Summary for the Busy Executive: Your Metabolism

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You've probably seen these headings: "Summary for the Busy Executive."  Most times it is tongue-in-cheek --as it is here-- but one does get the impression that Executives do not like to read much.  On the face of it, it seems to be because their time is so precious, but mostly it is because they read so little that they've lost the ability to read fast.  I'm a little like that, and I'm not even an executive.  I just sit here, writing blogs, with as many words in them as I can manage, except this one.

For your muscles to work, they have to get power from somewhere, just like an appliance.  There are two sorts of work (usually, and a third sort of work that you can safely ignore for the moment, which I will describe later):

Brief, low-intensity work.  Just getting up from your chair and walking across the room to turn the TV on, or the radio off, or eating, or reading the newspaper; this is all low-intensity work, and usually proceeds in spurts.  Reading, of course, can be a protracted (long-duration) activity, but it still falls into this class.  All this kind of activity is fueled by plain old sugar.

Moderate-intensity work for long periods.  This includes anything that is moderately strenuous, such as walking, slow running, swimming, rowing, riding (a pushbike or even a horse, I suppose), and easy hiking, as long as you do it for some time.  This sort of activity starts off burning sugar --we always have a little sugar in the blood-- but, after about 20 minutes, the body starts to dig up fat from all the places in which it has been stashed, e.g. big arm and leg muscles, and around your waist, and starts burning that, very slowly.  A gram of fat --as far as I know, and don't quote me on this-- has as much energy as ten grams of sugar, so once this process has begun, you sort of cruise along.  This is often called the second wind, which cuts in after you've been walking or running or yelling or singing or swimming for more than about 20 minutes.

It seems that, with training, people can get into the fat-burning zone a little faster.  This just might be an old wives' tale.

At any rate, burning fat needs a little more oxygen than burning sugar.  You have to breathe a little harder, but not enormous gulps of air, or anything.  When you're walking your dog for any distance, you notice them panting; part of that is that they perspire through their breath, so they have to cool down that way.  But some of it is, yes, getting into the fat-burning zone, and you might get just a bit breathless, too.  This is why it's called aerobic exercise; fat-burning uses up more oxygen than sugar-burning.

If you are very short of breath, that's different.  Your muscles are craving the oxygen, but your heart can't do the job.  It's trying to pump like crazy, but your arteries are all clogged up, and the body blames the lungs, so the lungs work harder, but all for nothing.  Ironically, the treatment of this situation will probably involve a combination of drugs, exercise, and, unfortunately, possibly surgery.  I would have it done, because it is a serious quality of life issue.

Once again, let me emphasize that the amount of fat you burn is proportional to the amount of time you exercise after getting into the fat burning zone.  So if you get into your fat-burning state after exactly 20 minutes,
You burn zero grams of fat if you stop right then;
You burn twice as many grams of fat if you exercise for 10 minutes more than if you exercise for 5 minutes more.

This morning, I went for an easy walk out to Dunkin' Donuts.  Predictably, I started breathing a little harder just around the 25-minute mark.  It was nearly half an hour into the walk when I hit the old doughnut-and-coffee hole, at which point I bought a cup of coffee, which was singularly disappointing.  It was weak, and I had asked for milk, and they must have put in skim milk, or something like that.  So it was healthy, but tasted horrible.  The things I do for my health!

Then I turned around, and walked home.  This time around, I suspect that I hit the aerobic state more quickly, and I got the benefit of another good 20 minutes of exercise.  Notice that those first twenty or so sugar-burning minutes do not burn fat at all.

Finally,

Brief, high-intensity activity.  I mean things like a sudden sprint, or lifting a very heavy object a short distance, or playing a point in tennis.  For these short bursts, the body actually burns protein.  The body is left with a little lactic acid, which, if it accumulates, gives you a painful cramp.  Obviously, unless you want to actually burn off your muscles rather than your fat, you don't want to do this sort of thing for therapeutic reasons.  If you just have to do it as part of your job, or something else that is important, like spring cleaning, well, okay.  Competitive tennis is hard on the body.  Recreational tennis, on the other hand, could be an aerobic activity, depending on how you play.

In all that preceded, I avoided actually making suggestions; but the principles are easy enough for someone who is in moderately good health to know what is beneficial and what is not.  If your health is poor, you need expert advice to avoid activity that your body is not ready for.  Generally speaking, slow walking for 25 minutes would be the least dangerous exercise, only coming next to slow swimming for 25 minutes.  The water supports your weight, taking some of the load off your heart, but also gives a little resistance, which is good.  This is especially suitable for people with very small feet, which would have trouble supporting your weight for long distances.  Small feet look lovely, but are rather a curse when you want to walk.
 

If you want to walk, get the best supporting sneakers you can afford.  'Nuff said.

If you're diabetic, don't go more than a 3-minute walk from a source of sugar, or take a source with you, e.g. an emergency can of orange soda in your backpack.  (And drink sparingly as needed; most orange soda contains like 30 grams of sugar.)

A Culinary Adventure!

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Hello, boys and girls!  Today is going to be special, because we're going to do something a little different!

First, I would like to take a brief survey.  How many of my readers have just come home from the grocery store (or even the supermarket!) with a packet of Muffin Mix, and thought to themselves: Oh dear; I just don't want to heat the house up with a lot of baking!  Let's see ... I thought I saw some hands going up ... yes!  Isn't that so true?  Just heat up a slice of pizza in the oven, and suddenly it's so hot, you've got to jump in the pool!  (And, sometimes, you don't even have one.  A pool, I mean.)

This is exactly what happened to me, only I have this little set up that works really well for me.  See, I have this little keyboard, and it came with --well, it didn't exactly come with it; I had to go out and buy it, you know?  Anyway-- it's this little stand thing; it's sort like of one of these Star Wars X wing fighters, you know what I mean?  One of those things, but of course it isn't going anywhere; it's just parked in my living room not doing much of anything.  But it really is a stand, but I don't use it for the keyboard any more.  So I put it out in the  back porch (which is another long story), and then, I bring out my convection oven!!  I don't think they make them any more (because I think little tots kept swallowing them, or who knows) but it is about the size of a small microwave, and much lighter.  So, I'm all set to go, and it's outside, so the house stays cool!  They say: preheat to 400 F, so that's the first thing to do.  (When the muffins are ready, I'm just going to throw them in, because, well, it's a convection oven, and it bakes in a hurry.)

The method is easy.  You put in some water --at least in my packet, which is KrustEaz, or something like that, you start with a cup and a quarter of water.  Then you add the mix, mix it up (I just use a beater from an old mixer that blew up one day, but the beater works fine,) then you fold in the fruit, er, stuff.  They give you a bag of, well in my case it was apple, in some sort of sticky syrup.  'Fold' means, just mix it in, but just lightly.  Now, I like just a little more fiber in my muffins.  So I crushed a tablespoonful or so of whole grain oatmeal, which of course is guaranteed to make the whole thing too dry.  So, I added a tablespoon of sugar-free Marmalade!!  So I folded those in.

Meanwhile, the KrustEaz fellows are giving me a recipe for 12 muffins, but I can make only 6.  You divide the batter up as well as you can (first you've got to grease the muffin tins.  I didn't have any spray stuff, so I just used my fingers --ew-- then I dusted the tray with rye flour.  Why rye?  Because that's all the flour I had in the house!!

Bake for eighteen minutes (I did 2o, just to be contrary), cool for five minutes, and serve!

I also bought some butter and olive-oil spread, which I'm sure will be yummy, and I will see how it comes out.  Hold on a second, while I try these little fellows ...

Oh my goodness, they are so good!  Well, what do you expect?  You add marmalade, how could you go wrong?

I mean, there are teen recipes, like: "Mix up a quart of strawberry cheesecake ice cream, a quarter cup of peanut butter, and a tablespoon of sprinkles, and top with whipped cream."  Like, this is not a recipe that can go south in any conceivable way.  Or: "Top a slice of pizza with chicken nuggets and blue cheese salad dressing, and eat with French fries."  I don't see the point in even mentioning these kinds of things in the same breath as a real recipe.

So, anyway, there's about a muffin's worth of batter still left, and I'm trying to think how to get it baked; maybe I'll just deep fry it with the chicken wings.

So, until next time, this is Arch, signing off:  Signoff!!!

The Phony Social Security Crisis

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Mano Singham, whose brilliant blog I follow, has a beautiful sequence of posts on Social Security.

Apparently, SS has become the pet-hate du jour of some people, and the Democrats are trying to fix it.  Singham described most of the popular suggested fixes.  I'll just mention two ideas, and how they were decided in such a way as to screw the working class.

Most of us do not realize that your income is taxed for Social Security only up to about $106,000 a year.  So, your ordinary millionaires are not taxed on all their income, for Social Security, just the first tiny bit.  Of course, this means that they won't get as much Social Security when they retire, compared to their present incomes.  But one expects that they will have a lot more savings than the rest of us.  One of the suggestions is that this cap be removed completely.  In other words, everybody pays a fixed proportion of their income into Social Security.  Anyone earning less than $106,ooo a year will never know the difference, except for the screaming of the plutocrats.  But there seems to be much opposition to this move.  Why?  Because most of the opposition is from fairly wealthy people (many of whom are in Congress) who have rich friends, and they're fighting for themselves.  Those who are for raising this cap e.g. progressive Democrats and other "left-leaning" folks are fighting for the poor, and obviously it is a lot harder to fight for a principle that benefits someone else than it is to keep something for yourself.  This move, to raise the cap, screws the wealthy class, so of course it is not going to work.

A very popular suggestion is to raise the retirement age to 70.

Think about this.  As Mano Singham points out, the kind of work that the upper classes do can still be done even when you're older.  You'll be stuck in an air-conditioned office, peering anxiously at your stocks losing value, every weekday from 9 to 5.  This is a hardship.  If they would let you retire at 55, you could do that at home, while the dog drools on your lap.  Honestly, a lot of upper management (read: income before taxes a lot higher than $106,000 per year) does little other than watch it's money grow on the stock market.

On the other hand, if you work in a factory, or as a waitress, or as a teacher in an elementary school, or a clerk in a store, you get to keep on working until you're 70.  Of course, it's still air-conditioned, but for these active occupations, you have to actually work, often on your feet.  This is not just dragging yourself over to the coffee machine.  Raising the retirement age is staggering for those who perform strenuous work.  For those whose work is in the mind, very few of us can actually see the work taking place.

So the move to raise retirement age screws the working classes, and of course a majority of congressmen would go for that.  After all, it is traditional that the poor must work a lot harder for anything they get than the wealthy, even poor senior citizens.  This plan is going to pass.

I personally plan to work past the usual retirement age simply because my retirement savings aren't worth a tinker's cuss.  And who made sure that my savings aren't worth a tinker's c*%&$?  A crew whose incomes are a lot greater than $106,000, namely the so-called Wall Street sons of bitches who screwed up the Mortgage industry, gotta love 'em.

A

Economics

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Economics is getting too important to be left to the Econogeeks.  It is just one of several things that people simply tinker with: dysfunctional families, ecology, unmotivated kids, etc.  In those instances, I suppose, it is justified; after all, nobody likes to prescribe to a family exactly what they ought to be doing, because you get to take on the entire responsibility for everything that will go wrong with them in the future.

But the Economy needs to be handled a lot better.  Sure, some of the same problems are there: if you take it on directly, head on, a lot of people are going to expect you to do a perfect job of it.  But it is becoming clear that "Economics" simply cannot be left to itself.

In the last week I have seen several things that have been adversely affected by the current economic climate.  Two of them are

Lilith Fair: a touring sequence of concerts by women performers.  Tickets are not selling, which is causing some of the artists to drop out of the lineup, which results in even more performers dropping out.  Obviously, when money is tight, there is still less tolerance of Mom when she wants to blow $25 on some women-only concert.  (Men do attend the concerts, evidently some very sweet guys; and we're told that there is hardly any crowding in the Men's Rooms.)

Female Imams in China: it appears that women are taking on leadership roles in the Islamic parts of China.  But again, we're told that they're being impacted by the poor economy.

I guess the more naive among us (including me) don't realize that certain things cannot be controlled too much: for instance, you can't force a performer to perform even if you cannot pay them as much as they want to be paid.  How are these things done?  Perhaps they get a flat fee, and maybe a transportation allowance, and a portion of the "gate receipts", which seems only fair.

Economics becomes this fluffy, woozy thing when a country becomes globalized to an extreme degree.  Until recently, for instance, the USA could feed itself with crops grown mainly within its borders, with inexpensive immigrant labor.  But part of the way of life here is that commodities must cost very little: cheap gasoline, cheap furniture, cheap food, cheap clothing.  The only way to do it is to get it from the third world.

Very soon, all the gasoline, furniture, food and clothing is coming from the Third World.  To begin with, the Third World is happy to provide all this, not knowing exactly how much this stuff is enjoyed over here.  But then, they would like to get computers and big cars and movies from here.  This is all very fine; they produce their stuff for cheap, we produce our stuff for not so cheap, since we're a lot more civilized, but it creates a very tight connection between their economy, and ours.

Now, there are a lot of guys who don't actually do the producing.  They actually make money on the business connections.  Every time money travels in or out, they make money.  These guys are called Wall Street.  For years they have claimed that if you mess with them, the conduit for cheap this and that will get screwed.

Well.  Leaving them to their own devices is clearly just as dangerous.  I have no suggestions as to what parts of the Economy must be controlled, or how to control it.  But consider the following:

Farmers are growing food, which they cannot sell even at prices lower than the prices charged in supermarkets.

What's wrong with this picture?  The Economy is in the hands of middle-men, who are most certainly not easy to satisfy.

Our lives become very uncomfortable if we think about this kind of problem, so we don't; the Econogeeks are only too happy to do the thinking for us, and the Wall Street Boyes are only too happy to scare the Econogeeks into gibbering idiots.

Arch

Who reads this Blog?

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I recently put in (at the suggestion of Google) an array of buttons under each post, so readers could weigh in with their assessment.  There is a "Fun" button, an "Interesting" buttons, and ... another one; I forget.  None of them have been clicked, so I conclude that the only people reading this blog are people who either are very pressed for time, or simply hate it!

There could also be people reading it, just to make sure they keep up with the latest news.  This makes me laugh so hard that I think I threw out my back again.

My family and friends might be reading it too, both of them, but they obviously want to keep it anonymous.  I read it, because my memory is getting weak and I don't want to forget what pissed me off this morning.  At any rate, we've had at least 500 visits since I put up that counter, which I did in ... when?  I have to remember, or it makes absolutely no sense.  Last week?  I had a thousand visitors a week!  Awesome.

In addition, nobody is making comments.  The reason is that someone is spamming me, and I have to delete their comments, or all my readers will end up marrying young ladies from China.  I'm sure that's a step up for some of them; who knows what they're marrying at present?  Maybe I will make comments unmoderated.  Just a warning: don't click on anything I wouldn't click on, especially if you've already got a Chinese wife!

Arch, guest blogger

Hell in a Handbasket

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I think we're getting to the point where we really can't feel bad about anything for very long, no matter how serious.  Forgive me if I mention below something that you feel I ought to be avoiding.  (Part of the trick to not feeling bad about something is to have people just shut up about it.)

First there was Cancer.  There were bad things before Cancer, but I remember how we grew up hating the word.  Pretty soon, though, it was OK to bring it up in casual conversation, especially after we knew that smoking caused it.  [Not exclusively, of course.]

The Atom Bomb was next.  There was a time when you would get glared at if you mentioned Hiroshima.  But thank god we're allowed to say it now.  I mean, there were concentration camps, and the Israelis still hate Concentration Camp jokes, at least when non-Jews tell them!

What about Communism?  It was a bad word for so long, but of course, the younger generation doesn't exactly know what it is any more.  [It is confused with health care legislation, especially by Baby Boomer fat cats.]  It used to be that little kids were threatened with Fidel Castro.  But it's clear that Cuba is no threat to the US anymore, not as much as Afghanistan, anyway.  And the Afghans don't have bombs.  Yet.

Then came AIDS.  Once AIDS got here, Syphilis and Gonorrhea were not as scary as they had been, though Hepatitis B and some other little things are still delightfully dangerous.  (Did I hear Herpes?)

Pedophilia had a short run, but people were more angry than frightened by the phenomenon.  Pedophiles after all are laughable pathetic figures, unless one happens to hold high office in some church!  Oh dear; let it never be discovered that a Pope was ever a pedophile.

Then there was Vietnam.  How much that word was hated.  But it hasn't been since about 1995.  Either the invention of Windows 95 had a mysterious calming effect, or it was the gulf war, or Vietnam Vets got too old and wise to maintain their indignation.

Though it doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath, there was Exxon Valdez, which caused a lot of indignation in a very small sector of society.  But Exxon went on to become your friendly neighborhood multi-national corporation.  I'm not sure how they pulled it off, but I suspect lowering gas prices had a little to do with it.  The Wildlife, of course, could not vote!  Ha ha!

Then 9/11 came along.  But to the despair of New Yorkers who can still remember that day with horror, the country at large seems to have gotten over it.  We got over it a lot faster than Hiroshima, though, arguably, 9/11 was a far more violent event than the A-Bomb.  So we're getting good at it.  We can forget bad news faster than any generation who ever walked the planet.

Katrina was a mess.  There were lots of Hurricanes before Katrina, but somehow Katrina took everyone by surprise.  George W. Bush was sort of blindsided by it, but he finished his term, and took the bad taste of Katrina with him.  New Orleans folks are still suffering, and many folks in the region are pissed off at the way things were handled, and will be handled in the future, but keeping up that level of anger takes a lot out of us.

Wall Street?  Enron?  Sub prime Mortgages?  Crash 2008?  Well, if you're unemployed, you're obviously angry; the rest of us probably can't quite get up our ire until we're unemployed too.

BP Oil Leak?  Well, everybody cares, certainly.  So what can you do?  Outlaw Oil Leaks?  I bet you the whole thing will be forgotten by Labor Day.

If the Dems had not tried so hard to pass Health Care legislation, there would not have been an oil leak.  I'm sure that is probably the basis of a new religion that's being invented even as we speak.

I have argued for thirty years with friends who insisted that the USA was too big and clumsy to have an honest, efficient government.  It was too much under the thumb of Big Business and The Pentagon [and Trade Unions, and crooked politicians, lazy bureaucrats, beltway bandits, and career unemployed no-goodniks].  It was impossible to make it run efficiently.  This is why, they said, we need to forget about health care reform, and get rid of as many branches of the government as possible, so that taxes will be lowered, and we must each of us look after ourselves.  Small Washington, Big US.  Maybe they have something.  Maybe, if I saved enough on taxes, I COULD PLUG THE OIL LEAK MYSELF.  Now there's a thought.  Huh.

Arch

A Child is Born

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A couple of friends of mine just had a baby!

The new arrival had been awaited with great delight and anticipation, the mother giving us all intermittent bulletins on Facebook (a new internet phenomenon described on Wikipedia/Facebook), but evidently the lady concerned has been distracted right after the delivery!

The birth of a wanted child (or even an initially unwanted one) is a cause for rejoicing at some level.  Not the sort of thing when you win a door prize at a Bingo game (OMG, what did you get?  NO WAY!), but a sort of quiet satisfaction.   This feeling is probably built into our genes as a survival characteristic.

In difficult times, among intellectuals of limited means, when the future appears somewhat bleak, it becomes a challenge to the unknown, an act of defiance.  (On the other hand, among the poverty - saddled young women of certain disadvantaged regions in Britain, for instance, it is the temporary fruition of a desperate need to find something innocent to love, which does not turn right around and do something vicious to you, other than poop in its diapers, I suppose!  I have absolutely no doubt that the same phenomenon is at work in the USA; it's just that I know how to avoid those places, and don't in Britain.)

A kid is, socially, a bundle of potential; and especially in societies where many opportunities are available for children, a child can be made familiar with any number of activities.  Among the activities our friends and we were involved in were:

Ballet.  Junior was barely 3 when she was conditionally allowed into a free community ballet class sponsored by the Carnegie Institute of Pittsburgh.  We are grateful!  Later on, the girls joined the Williamsport Civic Ballet, at which they made several very dear friends.

Gymnastics.  Basic, non-competitive community gymnastics for kids, for a nominal fee of around $20 a month, sponsored by our City and the Area Community College.

Swimming for tadpoles, offered by the YMCA.  Unfortunately, junior was pressured to swim competitively, at which point she gave up.

Karate, provided by the Community College, the local Catholic school, The City, and later by the YMCA.  Though a rough-and-tumble activity viewed from the outside, in reality --depending on the flavor of the art you select-- it teaches self-awareness, balance, respect for life, and, surprisingly, non-violence.

Girls Scouts, something that, at least initially, involves only a modest outlay of money.  (Of course you have to buy cookies.)

Tennis, provided by our Township.  You have to stay away from "Little League Parents," highly competitive parents who throw their all into the game.  Is it worth playing at all, if you don't play to win?  You have to decide for yourself!

Ping Pong, provided by a private individual.  The work was too much for the person concerned, and the program was dismantled.

Our girl was always slightly-built and petite, but the large variety of physical activities went a long way towards offsetting her natural disadvantages.  In some ways she was bullied mercilessly, on occasion being violently stuffed into large (hopefully clean) trash cans by her more gigantic classmates, but amazingly she never retaliated, except verbally.  Her comment was: "I think he likes me, but he's silly."  On the other hand, she was one of the first to volunteer for Touch Football, when played in the school gym, and unfortunately one of the goons tackled her and crushed her against the bleachers.  I'm not sure how much of this resilience is attributable to her physical self-confidence, learned in her various activities, and how much was an intrinsic part of her personality.  My suspicion is that the activities should get the credit.

Last, but not least, were the arts and crafts activities sponsored by our Township over the summer months, essentially free babysitting for the weekday mornings.  (Later on, she actually helped at these.)  And then, Theater in school and college.  This last is obviously a whole different ballgame, even if everyone can provide something in a theatrical project.  Project-oriented activities are famously good for young people to learn cooperation, time management, and some leadership skills.

When Junior was 12, not knowing any better, I got her set up with a paper route.  This was an activity of quite a different sort, but she managed to bring all her talents to bear on the activity.  She made friends with the dogs of all the 80-plus homes on her route, got her mother and me to help her, and kept careful track of the very specific instructions as to where to put the paper.  Some families wanted the paper on the front steps, and she had only to ring the bell and leave.  Others wanted the paper between the front door and the storm door; others wanted it in the garage, weighted by a brick, and so on.  Some of the pets wanted her to throw a ball to fetch, and were ready with the ball as she walked up.  ("Amber, girl, you have to let go of the ball first!")

Somewhere, she had learned to make the basic Crane, in origami.  So, one Christmas, she made a Christmas-tree ornament of each of her customers in red foil.  Needless to say, she made out like a bandit on Christmas bonuses.  By the end of her two-to three- year spell at delivering papers, she had $3000, with which she bought a futon.  This is what she sleeps on now!  Though this seems to be turning into a Hymn to Her...

The point is to get started early on activities at which your child gets to meet a variety of kids from different backgrounds.  One must learn to relate to people of all economic strata at a personal level; this is particularly important for anyone who goes into an occupation that involves constantly meeting new people.  Colleges and Universities know this, and it is why they give scholarships to increase the ethnic and sociological mix in the schools.  Young people comfortable with a wide variety of people are more useful to certain kinds of employers.  A young fellow only comfortable with other kids of the exact same sociological slice is really a liability to most employers, and an employed graduate is much more useful to the Alma Mater, as anyone in Academia knows.  (At very large schools, however, one occasionally finds the various demographic sectors insulating themselves from each other.)

Fortunately, both of us were not fully employed, and could spend the time busing junior back and forth.  You have to realize that not all the activities listed above were engaged in by the same child at the same time.

The World At War: What will become of Islam?

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The current wars being fought across the globe are flavored with an unfortunate condition: the battle of Islamic Extremists for the allegiance of Islamic peoples.

For various reasons, the hierarchy of the Christian Church has steadily lost its hold on those parts of the world that have been traditionally Christian.  The advance of Science, the universality of education, and the corruption within the church have all helped this process.

The Islamic world, however, has observed the secularization of Christian society with disgust and distaste.  One sector of Islamic society has responded by declaring war against the Christian West, and its perceived representative, the United States of America.  Generally speaking, the USA is not so much interested in defending Christianity as it is in making an (ahem) honest buck, and no doubt this annoys this particular sector of the Islamic world even more.

Another sector of the Islamic world admires the Secular West.  All religions are equal in the West, mostly, and have no power of their own in the Government, except, of course, through the actions of their adherents as individuals.  Religious extremists of all sorts are thoroughly frustrated by this state of affairs; they would prefer a role for religions above and beyond the role it plays via the action of the faithful.  It is not enough for the Christian Right to vote via conservative senators and congressmen.  The conservatives want their control of society to flow through the constitution itself.  They want Christian Prayer in School not to be at the mercy of a majority in Congress or the Supreme Court.  They know that Islamic prayer is not to be feared, because the Christian brats will never let it happen.  At any rate, admiring Islamic people, including many women, see that Western women, or women from Christian backgrounds, are not barred by their religion from participating in practically any activity, even if their salaries are often lower.  So even before the tragedy of September 11, 2001, there was a division within Islam.  We are not at war with a religion, but rather a power-hungry minority within it.  Its influence has grown because of the war.  The minority has temporarily succeeded in providing leadership in the crisis it itself helped to create.

At any rate, this protracted state of war is resulting in the vilification of a religion, Islam.  In many ways, the tenets of Islam are far more vague than those of Christianity.  The Sermon On the Mount lays out a pattern for living that the Koran must struggle to equal.  This is not because God is on the side of the Christians; it is rather that Jesus was a more enlightened and articulate man than was Mohamed.  Mohamed had the task of forging the tribes of the desert into a nation, and he chose religion to do it.  Jesus's agenda was different: it was to defeat the stranglehold that the clergy had on the Jewish people.  He failed, but he succeeded in setting out principles that fired the imagination of a large, underprivileged minority, and ultimately spread to the underclasses of Rome, and eventually to the entire world.  So Jesus failed, but his message lived on.  Mohamed succeeded, and what we are seeing now is the struggle of his message to become meaningful to a world whose imperatives are dramatically different from those of Mohamed.

The ideological struggle between Islam and the other philosophies current today may result in great loss of moral stature for the former.  But this is not what this war is about.  If the Islamic extremists lose this war, it will not necessarily be a condemnation of Islam itself.  Islam is not more wrong than Christianity, and in any case, a war cannot settle the matter.  This war is, at least partly, about whether religious wars are right.

There something more we must all fear: the Israeli government is led by people with very little wisdom or judgment.  It could be that Israel makes a strike that sets the Islamists back.  But such a strike will set civilization even further back.  Every victory that Israel has won has only set the stage for greater suffering, and greater efforts on the part of the USA and other governments to minimize the danger that Israel poses to the stability of the Middle East generally, and to the Islamic nations in particular.  Will an Israeli victory mean that Judaism is right, and Islam wrong?  Won't it prove that Judaism is superior to Christianity as well?

This war --or these wars-- have much to teach us.  But the lessons we will probably learn will be all wrong.  One lesson we will learn is that if any nation or rebel group want to inflict countless deaths, they will certainly have their wish.  Another lesson is that when the USA sets out to bring peace to any part of the world, it results in incredible loss of life, both for the Americans and their allies, and to the enemy.  There is another lesson, and this one will not be learned by anybody: the massive loss of enemy lives will never deter the religious extremist enemy.

The reason I got onto this topic is that I was reading L. M. Montgomery's sequence of Anne books.  In the last volume: Rilla of Ingleside, we see the mild nation of Canada being drawn into World War 1, and how the gentle intelligentsia of a rural town get elbowed out by common, jingoistic self-styled patriots.  Pacifists are made to despise themselves, and innocent young men egged on to enlist and die.  Rilla, Anne's youngest child, is devastated when her brother decides to enlist, and is ridiculed by her friends.  But she is pestered into making an oration to encourage young men to enlist, and she is labeled a hypocrite, because she hates seeing her brother enlist, but turns round to encourage other young men to get into uniform.  And, worst of all, in the process of getting up the ire to fight, it becomes a habit to vilify Germans.

Walter, the poet of the family, suffers agonies at the thought of having to participate in a bayonet charge, and to kill a man who could be a brother, or a son or a husband or a father of some innocent German woman or child.  But he is shamed by being given a white feather, the despicable means whereby so-called patriotic Canadian women shamed men into enlisting.  We can only guess that similar methods must be used against reluctant Muslim widows and orphans, to make them enlist as suicide bombers.  And similar methods will eventually be used to induce feeble-minded young American boys into donning uniform.  It is a miracle that the disgust and hostility American society had towards Vietnamese people has been forgotten, and young Vietnamese students welcomed here.  One can only hope that Afghan, Iraqi and Saudi youngsters in decades to come will be equally welcome here.

Bookbinding at Home

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When I was a teenager, we received a wonderful old weekly magazine that I read avidly.  After some years, the carefully saved issues had to be left at home when I went away to boarding school, and my mother and I decided that the best way to preserve them was to bind them into a volume.  The weekly issues were big floppy things, about 11" by 14", in the style of a newspaper, with a glossy, full-color cover, and inside pages in black-and-white.

"I'll show you how to do it," said Mom, who had acquired a variety of skills, and among them, evidently, book-binding; who knew from where?  We found a straight-backed chair, and laid the magazines, with their spines to the back of the chair.  Then we bought two sheets of heavy, tough paper which were roughly the same size as the magazine when folded double.  So now we had the 52 issues of the magazine, and one of the folded end-papers on top, and one of the folded end-papers on the bottom.

The next thing was to get binding tape.  We decided to use three binding tapes.  We glued them to the back of the chair with paste so that each one began about two inches higher than the January issue, and extended across the spine, and ended two inches below the December issue.  Once the tape was in place, all the magazines were removed, and only the bottom end-paper was left.

Now, Mom showed me how to sew the book up.  It was the sewing that would bind the magazines into a book.

[Added later:  Skip this step!  The end-papers are not sewn to the book!]  You opened up the folded end-page.  It was blue, I remember.  You pushed the needle through it, through the tape, across to the middle tape, through the end-page, across inside the end-page, out through the end-page and the other tape, back through the middle tape, across to the first tape again, and made a knot, on the outside.  The thread, therefore, made an enormous figure-of-eight in and out through the end-sheet.

You laid on top of the end-paper, the December issue, and opened it up carefully, until you had the middle of it.  You carefully pierced through the tape and the spine, up the middle, out through the magazine and the tape, across to the last tape.  [Here, you tied the magazine to the end-paper.]  Then back in through the tape and the magazine, back again to the center tape and through, and down to where you had begun the magazine. [ Tie down.]  Now put down the November issue, in through the first tape and the new magazine, up inside, out through the magazine and tape, up to the third tape, tie up to the previous magazine, back through to where you started, and tie down.  Basically, each section is sewn together using a long figure-of eight stitch, through the tapes, and tied to the adjoining sections at least at the top and the bottom, and in the middle, if desired.  The tying to the adjoining sections must be just tight enough to keep them firmly attached, but not so tight that the spine starts to pull together, forcing the pages to fan open.

As you can see, each magazine was tied to its neighbor only at the top and bottom.  Some binders tie each section to its neighbor at each tape.  Each magazine becomes what is known as a signature; leather-covered books are sewn in signatures, and traditionally signature-binding has been considered the strongest sort of binding.

The sewing continues until all the issues are sewn, as well as the front and back end-papers.  Now you can pick up the bound book; it has all the issues sewn together, as well as two extra blue pages in front, two extra blue pages at the back, and three tapes flapping in the wind, stitched into the spine of the bound volume at every point across the spine.

[The illustration shows a slight variation on the same method; the tapes have not been actually sewn in, they have merely been threaded into the sewing.  They are not helping to keep the signatures together; they will mainly secure the pages to the cover.  The tapes will be trimmed before gluing.]

The rest of the process is pretty simple.  You take the bound book, if you like, to someone who can trim it.  My mother tapped the volume with a hammer until it was slightly convex at the side that would open out, and then it was trimmed by a powerful trimmer; basically a captive knife that was screwed down to cut all the pages smoothly and evenly.  This part is actually not essential.

Now we made the cover, of three pieces of card: front, spine and back, and a piece of bookbinding cloth, a very strong kind of fabric.  The cardboard was glued to the fabric, and the fabric folded down around the cardboard.

The bound book was laid inside the opened-out cover, the three strips of tape extending out for some distance into the cover.  Now the blue end-papers were glued to the cover, completely hiding the binding tape.  Once the book was dry, the binding was complete.

Note that the pages of the book were held together by strong thread, knotted carefully to keep the signatures together.  The book and the cover, though, were held together by the glue that kept the binding tape stuck to the cardboard.  It is always thus: the cover of a book is not fastened as securely to the book itself as the pages of the book are fastened to each other, so it is not a good idea to hold only the covers of a book and shake the pages, to see whether they will come out.  They will, if you persist.

For those interested, Wikipedia gives a wonderful summary of the history of bookbinding, and one can see how the simple method described here has descended from historical techniques, especially those called Coptic methods.  (There is a section evidently written from the Islamic point of view, which has been flagged as not being neutral.  I'm not sure exactly what to make of that; it seems that Wikipedia Judaeo-Christian contributions.  Oh well.)

Arch

L. M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables

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I'm working my way through the Anne books, as far as the two puppies and my energetic daughter and her even more energetic friends allow.  This area triggers off my allergies something awful, so I live in a constant haze of antihistamines.

I have to retract some of my hostility towards bottled drinking water.  I began using bottled water to make tea and coffee, because the mineral-laden local water does not yield very good coffee or tea; the minerals seem to inhibit release of the flavors.  (There must be an explanation based on statistical mechanics, but I'm too lazy to follow it up in this heat...)

It is ironic that Lucy Maud Montgomery, who recorded so faithfully the foibles of her generation and her elderly neighbors, but still saw through the grumpy surfaces of many of them to the warmth and humor concealed below, whose trademark was a sort of irrepressible delight in everything, is now considered to have been an unhappy woman towards the end of her life.  Reading her, one is acutely aware of how much attuned to her times she was.  I can say with confidence that I feel equally at home with the manners and the environment of 2010 as with those of 1963, as well as 1750, or 1890.  The wide availability of literature enables us to be immersed in other times and places, and to some extent, to be comfortable with the prejudices and values of those times.  But Lucy Maud Montgomery found that her mind was not so flexible that she could get her mind around the two World Wars; evidently WWI was the beginning of the end for her.  She reportedly recorded her misery and her depression in her journal, but eventually found herself so demoralized that she stopped writing altogether, and committed suicide.  This must remain, at this point in time, essentially speculation, but that Ms Montgomery's life ended in depression seems beyond doubt.

There really is no moral to this story.  There must be others out there, who must create a fictional world, which is a distillation of all that is beautiful in this world, and live in that fictional world, simply in order to survive.  Sometimes I suspect that this is true even of myself.  Many authors are idealists, and it is their idealism that must attract many readers to them, and the worlds they create.  The average human mind depends on idealization and abstraction in order to understand the world, and presumably a more fragrant idealization does no harm.  Above all, fictional worlds must be rational.  We are necessarily tolerant of irrationality in this world simply as a survival characteristic: the good are seldom rewarded, while the cruel and vicious seem to enjoy a certain degree of enjoyment of their ill-gotten gains.  But we cannot bear this kind of illogic in a fictional world, unless it is served up in the guise of humor, e.g. Voltaire's Candide.  (I have never read the latter --I can tell a lie, but I won't-- I only know about it from hearsay.)  But of course, there is no rule that says that kind actions must be followed immediately by some reward.  The longer the action and the reward are separated, the more skillful the writing is deemed.  Even more so for cruelty: the phenomenon is called dramatic irony, which reduces the principle to the level of a mere literary device.

The goodness which we atheists ascribe to our essential nature does need some nurturing.  The belief that kindness begets kindness is one that must be reinforced in childhood, and this is one of Ms Montgomery's basic axioms.  The more mature Anne becomes, the longer she is prepared to wait in order that the kindness of her actions should bring forth kindness to her in return, and that could be another measure of maturity.  The ultimate maturity, of course, is to be kind with no expectation of benefit from it: disinterested love, which is a precept of Buddhism.  This Buddhist concept, named maithri, is an ideal that it appears the vast majority of Buddhists have given up.  This is not surprising, since the vast majority of Christians have given up on 'selfless love', but of course Jesus is all-forgiving, so there isn't really a problem there.

On the face of it, disinterested love is not hard: just give something to charity, and don't report it to the IRS.  (Reporting it brings a small benefit, so that the action would not be entirely disinterested!)  But there are obviously hidden benefits, such as improved self-esteem.

In 1929, Lloyd C. Douglas wrote a major novel called Magnificent Obsession, which outlined a sort of metaphysical mathematization of the concept of doing good.  I wonder what L. M. Montgomery would have thought of that book, and its sequels?  After initial slight embarrassment, she would have probably embraced the books wholeheartedly.  Certainly she had already stumbled on the idea that a kind deed has a life of its own, quite apart from either the author or the recipient of the deed.  (Douglas wrote other well-known novels, including The Robe, a story with great charm and persuasion.)

Lucy Maud Montgomery lavished her love on her heroine Anne Shirley, though one has to suspect that Anne was at least partly a surrogate for Ms Montgomery herself.  (I keep suspecting this of every interesting fictional character, and one of these days I'm going to be wrong.  I thought Hermione Granger was a surrogate for Jane Rowling, but evidently she has stated that Dumbledore was that.  I suppose there's nothing to prevent both being true; an author puts him- or herself into all her characters.)  If we are to interpret Ms Montgomery's love for Anne Shirley as love for herself --in other words, if we were to see it as a sort of Pygmalion phenomenon-- it would seem that Ms Montgomery was a very mentally healthy person.  (We must think of the circumstances as similar to the Pygmalion story, but without the implied psychological judgment.  Good self-image is good; self adoration is considered unhealthy.  It is these fine judgments that are the reason psychologists earn the big bucks, and you and I must struggle along...)

The following passage (from Anne's House of Dreams) is particularly poetic, and I thought I would quote it to give you a taste of how beautiful was the world Montgomery created for Anne.  In some ways, this scene is the romantic climax of the entire series; Anne and Gilbert are on their honeymoon, and have just been welcomed to their cottage by friendly neighbors:

"The laughter of the good-nights died away.  Anne and Gilbert walked hand in hand around their garden.  The brook that ran across the corner dimpled pellucidly in the shadows of the birches.  The poppies along its banks were like shallow cups of moonlight.  Flowers that had been planted by the Schoolmaster's Bride* flung their sweetness on the shadowy air, like the beauty and blessing of sacred yesterdays.  Anne paused in the gloom to gather a spray."

[*The first occupant of the cottage]

Arch

P.S: I bought myself the last couple of books in the series to read on the plane, so that I would not have to break up my daughter's complete collection.  I bought them at one of the stores of the chain called Bookmans, which sell used books, CDs and DVDs.  One hopes that the Media Lobby will not succeed in clamping down on the recycling of these things.  Some companies would rather rent stuff to you.