Live from Austin!

I subscribe to Nutrition Action Healthletter . A recent edition carried an article on ethical (and healthy) fish consumption. It included handy lists of fish that can safely be eaten, fish that are good alternatives in a pinch, and fish which you should avoid eating–either because of health concerns, or because they are endangered.

I just scanned, OCRed and edited the lists to put in my BlackBerry, so I thought I’d post them here in case you want to copy them to your own phone’s notepad.

Best choices

Arctic char (farmed)
Barramundi (U.S. farmed)
Catfish (U.S. farmed)
Clams (farmed)
Cod - Pacific (Alaska longline)
Crab - stone or Dungeness
Halibut - Pacific
Atlantic Herring/Sardines
Lobster - spiny (U.S.)
Mussels (farmed)
Oysters (farmed)
Pollock (Alaska wild)
Salmon (Alaska wild)
Scallops - bay (farmed)
Striped bass (wild* or farmed)
Sturgeon (farmed) or its caviar
Tilapia (U.S. farmed)
Trout - rainbow (farmed)
Tuna - albacore (U.S. or British Columbia, troll or pole)
Tuna - skipjack (troll or pole)

Good alternatives

Basa (farmed)
Clams (wild)
Cod - Pacific (trawled)
Crab - blue*
Crab - king (U.S.)
Crab - snow
Flounder (Pacific)
Lobster - American (Maine)
Mahi mahi (U.S.)
Oysters (wild)*
Scallops - sea (Northeast U.S. and Canada)
Shrimp (U.S. farmed or wild)
Sole (Pacific)
Squid
Surimi (imitation crab)
Swai (farmed)
Swordfish (U.S. longline)*
Tilapia (Central America farmed)
Tuna - bigeye (troll or pole)
Tuna - yellowfin (troll or pole)
Tuna - canned white (albacore)* or canned light

Fish to avoid

Chilean seabass*
Cod - Atlantic*
Crab - king (imported)*
Flounder (Atlantic)
Grouper*
Halibut - Atlantic
Lobster - spiny (Caribbean imported)
Mahi mahi (imported)
Monkfish
Orange roughy*
Rockfish (Pacific)
Salmon (farmed, including Atlantic)*
Scallops - sea (mid-Atlantic)
Shark*
Shrimp (imported farmed or wild)
Snapper - red*
Sole (Atlantic)
Sturgeon (imported wild)* or its caviar*
Swordfish (imported)*
Tilapia (China or Taiwan farmed)
Tuna - albacore (Iongline)*
Tuna - bigeye (Iongline)*
Tuna - yellowfin (longline)*
Tuna - bluefin*

* indicates mercury contamination is a concern, and you should limit consumption for health reasons.

And if you’re wondering why someone who doesn’t eat meat would eat fish, evidence is that humans evolved on a diet heavy in fish , which is why Omega-3 seems to be so good for mental health and skin problems.

Or as the cliché puts it: meat is murder, fish is justifiable homicide.

Food riots are in the news. Meanwhile, the New York Times talks about the fact that food prices for Americans, as a fraction of income, are almost at an all-time low; and that Americans waste 27% of the food available.

This is one respect in which I have been unable to "go native".

I don’t remember exactly what my mother said to me as a child. I remember being told about starving children. It was probably more about getting me to eat what I was given, rather than getting me not to leave anything, but the programming worked so well that even now, I find it almost impossible to throw away food.

If I order at a restaurant, the amount of food I get is the amount I eat. If I have to, I take some of it home and eat it the next day. If rothko takes leftovers home and doesn’t eat them, I eat them for her so they won’t be wasted. If something has gone somewhat past its "best before" date, she won’t touch it. The same is true of leftovers that have been around for more than a day.

Me, I won’t throw it away unless it smells, tastes or looks bad, or I have sound scientific reasons to think it unsafe. For instance, on Friday I found a small amount of Philadelphia cream cheese that had a best before date in March. It looked fine, so I ate it. (It tasted fine too, and if it was going to poison me it would have done so by now.) If there had been some mold on it, I’d have cut off the moldy bit and eaten the rest. After all, what is cheese but fancy moldy milk?

Rice shouldn’t be re-heated repeatedly. If I ate meat, I’d be careful with that. Fish can’t really be re-heated. But most of what I eat keeps pretty well, so I rarely end up throwing anything away.

Sometimes I have to arrange my meals based on what needs to be eaten. If I buy a bag of salad, that means I have to have salad every day for the next few days, so that none of it will go to waste.

If we have guests over and food is involved, it’s always fresh, and there’s usually leftovers. If we make espresso brownies for book club, I know what I’ll be having for breakfast the next day.

I feel that if I buy food and don’t eat it, that’s a moral failing.  Food is something precious. You simply do not waste food, just like you do not burn books.

The parakeet finally came home with us on Monday, as he seemed to have settled down to life without other birds in his cage. He traveled from the pet store in a little cardboard box with air holes in. Unfortunately, the store is the other side of Austin, so by the time he got here he was huddled in the corner of the box, terrified.

We returned him to the cage, and set up his food and water. He spent Monday evening in what looked like a state of shock or misery, his head low. He didn’t really move or make a sound, and we felt rather concerned for him.

This morning I woke him when I went down to make coffee. He was more alert, but still very quiet. He had a morning handling from rothko, and we weighed him to check he was maintaining his weight. A mere 28g, but that’s apparently healthy.  He spent most of the afternoon sitting quietly. When I checked on him he would occasionally yawn, or fluff himself up.

I think he was basically recuperating, because after I finished work he suddenly perked up. Half way through my exercise break he suddenly started chirping loudly. He wandered around the cage, played with his toys a little, then went to the food dishes and started eating.

I think he spent a good couple of hours filling his face. At one point he paused and went and got a drink, then returned to the food; this resulted in his beak getting the dietary supplement powder stuck all over it, which was pretty amusing.  He sat and digested for a bit and watched me. After a while longer he took some of the crunchy food (seed and fruit-flavored pellets), and sat and munched at it noisily on the upper perch.

By around 9:30 he was looking sleepy and content. So I’m feeling better about his general health. Hopefully tomorrow he’ll be back to his normal self, clambering around like he did in the pet store.

I realized that I hadn’t spent enough quality time watching squirrels recently. Black Tip would sit on the fence and wait for me to put food out, but we haven’t seen him in a while, and the new youngsters are shy.

On Sunday I was idly browsing the tool store when I saw they had a special on wireless motion sensor alarms, the kind you can mount on your driveway and hear a beep when someone approaches the house. I figured I’d risk $12 to see if one could detect a squirrel. Cheap Chinese-made crap, but it’s not for actual security use, so who cares?

Opening up the box revealed an infra-red sensor and transmitter unit, and a receiver with some apparently superfluous LEDs, both battery powered. The “chime” is a harsh beep, and I’m not sure how much I’d trust the claim of a 400′ range, but for this application it’s fine.

The sensor/transmitter is now on the rat mat, and the receiver is in the living room. When a squirrel approaches to chow, the receiver beeps and we can walk to the back door to watch. Since there’s no sound from the sensor, the squirrel doesn’t get frightened off. As far as they know, we’re just spending a lot more time at the back of the house.

I’m now wondering how hard it would be to get it hooked up to trigger a camera…

Posted by an Anonymous Coward in an unrelated discussion on Slashdot:

I have 2 dogs & I was buying a large bag of Pal at Big W and standing inline at the check out.

A woman behind me asked if I had a dog.

On impulse, I told her that no, I was starting The Pal Diet again although I probably shouldn’t because I’d ended up in the hospital last time, but that I’d lost 50 pounds before I awakened in an intensive care ward with tubes coming out of most of my orifices and IV’s in both arms.

I told her that it was essentially a perfect diet and that the way that it works is to load your pants pockets with Pal nuggets and simply eat one or two every time you feel hungry & that the food is nutritionally complete so I was going to try it again.

I have to mention here that practically everyone in the line was by now enthralled with my story, particularly a guy who was behind her.

Horrified, she asked if I’d ended up in the hospital in that condition because I had been poisoned. I told her no; it was because I’d been sitting in the street licking my balls and a car hit me.

I thought one guy was going to have a heart attack he was laughing so hard as he staggered out the door.

From CQ Politics:

Like Hansel and Gretel hoping to follow their bread crumbs out of the forest, the FBI sifted through customer data collected by San Francisco-area grocery stores in 2005 and 2006, hoping that sales records of Middle Eastern food would lead to Iranian terrorists.

The idea was that a spike in, say, falafel sales, combined with other data, would lead to Iranian secret agents in the south San Francisco-San Jose area.

OK, I confess: I have purchased and eaten falafels on several occasions. I’ll come quietly.

It had been some four years since I had last visited England. Given how little time off Americans get, visiting my family means not actually having a proper vacation that year, so I don’t get to go back as often as everyone would like. This time the visit was for a particular event: my brother Edward was getting married.

I know I have some friends who don’t really understand the whole “marriage” thing. As the saying goes, “Why buy the cow if you can get the milk for free?” Here’s an analogy that might help:

Consider sports. It’s possible to watch a random sports game and get something out of it. However, most fans choose to support a specific team. They make a long term commitment to that team. They go to its matches even when the weather’s bad. They buy logo shirts and hats and scarves and memorabilia. They support the same team for years, even if it loses, even if they move to a different part of the country or a different part of the world.

Why do they do this? Clearly, committing to supporting one team in some way makes watching the games better. It enhances the experience. The committed supporter gets something out of the game that an uncommitted spectator simply doesn’t get, even if the actual game is the same.

So anyway, my brother was getting married, and we were to attend. And since it’s a long way to travel just for a couple of days, we planned to go a week early and spend some time with the family.

Shortly before booking the plane tickets, I learned that British Airways and Virgin Atlantic each have a “deluxe economy” class. BA call theirs World Traveler Plus, Virgin’s is Premium Economy. In either case, it costs about 15% more than the regular cattle class ticket. For that you get a wider seat that reclines further and has proper lumbar support and headrest, there’s more legroom, and you get proper food and free drinks, priority baggage handling, and so on. We decided to give it a shot; anything to make the 6-8 hour transatlantic hop more bearable.

Unfortunately, no US airline offers anything like it. They have cattle class, and they have the outrageously expensive first class, and that’s it. So we were stuck on an American Airlines flight to Chicago, where we had to change to British Airways for the rest of the journey. It was a bit like taking a Greyhound bus to your limo; I don’t know why BA picked American as their “OneWorld Alliance” partner airline.

In Chicago, we had to change terminals. Which meant leaving the secured area, walking across to the trains, getting the train to Terminal 4, and then going back into the airport and clearing security again.

Unfortunately, Chicago O’Hare’s Terminal 4 doesn’t have proper security facilities yet, as it seems to be last on their list for upgrades. (It seems they want to build a new Terminal 4 that works, then demolish the current one.) It’s also the terminal every single international flight leaves from, which means lots of people who look suspicious (i.e. not white and midwestern), which in turn means security is slower than normal.

At the far end of the shopping concourse, they had set up 5 makeshift security gates. Three lines of frustrated would-be travelers stretched the entire length of the concourse, past all the shops and restaurants, all the way to the building’s entrance doors.

After spending around 40 minutes in line, we reached the TSA person whose job it is to look at your boarding pass and passport. She said something unclear about needing a boarding pass. I looked at the boarding pass I had obtained from the online check-in. It said “Boarding pass” in large letters, and “You are now ready to fly”, and had a bar code. I explained that we had checked in for the flight online.

No, explained the TSA person, you have to get your boarding pass stamped. By the ticket desk. Hence defeating the entire purpose of online checkin. I looked at my watch nervously, and explained that we would never be able to make it through the queues again in time for our flight. The TSA staffer said we could jump the queue when we came back.

So, we left the queue and found the BA ticket desk. The woman there sighed and explained that it was a new rule the TSA had imposed, and nothing to do with BA. She stamped our boarding passes with a generic rubber stamp, and wrote something illegible over it with a ball point pen. We walked all the way back up to the front of the security line, and this time made it through. Good job, TSA; security theater at its finest.

Beyond the security barriers there was a small stand selling snacks at an outrageous markup. By this time we were tired and angry and hungry, so I gave in and got some Chex Trail Mix.

Once we were on the BA plane, things looked up. The seats were comfortable, with good back support, and headrests at head level. (I don’t know where US airlines get the midgets they use to design their seating.) Before long there was food and drink, and they remembered my vegetarian meal preference. I took a melatonin tablet, reclined the seat, and tried to nap.

After hearing me mention that we considered a Subaru Outback as plan B if we couldn’t get a Prius, a Subaru dealer tries to sell me a new car. I don’t seem to be buying it, so he takes me to a special Subaru dealership hidden away in the countryside.

The area is surrounded by trees and grass. The buildings are large and low, like aircraft hangars. We walk past lots filled with SUVs. I explain that I’m really not interested in SUVs.

He points at a sports car. I look at it. It’s a nice design, but it’s only about 2 meters long, so I’d never fit in it. I’m similarly unenthusiastic about the Subaru Clown Car. Then he shows me a car I could actually fit in, but it’s bright pink and looks like it was made by gluing together giant models of male and female genitals.

I start to suspect that these cars are deliberately unsellable, so he can push me towards an SUV. I say that I’m really not interested in buying anything. The salesman says I’ll change my mind once I’ve had The Subaru Experience.

We climb into an SUV and close the doors. Suddenly, a circular-saw-wielding maniac in a hockey mask attempts to cut through the door next to me. The door stands up pretty well to the attack. I’m obviously startled, but the salesman grins at me and says something about the ruggedness of Subaru SUVs. I can’t hear it above the whine of metal against metal. Then the attacker lunges the saw through the window, the blade touches my arm, and I discover it’s fake. The whole thing is fake, like a movie.

It turns out that this Subaru dealership is a converted movie studio where they stage elaborate scenarios intended to convince people to buy vehicles.

The second scenario is to experience how a Subaru Outback stands up to an attack by rabid wolves. The answer is: pretty well. Once the howling stops, we get out and head into a nearby building.

The salesman hands me some protective clothing. I put it on, but when I look in the mirror it turns out to be a waiter’s outfit. We walk through into a long room with tables laden with food along both sides. At the far end is some sort of car. We’re going to be experiencing how well a Subaru stands up to a custard pie fight.

I’ve had enough. I don’t want to get custard and whipped cream all over me. I run back out into the corridor. Alarms start sounding, alerting everyone to an escaping customer. I exit the corridor into a garage filled with assorted special-purpose Subaru vehicles. I’m delighted to find a Subaru customized for ram-raiding. I get in, hotwire it, drive out through the garage doors, and escape.

We’ve been out getting the food for Christmas. The supermarket sells corn for squirrels—it even has a picture of a squirrel on the bag. I also picked up a big $3 bag of sunflower seeds, it’ll be their Christmas gift. The man standing behind us in the checkout queue was a squirrel skeptic. “You’re feeding rats!”

We got a fake tree this year, after Mythbusters covered how much damage a tree can do if it catches on fire and rothko decided she didn’t want a real tree in the house after all. Safety aside, there’s something to be said for not having needles everywhere, and having branches strong enough to hold up weightier ornaments. You can get Christmas tree smell as scented candles, and probably as an aerosol too.

The big excitement, though, is that we managed to get some mince pies this year. I don’t think I’d seen any since we visited my family for Christmas several years ago.

No Wii for Christmas. I tried stores, I tried online, no luck. I even tried the Amazon customers vote, which said I had a slightly better chance of winning the chance to buy a Wii than I had of getting hemorrhoids, which kinda makes me feel better that that sort of probability is by no means a sure thing.

Hamburg sits on the Elbe river, a few kilometers inland. A cunning tax dodge in 1189 propelled it into becoming Europe’s second largest port, and a world class red light district soon followed, surrounded by dive bars and seedy nightclubs. These days the city is keener to present the area through rose-tinted John Lennon glasses, omitting to mention that the Beatles played the Star-Club mostly because they couldn’t get a paying gig anywhere else in 1962.

The Elbe is apparently pretty deep, because the Queen Mary 2 was there. She’s the largest ocean liner in the world, making the Titanic look small in comparison. She takes around 7 days to cross the Atlantic, at a price of $1000+. Mind you, that’s not much more than we paid for our tickets, and if they have broadband on the ship I wouldn’t even need to use up vacation days on the crossing. I bet the food’s nicer than Continental. If they toned down the swanky ballrooms a bit and made it cheaper, they could have a compelling business proposition. But I digress.

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