When Federal Regulation Goes Too Far

Government regulation is the price we pay for living in a civilized society.  But when ill-advised government regulations threaten to limit the selection of craft beers available to the brew lovers among us, it’s time for the feds to dial back and understand their proper role.

In this case, the government actor is the Food and Drug Administration.  It’s the entity that makes sure that Americans don’t consume diseased foods or drugs that have harmful side effects.  No one disputes the need for such regulations, of course.  But the FDA has also promulgated a regulation that would require restaurant chains to offer full nutritional information for all of the beers they have on tap.  In order to comply with the regulations, which go into effect next year, brewers will need to perform expensive tests that allow them to specify the number of calories in their beer, the protein content, and so on.

The tests are a cost that can easily be borne by the major breweries that crank out millions of bottles of beer a year — but not so much for the small, local craft breweries that prepare tantalizing artisanal offerings in small batches that typically vary from season to season.  Think of that rich Winter Warmer you enjoyed when the cold snap hit last weekend, or the tart Summer Shandy you found so refreshing on a hot July afternoon.  The cost of the tests might cause the craft breweries to dial back on the number of their interesting offerings, which would be a shame for us, and them — and for the people employed in the craft beer industry, which has been booming in Ohio and elsewhere.

I’m all for labeling consumables where people might logically want to look at the label to determine calorie count, cholesterol levels, carbohydrates, sodium content, or whatever other ingredient might be an area of dietary focus.  And if brewers want to market their suds based on one of these areas — like with low-carb beer — then by all means let’s make sure those statements are accurate.

But craft beer is not one of those consumables where ingredient labels are useful.  No true beer-lover makes a decision on whether to order a particular craft beer based on its protein content or calorie level.  They just want to know what kind of beer it is (“hmm, that Belgian-style ale sounds good”) and its alcoholic content, which is typically disclosed already at any decent craft beer establishment.

Inspect the breweries?  Sure.  Make certain that they are clean and aren’t producing a product that might make people sick?  Absolutely!  But don’t implement pointless regulations that wouldn’t make a difference to craft beer consumers, and in the process cut down on our choices.

Doesn’t anyone in the FDA drink beer?  If not, perhaps they should consult with President Obama.  He seems to like a cold one now and then.

Calling For Christmas Cookie Recipes — 2015

Well, Thanksgiving has passed — which means two things.  First, the Christmas cookie baking season is upon us.  Second, we’ve just eaten a lot of whipped toppings on pumpkin pie, pecan pie, or, in cases of extreme need, bark.  So why not combine these two staples of the modern American experience?

Cool Whip Cookies

I’ve never made cookies using cake mix before.  It seems like a tawdry shortcut, but some of my friends swear by cake mix-cookie recipes.  This one looked interesting enough — and easy enough! — to make it onto my Christmas cookie list for this year.

Ingredients:  1 8-ounce container of Cool Whip whipped topping; 2 eggs; 1 18.25 ounce package of lemon cake mix; 1 teaspoon lemon juice; 1/3 cup of confectioner’s sugar.

Preheat oven to 350 degrees.  Beat eggs and whipped topping together.  Add the lemon cake mix and the lemon juice and continue beating until dough is fully mixed and thick.

Fill bowl with confectioner’s sugar.  Drop teaspoons of cookie mixture into bowl and roll to coat.  Bake cookies at 350 degrees for 8 minutes, then remove cookies to rack to cool.

Calling For Christmas Cookie Recipes — 2014

Calling For Christmas Cookie Recipes — 2013

Calling For Christmas Cookie Recipes — 2012

Calling For Christmas Cookie Recipes — 2011

Calling For Christmas Cookie Recipes — 2010

Calling For Christmas Cookie Recipes — 2009

All’s Right With The World

Yesterday’s Ohio State win over Michigan was very satisfying, and allowed all members of Buckeye Nation to sleep more peacefully last night.

It was satisfying because it was so dominating.  The Buckeyes ran the ball at will and made the Wolverines’ defense look totally overmatched.   We’d been hearing about the great Wolverines D early this season, but there was only one great defense on the field in Ann Arbor yesterday, and it was wearing scarlet and great.  The telltale sign was that Michigan couldn’t get stops when it absolutely had to do so — whereas the Buckeyes D could, and did.

It was satisfying because the Buckeyes finished.  With the game close at halftime, the Buckeyes reeled off four straight touchdowns on methodical drives.  They executed and beat the Wolverines physically.  As the second half wore on, it became clear that the Michigan defense just wanted no part of the OSU offensive line, or Zeke Elliott, or J.T. Barrett.  I think the Buckeyes could have hit 50 if Coach Urban Meyer hadn’t called off the dogs.

And finally, it was satisfying because it had to be soul-crushing for the Michigan faithful, who view the hiring of Jim Harbaugh as the harbinger of a return to the glory years.  It reminded me of OSU during the Cooper era, when Buckeye fans would have high hopes that this would be the year they would knock off mighty Michigan, only to have a Michigan running back with a long name rush for 300 yards.  In a rivalry game, there is nothing sweeter than beating your opponent so convincingly on their field that their fans are streaming out with 10 minutes left in the game.

Ohio State has now beaten Michigan 10 of the last 11 years.  When that happens, all’s right with the world.

The Christmas Deceptions Begin

  
Kish and I stopped in a FedEx office this morning.  We apparently just missed Santa, or one of his elves, who had been there Xeroxing “elf on a shelf” messages.  This message acknowledges the assignment of the elf Maxy to one family, where he will keep an eye on behavior and report back to Santa himself.

Merry Christmas, indeed!  As any former kid knows, the post-Thanksgiving period in when you really need to toe the line, else you end up on the dreaded “naughty” list.  And Maxy will be there, watching.

The Game, 2015 Edition

Today football fans the world over get to watch, once again, the greatest rivalry game in college sports.  In a few hours Ohio State and Michigan will square off at the Big House for The Game.

Don’t believe those who say this contest has lost some of its luster after Ohio State’s stunning loss to Michigan State last week.  If anything, that makes The Game even more important.  Ohio State does not want to end its season with two soul-crushing losses — and the Wolverines would like nothing more but to send Ohio State back to Columbus, whipped and beaten and clearly knocked off the top of the Big Ten pedestal.

I have no idea what to expect from this match-up — other than that it will be hard-hitting and hard-fought, because The Game always is.  Jim Harbaugh has turned Michigan around quickly, and made them a tough, power team with a good defense.  His old coach, Bo Schembechler, would be proud.

As for Ohio State, you wonder where the Buckeyes are, mentally.  Are they still reeling from a bad game, or are they primed to go out and show the world that last week’s dismal offensive showing was a rain-soaked fluke?  This is a week where Urban Meyer earns his paycheck.

Go Bucks!

Reeking Of Class

How low can Donald Trump go?

Trump obviously is a jerk, but his buffoonery seems to have a kind of unfortunate multiplying effect.  He makes the outlandish claim that he saw, on television, thousands of Muslims in New Jersey celebrating the fall of the World Trade Center towers on September 11.  His claim is debunked.  Trump then seizes on an article written by a reporter that suggests that at least a few people in New Jersey were detained by police for apparently celebrating the attacks.

When that reporter says in an interview that he doesn’t recall anyone in authority saying that thousands, or even hundreds, were celebrating the 9\11 attacks, Trump attacks the reporter.  Some view Trump’s depiction of the reporter as meanly mocking the reporter’s hand disability, and Trump denies the charge — on the barely more defensible ground that he was simply mocking a flummoxed reporter, rather than mocking the reporter’s hand — and demands an apology for being criticized for his insensitivity.  All the while, Trump stays in the headlines, day after day.

Even if you take Trump at his word that he was not mocking the reporter’s disability, it is inarguable that he was mocking the reporter — and all the while acting like the loud-mouthed bullying kid who made 7th grade so unpleasant.

If, like me, you are disgusted with the coarseness of our national discourse, it’s hard to even imagine how low things could go with Trump forever in the news.  When was the last time you saw a politician stoop to physical mockery?  Where’s the next stop on the downward spiral?

Thanksgiving’s End

  
Well, we’re still working on the pies.

Family Time

   

 It’s Thanksgiving, the quintessential holiday for American families.  
It’s a holiday where each family tends to develop its own rich trove of traditions.  Maybe it’s a family football game before or after the feast.  Maybe it’s a particular food, like Aunt Gertrude’s oyster stuffing or cranberry sauce still maintaining the shape of the can from which it came, sliced to produce red hockey pucks.  Maybe it’s the rickety, riotous “kid’s table” where everyone under the age of 30 has to sit because the real dining room table can’t accommodate the whole clan.

But one of the biggest and most closely held traditions has to do with time — as in, when do you sit down for your meal?  Newly married couples learn to their astonishment that not every family eats at the same time.  Some people eat at noon, right after the parades end.  Some people eat at four, squeezing the meal in between the football games on TV.  So the newly married couple might eat two meals, one with each family, until they start to establish their own traditions.

I’ve never heard of anyone waiting until a more standard dinner time — say, 7 p.m. — to eat their turkey.    By then, most of us are chowing a cold turkey sandwich, pounding down a second piece of pumpkin pie, and groaning at our gluttony.

Wherever you are, and whenever you eat, Happy Thanksgiving!

The Jerkiness That Spread Around The World

When I was younger, I once read a book called, I think, “The Smile That Went Around The World.”  It told the happy story of a kid who came outside with a happy grin and smiled at a stranger, who then smiled at another stranger, who smiled at another — and on and on, until the smile reached every country and world was one big happy place.  It was a nice thought to instill in small children, who could cling to the idea that they could change the world just by smiling.

Of course, when we reach adulthood we realize that often it takes more than a smile from a stranger to turn someone’s mood around.  But what about the opposite kind of behavior?   How does behaving like a colossal jerk affect others in the vicinity?

New studies are indicating that rude behavior does, indeed, spread like a kind of disease.  The studies reveal that being the target of discourtesy, or simply witnessing ill-mannered conduct, tends to induce more rude behavior.  The psychologists posit that seeing loutishness or abusiveness activates parts of our brains that are sensitive to rudeness and triggers an increased likelihood of an impolite response on our part.  Our ungracious response, in turn, can provoke escalating rudeness in others.

Unlike the happy but unrealistic concept of the smile traveling around the world, this research matches our experience in real-life scenarios.  How many times have you been cut off by a thoughtless person who is driving like a jerk and felt a surge of anger and a sudden wild desire to retaliate?  If you’re standing in a line and some jerk tries to cut in front, it’s not unusual to see surly reactions or even a breakdown in the queue.   How often have you seen perfect strangers telling each other off because of some ill-advised conduct, or the mean actions of a supervisor then mimicked by his subordinate?

It’s sad to think that rudeness is so easy to provoke in others — but as we move into the Thanksgiving weekend, we can all be on guard.  We might not be able to send a smile around the world, but at least we can exercise some self-control and stop the spread of boorishness in its tracks.

 

Seasonal Reflections

In downtown Columbus, you know that the holiday season is here when they place enormous red globes in the flower pots.  I like crimson balls, because they add a welcome spot of color and because they give you a red, fish-eyed view of reality — which often can be a helpful perspective during a Columbus winter.

Double Oven Dreams

Lately, when I go into our kitchen, I am drawn to the shiny, aluminum-clad appliance in the far corner, next to the outside wall.  I look at it, and think about possibilities.  Happy, hopeful, heated, holiday possibilities.

It’s the double oven, of course.

A double oven may not be a big deal for those who’ve always had  one, but I’m not in that category.  I’ve only had a single oven, which has been . . . sufficient.  There aren’t many times when you really need two ovens.  But the holiday season is one of those times.  And now, with Thanksgiving only two days away and the Christmas cookie season right behind it, I think of what I might be able to accomplish with deft use of the double oven.

For Thanksgiving, the benefits of a double oven are obvious.  The turkey can be cooking away in one oven, perhaps with one or two other dishes, and the other oven can be used for warming pies, candied yams, rolls, a green bean casserole, and on and on.  No more desperate attempts at oven space management, trying to jam every course into the nooks and crannies around the turkey in a doomed bid to get everything hot and ready to serve at the same time.  In short, the double oven affords the luxury of ample space.

For Christmas cookie baking, the potential benefits are different.  The double oven should allow me to maximize efficiency and eliminate the down times, when I’ve got a sheet of cookies ready to bake but I’m waiting for those in the oven to finish.  I look at the shiny aluminum facing and I think of Dutch spice cookies turning a rich golden brown in the top oven as I’m loading a tray of Cranberry hootycreeks into the bottom unit.  An efficiency expert would undoubtedly be able to calculate how much time I might save by deft use of the double oven options.  It will require careful planning and sequencing, of course, but I’m eager to tackle the challenge.

And now I wonder — do I have enough counter space for all of these cookies?

Full Avoidance Mode

There was a football game played on Saturday, but I’d rather not talk about it.

It’s kind of embarrassing, really, but when it comes to unfortunate results in the sporting events that I care about I take a child-like, total ostrich approach.  I go into full avoidance mode.  I don’t read about it, I don’t want to see anything about it, and when people start to talk to me about it I feel like putting my fingers in my ears and saying “blah, blah, blah” until they go away and leave me to my sports solitude.

It’s embarrassing behavior, because it’s juvenile.  An adult should be able to cope with a sports team loss, reading the different analyses of the game, listening to the pundits explain why things went sour, and so on.

I guess I’m just not an adult.  I still lose sleep over the bad losses and feel crushed by the dashed expectations.  If I go into full avoidance mode, at least I can prevent the news reports from exacerbating my distress.

So I’ve got my head in the sand for a few days.  The fact that Thanksgiving is this week will help — not because giving thanks for good fortune puts a sports loss into its proper perspective, which should be the case, but because a holiday always is a point of focus that makes things that happened before the holiday seem remote.  It’s the calendar equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and going “lah, lah, lah.”

Strangers In A Strange Land

Do a majority of Americans really feel like “strangers in their own country”?

That’s one of the provocative conclusions of a recent Ipsos poll.  According to the poll, 53 percent of Americans surveyed — 62 percent of Republicans, 53 percent of Independents, and 37 percent of Democrats — agreed with the statement “These days I feel like a stranger in my own country.”  An even larger percentage of respondents agreed with the statement “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.”

The poll designers believe these results expose “neo-nativist” sentiments in America and help to explain the mystifying, continuing popularity of Donald Trump.  They state:  “Simply put, Trump’s candidacy taps into a deep, visceral fear among many that America’s best days are behind it. That the land of freedom, baseball and apple pie is no longer recognizable; and that ‘the  other’—sometimes the immigrant, sometimes the Non-American, and almost always the  nonwhite—is to blame for these circumstances.” In short, they apparently view the statements posed by the poll and quoted above — which don’t explicitly refer to race or immigration — as nevertheless exposing racist and xenophobic attitudes among Americans.  (At the other end of the spectrum, they view the statement “More and more, America is a place that I can feel comfortable as myself” as exhibiting non-“nativist” sentiments.)

I’m skeptical of this kind of armchair analysis of the American psyche generally, and particularly in this instance where the two purportedly “nativist” statements seem to tap into a less sensational sentiment — the view that America is heading in the wrong direction.  For decades, pollsters have asked whether respondents think America is heading in the right direction; last week the Rasmussen poll found that only 28 percent of Americans say yes to that question.  I don’t recall reading that the right direction/wrong direction question is supposed to expose “nativist” views, and I don’t see its phrasing as materially different from the statement that “More and more, I don’t identify with what America has become.”  Both statements are broad enough to encompass a wide range of dissatisfactions — with political developments, with economic issues, with cultural and social changes, with security issues, and with America’s position in the world, among many others — and therefore can’t be directly tied to “nativist” attitudes.

I have no doubt that there are racists in America and that at least some of the anti-immigrant sentiments are rooted in racist xenophobia, but I think the notion that a majority of Americans are “neo-nativists” is silly.  It is, perhaps, easier to rationalize a pervasive sense of dissatisfaction with our country’s direction as rooted in ignorant, racist views, because it allows people to avoid evaluating whether there are less inflammatory, more substantive concerns underlying the sense of unease with our position in the world.  I don’t know why, for some people, the bumptious blowhard Donald Trump seems like a solution to our nation’s perceived problems, but I think the conclusion that he has tapped into a previously hidden vein of racism in America just allows people to avoid tacking the tougher question:  what is it, exactly, that is motivating people to express support for this guy?

 

 

#PumpkinFail

Call me crazy, but I think that when your formerly bright orange and carefully carved Halloween jack-o’lanterns start to look like deflated penicillin cultures, it’s time for even the most ardent pumpkin lover to concede defeat and remove the rotting remains.

The Art Of Hands

I remember reading once about the difficulty that artists have in presenting hands in drawn or painted portraits.  Many portraits feature only the head and shoulders of the subject — perhaps because including the hands is so darned difficult — and in full-body portraits the portrayal of the hands is often just a bit . . . off.  The fingers are too smooth, or the thumb looks weird, or the hand is put in an unnatural pose.  It takes a true master to draw or paint hands that actually look natural.

I think that is because the hands are among the most expressive parts of the human body.  You can learn a lot about someone by looking at their hands, and for others the hands are as eloquent as a face or a voice.  One of my grandmothers joked often about her “stubby fingers,” but her hands were essential to her interpersonal communications, as she patted cheeks and clutched elbows.  Even after she had a stroke and could not speak, she would hold your hand and squeeze.

So I was fascinated by a show at the gallery at 9338 Campau, during our visit to Hamtramck last weekend, that was all about hands.  Called The Visibility of Labor by Tsz Yan Ng, it featured plaster casts of the hands of the people who helped to create a single dress at a factory in China — from the pencil-holding designers to the fabric cutters to the sewers to the folders to the hands that ultimately display the finished dress.  The hands are so perfectly cast that you can see every wrinkle, vein, knuckle, and ring; it’s easy to tell the hands of the older workers from the hands of the younger.  You half expect that the hands will move before your eyes.

The Visibility of Labor has moved on from the 9338 Campau gallery, but keep an eye out for it at an art gallery near you — and if you’re lucky enough to catch it, pause for a moment to think about the art of hands.