The Revenge of Scobie

Motor cross biker at the Alameda County Fair in July 2022. As I mentioned in my prior post, I have a longstanding habit of writing New Year's resolutions each year (no later than the first business day of January) and then in December, reviewing those resolutions to see how I fared. I went looking for last year's resolutions, and much to my surprise, found that I had started a post and never published it. In fact, I didn't even write any resolutions down! The post was titled "Intentions" so I must have been drifting away from the idea of "resolutions" toward a practice that is more about my hopes and, well, intentions. I even wrote about that decision in my 2020 review . In any case, it turns out to have been a pretty good idea to not write anything down because if I had, I might have been constrained in what I could achieve. I did achieve a lot this year. I published a book and several articles. I started teaching a class at Berkeley Law. I traveled a l

 While my day-to-day blogging practice is entirely aspirational, I am good at the annual review each December and making my New Year's resolutions on the first business day of each new year.  I've got a lot to cover. This has been an excellent year for me. I traveled to Toronto, Berlin, Venice, Sicily, and Palm Springs. My dream of getting a beach house came true. My kids and marriage are all healthy and strong. I connected with a lot of old friends and deepened my friendships with many others as well.  I also read many books and watched a decent amount of TV and movies. Here's a list of the books I finished: Real Estate, Deborah Levy (memoir) Wild Seed, Octavia Butler (scifi/fantasy) The Silence of the Girls, Pat Barker (historical fiction) The Ministry for the Future, Kim Stanley Robinson (hard science fiction) Please Kill Me, Legs McNeil and Gillian McCain (oral history of punk) Hollywood Bowl, Mikel Jollett (memoir) The Killing Moon, NK Jemison (scifi/fantasy) The Argon

 I'll be blunt: Elon Musk breaks labor laws with impunity because the punishment for doing so is cheaper than complying with the law. Example: the WARN Act requires giving either 60 days' notice of a layoff or an equivalent number of days' pay, but the penalty is (duh duh duh!) the pay. Violating the National Labor Relations Act by disciplining an employee for acting in concert with another employee to improve working conditions (for example, forming a union or, you know, asking the heat to be turned on) is penalized with . . . . a posted notice that the employer violated the law. On the bulletin board in the breakroom. Workplace injury? Your damages are limited to workers' comp payments governed by laws written in the 1950s. I'm not exaggerating. Breaking labor law is way cheaper than complying with it. Instead of being shocked that Musk is a serial lawbreaker, be shocked that workplace rights are so low priority that even a Democratic Congress hasn't bothered

 Tonight I was making a marinade for a flank steak that called for balsamic vinegar. The bottle looked like it had a 1/4 cup of vinegar in it but nothing would come out. Instead, it appeared that there was a small liver in the bottle. Gross, right? It's a SCOBY, which means Symbiotic Culture of Bacteria and Yeast. It's also called a mother, as in the Mother of Vinegar. This gross blob is the progenitor of new vinegar, and I'm pretty psyched that it appeared in my bottle. Based on a very cursory Google search about this phenomenon, it's sort of uncommon with balsamic, which is typically barrel-aged. I'm also excited because it opens yet another avenue of home science for me. In other words, I love this shit. My adult partner, aka my husband, does not love this shit. He loves me very much and loves that I love this stuff BUT his appreciation for my homesteading instinct is limited to the IDEA that I like homesteading, not the actual bacteria and yeast cultures I might

 A few weeks ago I blogged about joygiving (as opposed to painstaking) and today there's an article in the New York Times about Freudenfreude. It's the opposite of Schadenfreude in that you take joy in the joy of others. I like that. I want more of it.

(Hy-Vee Party Sub) My favorite sandwich is The Italian Sub. An Italian sub has several cured meats (e.g., ham, salami, capicola, or mortadella) and provolone cheese. The variation I prefer, and which I often made for myself when employed at Brivi's Deli in Springfield, New Jersey, includes lettuce, tomato, onions, and oil and vinegar. Other people like adding hot peppers, pickles, or maybe mayo (I've heard).  There are probably other standard sandwich toppings that get invoked, but the toppings aren't the main event: how each ingredient is prepared matters the most. For example, the lettuce needs to be shredded, not ripped, or the whole leaf. Delis shred the lettuce by running it through the meat slicer. It only takes a second. The tomatoes should get cut by the slicer too so that they are thin, but not too thin, and uniform in width. The same goes for the onion, and it's almost always a red onion. The meats should be cut very thin. In fact, the right term is "shav