying to extract adult stem cells from adult tissues is possibly a fool's errand," he said.
In the light of new knowledge, some stem cell biologists are making more guarded predictions about the imminence of stem cell therapy. Ron McKay, an expert on neural stem cells at the National Institutes of Health, noted that stem cells inserted into the developing brain of a fetal animal "become incorporated in an extraordinary way, as if local cues were controlling their behavior."
But in the adult brain, he said, nothing happens, suggesting that the concept of using stem cells to treat Alzheimer's disease is illusory.
Stem cells head the hierarchy of cells with which nature organizes animal tissues, but so much remains to be understood that it is hard to tell which aspect of their biology may hold therapeutic promise. "I think the idea of cell therapy per se will not be that powerful a tool for most diseases," Dr. McKay said. "But stem cell biology will be a hugely important tool."
Regeneration and stem cell therapy are promising aspects of regenerative medicine but both are still at the research stage. "I'm very bullish on regenerative medicine," said Dr. Keating, alluding to both types. "I think it's going to happen and it will be a revolution, but it will take time. It would be a mistake to oversell it and promise too much too early."###
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