Bulletproof Whiskey Set

 I don’t know about you, but every morning when I check my email I find 75-100 pieces of email waiting for me to read.  There are some that came from newsletters I subscribed to, but most of them are just junk that somehow slipped through my email’s spam filter.  I usually spend a few minutes deleting the spam and then go back and read the others before deleting them or filing them away in a folder that I’ll probably never open.

This morning as I was marking the spam for deletion there was one piece of junk mail that caught my eye.  It was from an online gun place advertising a “bulletproof whiskey set.”  I had never heard of such a thing and my curiosity got the best of me so I opened it.

Now, you might be wondering why I get email from an online gun dealer.  A few years ago I decided to get a State of Nebraska Concealed Carry permit.  I’m not exactly sure why, but I went through the training, passed the test, and received the permit in the mail after a few weeks.  The next order of business was to get a handgun that I could carry should I ever get the urge to do so.  I browsed several online sites where they sold such weapons and read a lot about them so I could make sure to get one that would work well for me.  I subscribed to a number of daily newsletters dealing with concealed carry and used them as a source of information to make my decision.  Today, despite having unsubscribed to all of them multiple times, they still show up regularly in my inbox.  By the way, I carried a handgun everywhere for a short time before deciding that it wasn’t worth the trouble.  I have a deal with the Omaha Police.  I let their highly trained officers protect me because that's their job, not mine.  In return, they don’t go around fixing computers because that’s my job, not theirs.

Anyway, I clicked on the bulletproof whiskey set and started reading about it.  It consisted of four rocks glasses and a decanter, all made of bulletproof glass.  It was on sale for only $150 today only.  If I really wanted to immediately spend $150 then there are a number of other things I would spend it on since I really don’t drink whiskey or scotch.  And if I somehow acquired a taste for it I would probably just drink some out of the same beat up old jelly jar I use for wine, tequila, vodka, and pretty much any other alcohol that comes my way.

Nevertheless, I read on.  The description said it was specially crafted to survive a “vigorous bugout.”  I wasn’t too clear on what that meant so I looked it up.  When you have to bugout it means that someone is after you intending to do you great harm and you have to leave your current location very quickly and flee to a different one.  I thought about this for a minute.  If Tanya and I had to bugout and run for our lives, we’d probably take a little food, our pets, maybe a gun, our phones, and some camping gear.  We wouldn’t be too concerned about taking along four rocks glasses and a decanter of bourbon.  It’s unlikely that when we reached a safe place we would set up our camp and then immediately pour a nice round of cocktails and invite some neighbors over.

And another thing.  Why would you advertise an alcohol-related item on a site where people buy guns?  It’s not like alcohol and guns go together like peanut butter and jelly.  When we go to our friend’s farm to shoot targets with them on the 4th of July, there is a lot of drinking but the rule is that all the guns are secured and stored away safely long before a single cocktail is poured for anyone.  It’s just common sense.

After deleting that message I didn’t think about it again until I was driving to the grocery store over lunch.  One of the reasons I canceled our membership at a nice gun range nearby was that we really didn’t like the gun culture that we found there.  After people finished shooting, they usually gathered in a common area in the showroom and discussed guns.  The conversations always turned into discussions of a particular caliber’s “stopping power” and how many shots it would take to kill someone.  And they discussed all the tactical gear they carried around all day.  And they discussed their second amendment rights and how they were preparing for widespread civil unrest and general mayhem that is sure to occur in the next few years because of the liberals.  We were there to shoot targets, not train for WWIII.  It doesn’t take a pistol and loads of tactical gear to subdue a target.  You can do that with a clothes pin.  When we were done shooting we usually just secured our guns, cleaned up our lane, and went home.

I think the gun culture has gotten a little out of hand.  There are too many people running around and trying to project an image like they are highly trained Special Forces operatives whose sworn duty is to protect our way of life from all enemies, foreign or domestic.  In reality I think they are just a bunch of tragically stupid, fat, balding, uneducated, middle aged white men who barely have the stamina to get off the couch and go to the refrigerator to get another can of Old Milwaukee.  Rather than learn about what’s going on in the world, they spend their time cruising the web for information on the latest ridiculous conspiracy theory and then go out in public trying to project some kind of hard-ass image.  It’s really very sad.

The Perfect Dinner Roll

 

I finally found the recipe for the holy grail of dinner rolls.  While you may not think baking a good dinner roll is a big deal, I assure you that it actually is.  Americans eat a lot of bread.  When you go into a nice restaurant they usually serve you some kind of bread with your meal unless you ordered a sandwich or something that could be considered lunch food and is already served on bread.  Eating bread has some religious implications, but I’m not going to discuss any of those here.  You can go read about them somewhere else.  At any rate, let’s just say that Americans eat a lot of bread because we like it.

I’ve always loved baking and did a lot of baking when I worked in restaurants and clubs throughout my many years in foodservice.  When I bought my first restaurant we purchased sliced Italian bread loaves and pizza dough from a local family-owned Italian bakery.  This bakery’s sliced white bread and dinner rolls had been a staple in Omaha’s Italian restaurants for over 50 years.  The bakery also made pizza, so I was able to buy dough from them to make our pizza.  My restaurant was far away enough that they didn’t consider us their competition in the pizza market, plus we sold a ton of pizza so they they made a lot of money selling dough to us. There were two Italian bakeries in Omaha at the time and this one was the smaller one.  I thought the bread tasted like sawdust, but my customers loved it so we kept using it.

One day the bread guy didn’t show up.  We had enough bread from the previous day so I wasn’t particularly worried about it.  Then he didn’t show up the next day, either.  When I called the bakery to ask when they would be delivering to us they transferred me to the owner.  He told me that they had decided to stop delivering  to our part of Omaha.  This was the first I had heard of their plan, so I was pissed off and I let him know about it.  He just hung up on me so that was the end of my business relationship with them.  Forever.

Now, baking Italian bread is not rocket science, but it requires a little planning to know how much to make and when to start making it in order to give the dough enough time to rise properly and develop the correct texture and flavor.  I was very busy with other aspects of reviving a previously failing restaurant, so making bread and pizza dough wasn’t too high on my favorite things to do every day, but I did it anyway.  The upside was that my customers liked our bread more than the Italian bakery’s product.  They often stopped by for a couple of loaves to take home in the late afternoon when it was fresh from the oven.  Our pizza dough was way better than theirs, too, and we saw our pizza sales quickly rise to over 100 pizzas per night and over 200 on our Tuesday Pizza nights.  We competed with all the Italian places in town, but we sold a shit ton more pizzas than anyone else.

I had always tried baking dinner rolls at home for family gatherings, but I could never produce a really good one.  I got tired of wasting a lot of time trying to bake rolls for every gathering and usually I just bought them at the grocery store.  Sadly, the grocery store rolls were better than mine anyway.

When I opened my second restaurant, much smaller than the first one, I knew I wanted to make my own baked goods there.  The Italian bakery that crewed me over in the first restaurant was just one block away and my new place would also offer pizza as a small plate appetizer or as a light entree so they didn’t want my business.  They loudly voiced their displeasure at the fact that I was going to sell pizza right in “their” neighborhood.  Anyway, I developed a pretty good recipe for dinner rolls and began making them for our bread baskets.  The Italian bakery wasn’t too happy about that either, but I got over it.  After a couple of months of making them I decided to just make a nice focaccia bread in large sheets and serve that instead of dinner rolls.  I realized that  after 30 years I still hadn’t found the perfect dinner roll.  I eventually retired from foodservice without ever finding it.

So, a couple of months ago I was looking for something on the King Arthur Baking web site and came across a recipe for Amish dinner rolls.  The picture in the recipe looked exactly like what I was looking for so I made half a batch to try them out.  Bingo.  Big, beautiful, buttery brown tender crust on the outside, pillow soft and buttery sweet on the inside.  The ones in the picture above are almost two days old, but you get the idea.  I remember eating these at those big cafeteria-style restaurants when I was a kid.  Delicious and pretty easy to make.  You don’t have to start making the dough the day before and they keep really well if you keep them tightly covered.

I’m not going to include the recipe here because I don’t want to do any more cutting, pasting, and formatting than necessary, but you can get it for yourself at this link:

https://www.kingarthurbaking.com/recipes/amish-dinner-rolls-recipe

Incidentally, there are lots of really good recipes on the King Arthur web site.  In case you didn’t know, King Arthur is a company that produces baking ingredients and supplies.  Lots of good stuff there.

Good luck.  I’m sure your family and guests will love these.

Living With a Bobcat

Before we get started here, let me say that I don't have a bobcat and I have never had one.  We have two mostly normal cats, but no bobcats.  I had a friend whose family had adopted a bobcat when it was a kitten.  The only reason I’m writing this post is that I did a post here 5 years ago about a meth addict that featured their bobcat. This is basically just a follow-up featuring a lot more bobcat.

My friend Mike’s aunt and uncle lived on a farm about an hour from Omaha.  They found a litter of kittens in their beat up old barn and thought the kittens had been abandoned my their mother.  There were a ton of feral cats on and around their farm, so it wasn’t unusual to see mothers with kittens there.

During a visit, Mike’s aunt mentioned the kittens in the barn and somehow Mike and his sister Kari convinced their parents to let them bring one home.  They named him Bob.  This was pure coincidence because they didn’t realize right away that he was actually a bobcat.  A few weeks later Mike’s uncle called to tell his family that their new kitten was actually a bobcat.  His uncle told them that the reason they never saw the mother was that she was probably out killing things for them to eat and that they had eventually seen her one day.  They told Mike’s family that the mother was very large and fearsome looking.  They just left her alone and stopped feeding the kittens several times a day.  Eventually mom and the remaining kittens left on their own and went somewhere else.

Mike’s family had a family meeting and decided they would keep Bob until he became a problem, but he never did.  He grew up as a beloved member of their family and never exhibited any aggressive behavior or acted like a wild animal.  He was basically a very large house cat.  He got along great with everyone and played in the back yard with their German shepherd and husky dogs.  They also had a small dog that was some kind of yappy, spoiled, bitchy, long-haired lapdog that Bob ignored for the most part.  Bob could have swallowed that dog in one bite, but he was never inclined to do so.

Mike and I were part of a group of four or five guys who hung around together all the time.  After school we would generally go over to someone’s house and discuss school, girls, and sports.  When one of us was on a sports team the rest of us went and watched the practices, afterwards offering suggestions for improvement like we were seasoned professionals in that sport.  We had no actual knowledge of what we were talking about, but we did it anyway.

None of us were involved in winter sports, so during the winter months we usually just went over to someone’s house after school.  We liked to go to Mike’s house the best because they the house was huge and they always had the best snacks. Mike’s mom was always great to us and Mike’s sister was hot.  Kari was a couple of years older than us and she always tried to keep her distance from us, but still stay close enough to hear everything we were talking about. When we were at Mike’s house his two larger dogs and Bob would hang out with us.  At first we were all nervous about hanging out with a live bobcat, but over time he was just like one of the dogs and we got used to him.  Usually he would just find a place to sit down and listen intently to our conversations.  When we went out into Mike’s large back yard, Bob and both of the dogs would also join us through the doggy door that Mike’s dad had installed in the back door.  

Playing outside with Bob was an experience.  Apparently bobcats have a natural instinct that compels them to go after flying things and rip them to shreds.  We saw this happen to a few unlucky birds who attempted to fly too low across the back yard.  Bob was very muscular so he could jump really high and easily catch a bird in mid flight if it trespassed into his airspace.  None of us wanted to try and take a dead bird away from a full grown male bobcat for obvious reasons, so we would just watch in horror as he dismembered the bird and swallowed it, bones and all.  A few times he attempted to take his catch back into the house to consume it inside, but each time he was met with angry screams from Mike’s mother and he would quickly emerge from the doggy door back into the yard without the bird.  She would then glare at all of us through the kitchen window and shake her head at us as we did our best not to laugh.

The reason I bring up the whole flying prey subject is that we would frequently take a football outside with us to play catch while we discussed our usual topics of girls, school, girls, sports, and girls.  As the football flew through the air from one person to the next, Bob would chase it and if one of us happened to throw a pass that didn’t have much altitude he would usually jump and intercept it in mid air.  Once Bob had the football there wasn’t much we could do about it.  That was the end of the football.  He would already have several punctures in it before his feet even hit the ground.  There would be no saving that that football.  Again, none of us were inclined to try wrangling with a full grown male bobcat with huge teeth and very sharp claws.  We lost a number of footballs to Bob.  Sometimes he would tear off chunks of leather and eat them, but mostly he was just proud of himself for intercepting another flying object and subduing it.

During the day when Mike’s family was away, Bob slept most of the time.  At least we all thought he slept.  But sometimes he apparently didn’t sleep and became bored.  One cloudy and cold Wednesday, Mike and I decided to go to his house after school and play his Atari Pong game console.  If you’ve never heard of Pong, it was one of the first electronic games that you could hook up to your television.  It was like an electronic ping pong game where the ball bounced around the screen and you had to maneuver a paddle and position it to hit it so it wouldn’t go off the screen at the bottom.  By today’s standards it was rather uninspiring, but that was 1975 so it was pretty much a technological miracle back then.  An Atari was pretty expensive so not many people had them.

On this particular Wednesday, we walked from school over to Mike’s anticipating a couple of hours of Pong before I walked home for dinner.  When we opened the front door to go in we were met with feathers.  Lots and lots of small white feathers.  They were everywhere.  They were covering everything in every room.  We instantly knew Bob was the culprit.  We surmised that someone had forgotten to lock the doggy door and Bob had gone outside and caught a large bird to bring inside and dismember.  

In a truly stunning display of 15-year-old boys’ logic, we simply closed the front door and walked over to my house, opting to just pretend we didn’t know anything about the spectacle that would await the rest of the family when they got home.  We later found out that Bob had dragged one of those double wide king-sized bed pillows from the guest bedroom downstairs into the living room and ripped it open to see what was inside.  Unsatisfied with what he found inside the pillow he went and got another one, obviously hoping he would find something more interesting inside the second one.  Later that night Mike successfully convinced his parents that finding goose down all over the house was infinitely better than finding bloody bird parts scattered everywhere.  Throughout all the drama and ensuing cleanup Bob just acted like nothing unusual was going on.

Bob didn’t spend as much time outside during the cold winter months.  Nebraska winters are notoriously cold and windy.  In the 1970’s we always got a lot of snow during the winter, much more than we get now.  Snows of over 12 inches were commonplace.  One of Mike’s household chores was to clear the walks each time it snowed.  His father had been kind enough to buy him a large snowblower to use, but it still took quite a long time to get everything cleared off after each snow.  Included in the areas that Mike cleared was a large patio in the back yard.  During the winter the snow in their back yard got very deep and Mike kept the patio clear so Bob and the dogs would have a place to do their business and walk around a bit.

One morning Bob went outside with the dogs as usual.  They usually just went outside and took care of nature’s call before quickly returning to the warmth of the kitchen through the doggy door.  On this morning Bob didn’t return.  After about 30 minutes Mike went out to find him.  Bob was sitting up in a medium sized maple tree in the middle of the yard.  He was about 15 feet up the tree sitting on a large branch.  Bobcats are very skilled climbers.  He wasn’t doing anything.  Just sitting there looking around.  He was still sitting in the tree when Mike left for school an hour later.  When the last person left the house for the day they left the doggy door unlocked  for him, thinking he would get cold and come inside while they were gone.  He had other plans.

Now you’d think the family would hesitate leaving for the day with a full grown bobcat sitting in a tree in their yard, but they left anyway, expecting to find him inside and sleeping on the couch later when they got home.  They didn't consider the possibility of Bob leaving the yard and mauling a neighbor’s kid or maybe even being hit by a car.  Apparently bobcats are somewhat territorial and Bob considered the back yard as his territory, so he almost never strayed out of his private kingdom.  There was a very large park with both open and wooded areas less than a block away, but Bob never went there.  We decided that there must have been another bobcat living there and Bob wanted to avoid encountering it.  We discussed the tree situation at length during the school day and decided that we should go directly to Mike’s house to check on Bob when we got out of school.

When we got to Mike’s house we immediately started looking for Bob.  Not finding him in any of his usual favorite spots throughout the house, we went out to the back yard.  There he was, still sitting in the tree.  Just sitting there casually and doing absolutely nothing.  There were no new footprints in the snow surrounding the tree so we knew he had just been sitting there all day.  We tried to coax him down but after many tries we were still unsuccessful.

Now, if you’ve ever had a cat you know that it’s very hard to get them to do anything they don’t want to do.  They will simply ignore your best efforts to get them to do what you want.  They do this not out of malice, but just because that’s the way cats are.  Bobcats are the same way.  If they don’t want to do something then they’re not going to do it.  A situation can become more complicated with a bobcat, however, because they’re very powerful wild animals.  A mad bobcat can tear you up pretty badly in just a few seconds.  Bob was very domesticated, but we feared that there was enough wildness still left in him that we decided it wouldn’t be in our best interest to climb up there and grab him.  We tried to coax him down with a bowl of food, some raw chicken breasts, and a couple of cans of good quality tuna, but he just wasn’t interested and remained in the tree.

By this time, the rest of Mike’s family had come home and we all stood on the patio and stared at Bob.  He stared back.  Six to ten inches of new snow was expected that night into the next morning, so they were worried about Bob siting in the tree all night. Mike’s mother called the vet and he said that if Bob didn’t appear to be in distress we should just leave him there and he would probably come down when he was good and ready.  We briefly discussed the option of calling the fire department and asking them to bring him down, but soon we all agreed that the fire department option would surely be disastrous for Bob and the unlucky firefighter who had to climb up and get him.  Besides, bobcats were considered dangerous animals by the city government and it was illegal to own one within the city limits.  So we decided to just wait for him to come down on his own.

When I got to school the next morning I found Mike and asked about Bob’s status.  Bob was still up in the tree.  After school we went over to Mike’s and tried one again to convince Bob to leave the tree.  He wasn’t having it.  We even tried sacrificing a nice Rawlings leather football by placing it in the snow under the tree but he wasn’t interested.  He just sat there on the branch and stared at us, completely unimpressed by our heroic efforts to rescue him.

Bob stayed up in that tree for another two days.  On the evening of the third day he came walking in the doggy door, jumped up onto the counter, and helped himself to a large bowl of spaghetti and meatballs intended to be the family’s dinner.  After satisfying his hunger, he casually walked past Mike’s family into the living room and laid down on the couch, smearing it with plenty of spaghetti sauce as he made himself comfortable.  No one ever figured out why Bob decided to sit up in a tree for three days during the coldest days of winter and to my knowledge he never did it again.

I mentioned earlier that it was illegal to have a bobcat within the Omaha city limits and it’s still illegal today, 50 years later.  Mike’s family decided that they would simply ignore this statute since they originally thought Bob would just grow into a big barn cat rather than a ferocious apex predator.  I still think that the distinctive short tail should have been a pretty good clue, but I guess they either decided to ignore it or maybe they hoped that it would eventually grow out to be a regular domestic house cat tail.  At any rate, they licensed Bob as a domestic shorthair house cat, had him neutered, and got him all his shots as their vet suggested.  I don’t think the vet ever cautioned them about the differences between owning a regular domestic cat versus a bobcat.  I think he just ignored the situation and hoped that they would eventually hand Bob over to the zoo once he became hard to live with.  

Bob never showed any aggression whatsoever and basically acted just like a regular pet cat except for the feather incident and his larger size.  I spent many hours at Mike’s house with Bob curled up on the couch next to me sleeping and purring loudly.  Long after Mike had grown up and moved away we learned that Bob had passed away peacefully in his sleep one night.  We all felt a great sense of loss when we learned of Bob’s passing, but we knew he had had many wonderful years with Mike’s family and friends and had lived a great life.

Should We Search for Extraterrestrial Life?

So what do you think about searching for extraterrestrial life?  The idea sounds pretty cool, but should we really be doing it?  I’m not so sure that it’s a good idea.  There are arguments both ways, but I think it makes sense for us to avoid it for now.

I think some people have a dream that we will befriend some far away civilization that has incredibly advanced technology and they are just going to hand over all their knowledge for us to use as we like.  Really?  Do you really think there’s some benevolent civilization somewhere whose primary activity is floating around the galaxy doing good things for all the other civilizations they come across?  I highly doubt it.

If there is intelligent life capable of space travel over long distances, then it’s more likely that they’ll find us.  We’re not going to find them somewhere with a few big telescopes and then just invite them over to our planet for a visit.  If they’re out traveling around in space then they probably have a good reason for it.  Most likely, they’ve depleted the resources on their planet so much that they’re out looking around for new sources for the stuff they’ve used up on theirs.  In that case humans would just be in their way and they would probably prefer to just get rid of us so they could go about the business of gathering up anything Earth has to offer and carting it back home.  Think about that for a minute and remember “War of the Worlds” by H.G. Wells.  As an aside, if you haven’t read that book you really should.  It’s an amazing piece of literature and I’m sure you’d like it.

So what if aliens visited Earth and contacted us?  What would they look like and how would we communicate with them?  In a best case scenario they would look like the little green or gray men as they are depicted in the movies.  Their language would be audible like ours but it would sound like a foreign language to us.  Ok, we could work with that.  But what if they were just moving blobs of semi-transparent goo and they communicated with each other telepathically?  How would we handle that?  The thing is, if they were substantially different from us we would probably just assume they were hostile and immediately start unleashing our weapons on  them.  If something is different or unfamiliar to us we generally treat it as hostile and assume bad intent.  It’s an instinct that will eventually go away if we are able to continue the process of human evolution, but for now we’re just stuck with it.

To me, the thought of aliens finding us is terrifying.  Not because I’m not curious about it - I certainly am.  It’s because we have no idea what they would do.  They might just regard us as a curiosity and move on.  Maybe they would try to befriend us.  Or another possibility is that they would be similar to us and consider us a threat that needs to be eradicated.  Humans seem to think that any living thing that’s not like us should be conquered, enslaved, or eradicated.  It’s what we do and we do it well.

Given the uncertainty of what would happen in an encounter with aliens, I think it makes more sense for us to not go looking for trouble.  We make enough trouble for us all by ourselves and we don’t need to be out looking for more.  That being said, we’re already advertising our presence to everything within about a gazillion miles away with our heavy use of the radio waves.  The first radio transmission was May 13, 1897 by Guglielmo Marconi.  At that point the cat was out of the bag.  Our use of the radio spectrum has increased exponentially since then, so all of our cats are now out of the bag.  Even if we realize the danger we’ve put ourselves in, we can’t just stop using radio waves.  We’re completely dependent on it now.  And even if all the world’s leaders got together and totally banned all radio transmissions, there would be some dumbshit who did it anyway.  All it takes is one.  

So what should we do about all of this?  Nothing.  We should do nothing.  If there’s a civilization out there with the intelligence and technology capable of hearing us, then they’re either already aware of us or they will be when Marconi’s first radio transmission eventually makes it to them.  There’s nothing we can do now to prevent this from happening.

Anyway, that’s my opinion on the question of searching for extraterrestrial life.  We should just concentrate on trying to undo some of the damage we’ve done to our planet and to each other.  It will be better in the long run for us and our children and their children.

The Man Cat

 

We have two cats.  One is a large Maine Coon who loves everyone as soon as she lays eyes on them.  If you walk into our house then you are automatically and instantly her new best friend.  The other cat is what's called a Man Cat.  Let me explain.

The Man Cat is a female calico shorthair and she likes men more than women.  We don't really know why, but we have a theory, which I'll explain after providing a little background information.  When a woman comes to our house for a visit, the Man Cat is largely indifferent to the whole event.  She may walk through the room, but she mostly just ignores the interloper entirely and just goes about her important cat business.  

When a man visits, the Man Cat takes notice of him right away.  At first she'll watch him from a distance.  Over time she'll get closer and closer and eventually, for a selected few, the Man Cat will end up rubbing against the lucky visitor's leg and/or sitting nearby and watching him intently.  We're not sure what causes this, but we have a theory.

The day we got the Man Cat, Tanya and I had been out on a Saturday afternoon running some errands.  She had wanted an orange tabby cat for some time, so we stopped by a large chain pet store to look for one.  No luck.  They had plenty of cats, but no orange ones.  We had given up our search for that day and were heading home when we decided to stop at one more place and see if they had any orange tabbys.  

They had only two cats for adoption.  One was an older gray and black one and the other was a calico shorthair kitten that was small enough to easily fit in the palm of your hand.  Tanya asked the attendant if she could hold the little multi-colored morsel.  When the door to the cage was opened, the calico immediately walked right up Tanya's arm and perched on her shoulder.  It was at that moment that I knew we would not be leaving the store without that cat.  We filled out the required paperwork, paid $40, and promised that we would take good care of her.  They packed her up in a box for us.  After spending another $100 on the necessary cat accessories we took her home.

We already had two cats at home so we knew we needed to introduce them to the new member of our family.  Now, if you search the internet for instructions on introducing a new kitten to your adult cats, then you will find tons of information and a lot of advice from cat experts.  We didn't know about any of this so when we got home we just opened the box and released her into the living room.  The Maine Coon was curious, but kept her distance until she could figure out what to do about the whole situation.  Our other cat slinked away quickly and hid for a long, long time.  Her eye color changed from vivid green to a dull gray color.

Ok, we had gotten that over with.  Eventually the other cats realized that this small, multi-colored ball of fury was not going anywhere and they warmed up to her a little bit.  She had a huge amount of energy and could be heard running through the house at full speed for most of the night.  Every night.  She had been born feral so it took some time for her to become accustomed to now being an inside only cat and living with humans.  She learned to tolerate us as her caregivers and she was sometimes affectionate, but not very often.

As time went by she got somewhat larger, but she was still a very small cat.  When she got a little older we realized that she was not your average cat.  I decided to do some research and quickly found that calicos are different.  Very different.  They are feisty, mischievous, high energy, and you really have to keep your eye on them so they don't do bad things.  The Man Cat showed no signs of outgrowing any of those things and today, some 11 years later, she still hasn't outgrown them.  She's slowed down a little bit, but she's still 100% calico crazy.

So how did she become a Man Cat?  We think she became one when she got very sick at about 9 months old.  She started having to rush to the litter box frequently to pee.  This got progressively worse.  We thought she had a urinary tract infection.  Now, if you have cats then you probably know that this can be very serious for cats.  Humans take antibiotics for a few days and they're usually fine.  You can't just get some antibiotics for a cat and administer them.  Giving a cat a pill and getting the cat to swallow it is almost as hard as climbing Mt. Everest with one leg in a cast and blindfolded.  

We took Man Cat to the vet and, as expected, they prescribed antibiotic pills and a very expensive prescription cat food.  Neither helped.  We had many trips to the vet but she kept getting worse.  She started peeing wherever she was when the urge hit her and she was losing weight rapidly, would not eat, and rarely drank any water.  We knew she was not long for the world unless we got some help so we took her to a different vet.

When all this was going down I was working for a company headquartered in Redwood City, California and I worked remotely from our home in Omaha, Nebraska.  Since I was home almost all the time and Tanya worked at a nearby restaurant I was the one who took Man Cat to her many vet visits.  She was too tired and sick to put up much of a fight so it wasn't very hard to get her into a small kennel for the trip each way.

The new vet examined her and did some x-rays.  He immediately found a bladder stone that was the size of a penny and way too large for her to ever pass on her own.  He told us that our only options were euthanasia and surgery.  We had become very attached to the Man Cat by this time and opted for the expensive surgery.

I dropped her off at the vet early on her surgery day and called several times to check on her during the day.  After work I picked her up and drove her home.  When I opened the kennel she quickly went into my home office and hid for several hours.  In the days after surgery she regained her energy, started eating again, and quickly returned to her normal activities.  The surgery was a complete success.  No complications at all.

I call her a Man Cat, but she wasn't quite a Man Cat yet.  We think that she remembers me bringing her home from her many vet visits and eventually the surgery and she equates that with me saving her from a very frightening and uncomfortable situation.  Many days I would spread out my work on the dining room table and she started laying next to my work papers on the table.  Then she started laying on my papers.  Then she started laying across my keyboard.  We had many long and meaningful conversations during our days together.  She was a good listener and we became very close.  She started following me around the house and eventually it got to a point where she was never more than a few feet away from me at any time.  When I left the house she would sit in the window and wait for hours until I came home.  There was always a lot of meowing and eventually I learned what some of the different meows meant.  Unfortunately, she started distancing herself from Tanya.  This was very disappointing to Tanya but there wasn't much we could do about it.  

Tanya actually made up the term "Man Cat."  One day Tanya was trying to get her to sit on the sofa and watch a movie together, but the Man Cat wasn't having it and kept trying to return to me.  After several unsuccessful tries, Tanya said something like "Ok, then.  You just go ahead and go.  You're a Man Cat!"

Over the next 9 months she completely transitioned into a Man Cat and she remains one to this day.  As I write this she's sleeping on a chair less than three feet away from me.  Sometimes she just drives me crazy, but I wouldn't have it any other way.

A Mean Country

 This morning I had to go to a couple of our data centers and do some repair work on some of our larger systems.  Afterward I decided to stop by the grocery store and pick up a few things on my way home for lunch.  This particular grocery store has the regular size shopping carts and they also have some smaller carts for when you only need a few items but you don't want to use one of the hand baskets.  Today I got one of the smaller carts and started to put groceries into it.  About half way through my shopping I decided that I needed to use the restroom, so I parked my partially filled cart outside the restroom and went in.

When I came out a couple of minutes later my cart was gone.  In it's place sitting on the floor was a hand basket with my items in it.  A woman wearing a massive parka was quickly moving away from me,  looking back at me over her shoulder, and  laughing.  She pointed at the cart she had taken from me, laughed like a rabid hyena, and quickly disappeared into the produce section while looking back at me over her shoulder to make sure I wasn't following.

At first I was angry that, instead of walking 20 feet to the cart storage area and getting an unused cart, she thought she would just take mine.  Instead of catching up to her and beaning her with a package of bacon, I decided just to let it go and finish my shopping.  I ran into her in the aisles a few times over the next five minutes.  On the third time I encountered her she pointed at the hand basket I was carrying and said "That looks heavy."  I momentarily reached for the bacon but decided against it, silently hoping to myself that something she was buying would give her two or three days of projectile diarrhea.  Karma has a way of keeping things in balance.

When I was in my car leaving the parking lot there were about half a dozen cars jockeying for the first spot in the exit line.  It was like a demolition derby.  Screaming, cursing, honking of horns, and shaking of fists.  One woman even got her kids into the act.  It was the first time in my life I've ever had a 7-year old flip me off and scream "Fuck off!" while hanging out of a car window.  I'm sure she'll go far in life.

On the drive home I realized that the grocery store incident wasn't the first time over the last few months that I had seen someone intentionally do something mean to another person.  After thinking about it for a few minutes I had remembered at least twenty instances of this, but I could only remember once when someone had done something kind for someone just because they though it would be a nice thing to do.  I remembered back to when I was young and it seemed like people back then would take every opportunity available to help others, whether it was just a mundane task or something that was very urgently needed.

So I guess my question would be "When did we become a mean country?"  Was it something that happened over a long period of time or is this something new?  Today people seem to generally be slightly depressed, tragically apathetic, and noticeably anxious.  Yesterday I had a family member tell me that she just doesn't want to do the holiday season this year.  My wife and I had the same discussion a few days ago.  We're not excited about it either and we'd be just as happy skipping ahead to January.

The part that really concerns me, though, is the overt meanness we see every day.  It's like being mean to another person is now considered ok.  Our country didn't use to behave this way.  Now it's apparently just "normal" behavior.  I'm not sure what has caused this.  Maybe it's the sensory overload most of us suffer as a result of technology making constant interaction with anyone and everyone seemingly mandatory.  Maybe it's anxiety over what the incoming Trump administration will dish out to (or onto) us over the next four years.  Maybe it's uncertainty that the founding principles of our country are under attack and democracy may not even survive.  Maybe it's just too many things coming at us at once and we just need a break from it all so we can catch our breath and find our place again.  

At any rate, I've decided to stop being mostly indifferent and try to be kind.  Very kind.  Still being kind in the face of adversity is going to be very difficult, but I'm going to do it and I hope you will, too.

Why We Should Not Go To Mars

Recently I've seen some press about how the US will eventually colonize Mars.  We've sent some unmanned probes to Mars and they continue to make their way around the planet and send back interesting data that is certainly helping us learn more about what's going on there and what may have happened in the past.  Landing a probe on Mars and collecting information is a very cool achievement, but what is our next step and is there really a next logical step for us?  We're thinking about sending some people up there to colonize the planet.  

After thinking about this for awhile, I think colonizing Mars is a big mistake.  Sure, it would be a monumental achievement in terms of technology and exploration and we would surely learn much from the process of doing it, but what would it really get us in the long run?   

You can get on Netflix and watch that movie with Matt Damon and see what he went through trying to live there for a number of months until someone could show up and rescue him.  Really, who wants to grow potatoes in freeze-dried human excrement and survive on it?  I don't.  I'm not super excited about potatoes in the first place, and the thought of growing them in freeze-dried human crap and then eating them to survive isn't all that appealing to me.  I’d rather stay on Earth and make a nice pepper steak or some lasagna.

Think about it for a minute.  Would you really want to get on some kind of space ship and travel 5-10 months just to live somewhere as inhospitable as Mars?  And even if we did it, hasn't anyone read "The Martian Chronicles?"  That's some crazy shit.  And even if that's totally wrong (and it probably is), it is a warning that life on Mars could be something totally different than what we were expecting.  It would really suck to spend many months in some space ship and then end up in some desolate place that looks like Oklahoma except without the 7-Elevens.

Another reason I don’t think we should go is the cost.  Sure, we’re all curious about what we’d find there and it would be cool to check it out, but is satisfying that curiosity really worth billions and billions of dollars?  The new administration taking power in about a month is talking about cutting programs like Medicare and Social Security because they’re too expensive.  They’re calling them “entitlements” and categorizing them as discretionary spending.  Personally, I think the Social Security and Medicare deductions from all my paychecks for the last 45 years didn’t feel very discretionary.  I'd like to get it back someday as promised.  It seems to me like the money they plan to spend on exploring Mars could be better used to to meet some of the government’s existing obligations.  People will have no faith in a government that lies to them.

So let’s say we come up with a good reason to colonize Mars.  Using our current space travel technology, it takes between 5 and 10 months to get to Mars.  The time varies based on planetary alignment.  If we decided to colonize mars we would need to send a bunch of people there, say 20 or 30 to start and then send more on a regular basis.  You can’t send 30 people to Mars and then expect them to immediately start pumping out enough babies to colonize the planet.  We don’t currently have a space vehicle with enough space inside for 20 to 30 people.  And if we built one then we would have to build some kind of huge rocket system to get it into space.  Americans are good at building big things, but this thing would probably be a little too big even for us.  A better option would be to build it in space by sending up prefabricated sections and then assembling them while the whole thing is orbiting the Earth.  If they go this route I hope they don’t let Ikea get involved or it will take forever and we’re sure to have a lot of parts left over.

So once this monster was assembled and tested, we would need to start sending people up in small groups to get all the seats filled.  We would also need to send up enough fuel to power this thing for 5 to 10 months.  And food and supplies for everyone.  In a best case scenario it would take several years to do this.  But in our country we can’t just get something done.  It has to be done by committee.  People would be arguing over every minute detail for years, maybe even a whole generation.  It would take so long to get all the bickering done that, while waiting for everything to be sorted out, some of the colonists would certainly die of old age, boredom, or frustration and have to be replaced.

The whole scenario is not very practical right now.  Colonizing a new planet sure sounds sexy, but there are other things that are more urgent right now:  Dealing with the constitutional challenges we’re likely to face over the next 4 years, global warming, feeding and sheltering the homeless, basic human rights, and just finding a way for humans to all live together on the same planet without killing each other.  all these things will take a lot of money.  Maybe we should get this planet’s problems sorted out before we start working on ruining another one.

Picking Up a Prescription

 I'm 64 years old and in relatively good health, but I take several medications for chronic conditions.  Hereditary high blood pressure, high cholesterol, blood sugar management, etc.  Before you gasp and say that it really sounds like I'm a train wreck, let me just say that our health in the latter part of our lives is highly dependent on our lifestyle choices earlier in life and also by how our bodies handle the normal aging process.  I'm a former smoker and was at one point a consistent heavy drinker.

As I've gotten older, I've paid the price for some of those choices, but I'm very lucky in that I haven't paid a super high price for making them.  For that I'm grateful every day now.  I really don't deserve to be in good health at age 64.  Luckily I can function relatively normally on a day to day basis as long as I take my maintenance medications as instructed and don't do anything really stupid.  Some of my friends have not been so lucky.  Many are now deceased and others struggle to just get through every day.  I am thankful for what I have.

This post is about a trip I recently made to the pharmacy to pick up refills of the aforementioned maintenance medications.  My lovely wife, Tanya, said she also had some prescriptions ready to be picked up and asked me if I could get hers while I was there.  She is a little younger than me, although she tells our friends that she is much, much younger.  I won't go there in this post.

I got to the pharmacy and decided to just go to the drive-up window.  Our pharmacy is in a very busy grocery store and I didn't want to deal with the lunch hour crowd.  As luck would have it, there was no line at the drive-up window.  The Pharmacy Tech greeted me pleasantly as soon as I drove up.  They are always very friendly, but many times you get a Tech who would really rather be somewhere else and they certainly let you know it.

I was lucky enough to get one of the more enthusiastic ones and I asked for the prescriptions for Jeff and Tanya.  I used fake names, addresses, and birth dates in this post for obvious reasons, but I gave him the real ones.  You get the idea.  This was the dialog:

"Hi, I'd like to pick up the prescriptions for Jeff and Tanya Smith."

He looked us up on his computer and said "Ok, great.  I'll be right back with them" and disappeared back into the recesses of the pharmacy.  When he came back he opened up some plastic bags with all our drugs and eventually asked:

"What is your last name?"

I had just given it to him and he had just used it to find our prescriptions, but I gave it to him again anyway.  He nodded and sent out a signature sheet in the security drawer.  I signed it and returned it to the drawer.  Once the sheet was safely back in his hands he said:

"Can you verify your address?" 

So I gave him my address.  

"999 Main Street, Omaha, Nebraska, 68888."

He immediately asked for my birthday so I gave him that, too.  He then said:

"What is your address?"

I said "It's still 999 Main Street, Omaha, Nebraska 68888."  He looked at his computer and promptly asked me for my driver's license.  I put it in the security drawer and after retrieving it he briefly scanned it and asked for my birthday again.

"5/5/55" 

He looked at the computer again for a minute and then asked:

"How many prescriptions are you picking up and what are they?"

"I don't know.  The automated system just sent me a text and said I had prescriptions ready so I'm here to pick them up, whatever they are."

He nodded and returned my driver's license in the drawer.  A line of cars behind me had formed and it was growing by the minute.  He dropped my prescriptions into a small paper pharmacy bag and then asked:

"Who is the other person you're picking up for?"

"Tanya Smith, but you already know that since you went back into the pharmacy and grabbed her prescriptions already."

Normally I would be quite angry by now and probably would have told this guy to get his shit together and give me our damned prescriptions, but this time it was just too comical for anger and nasty words.  He said:

"Please verify her address."

"The same as mine.  999 Main Street, Omaha, 68888."  This time I left out the state, so he asked:

"What state?"

"Nebraska.  We are married and we live at the same address.  In the same house.  we share everything except prescriptions.  She has her own for her particular health requirements.  We are two different people.  Living at the same address.  In Nebraska."

"Please verify her birthdate."

"4/4/44."

"Ok."

He looked at the computer for a long time and then said:

"Please verify her address."

" This is getting ridiculous.  Please give me the prescriptions and tell me how much they are."

"I need to see her driver's license."

"I don't have her driver's license.  She drove to work and she needed to keep it with her."

"What's the name of her insurance company?"

"The same as mine.  United Insurance."

"I need to verify her insurance card." And he opened the security drawer again.

"I don't have her insurance card, but it's the same as mine.  Both our names are on both cards."

He apparently didn't want to deal with my insurance card and I was getting a little testy, so he said:

"$14.23. We might be able to do better than that with GoodRX instead of your insurance.  Do you want me to run it through GoodRX and see if it comes up with a better price?"

By this time I was ready to flip this guy $1000 cash plus the titles to our camper and one of the cars, and also throw in an all inclusive week in Cancun just to give me my drugs and let me leave.  

"No thanks.  $14.23 is fine.

I put my debit card in the drawer and sent it back.  He printed some receipts and drug information and stuffed the drugs into the small bag, carefully stapled it shut with several staples, and then sent it out in the drawer.  I immediately grabbed it, fearing that he might yank it back and demand a hair follicle in order to confirm my identity through DNA analysis.  By this time the line of cars behind me was getting very long and several of them were honking their horns.

"Your card is in the bag."

I thanked him for his hard work and diligence and then drove out of the pickup lane. It had taken almost 20 minutes to pick up our prescriptions.  The exit lane from the drive-up ended in the supermarket's loading dock area.  I pulled over to get my card from the paper bag and return it to my wallet.  One time in the past I didn't do this and ended up at the grocery store checkout lane with no way to pay for my groceries because my card was sitting in a prescription bag on our kitchen counter.  

I fought my way into the bag that was apparently sealed well enough to withstand a nuclear blast and carefully removed about 30 pages of drug interaction information.  No card.  He still had my card.

Rather than wait in what was now a 90 minute line of cars back at the pharmacy drive-up window, I parked the car and went inside to the pharmacy counter and asked them to retrieve my card.  They asked my name only once and then they were able to retrieve my card in a few minutes.  

You should know that most trips to this pharmacy are quick and uneventful.  The only time I have ever had a problem with them is once when I got a text saying I had a prescription ready for pickup.  I stopped by on my lunch hour thinking it was just one of my automatic refills I get all the time.  When I was picking it up and got to the payment part they said it would be $224.50 because my insurance didn't cover it.  It was someone else's prescription for Viagra that the pharmacy had filled and put on my account.  I guess if the other guy did that on purpose expecting a big discount then the joke's on him.  My insurance apparently doesn't cover Viagra.

Corporate Speak -- A Beginner's Guide

Have you ever been in a meeting or conference call and afterwards you ask yourself "What the fuck was that all about?"  I have.  I've worked in several large and very large organizations where we had a lot of meetings and conference calls.  Sometimes there were so many that they started before 8AM and were scheduled one after another until the end of the day.  We might get a few minutes along the way for a bio break, but that's about it for the day's non-meeting time.  At the end of the day I would look back and realize that the only time when I didn't have to be "on my game' was when I was standing at a urinal.  And that wasn't even guaranteed.  About half the time someone else from the same meeting would be standing at the next urinal wanting to discuss something that happened at the meeting that just ended.  On those days I relished the 20 minute commute home in complete solitude.  Unless my cell phone rang.  You get the picture.

In my first very large organization I began to notice that the higher ranking managers and directors used a terminology that I had never heard before.  I started to call it "corporate speak"  and I learned quickly that if I was going to be successful in that organization I had better become fluent in it immediately.  So I did.

The first term I encountered was "push back," which means to offer resistance or voice disagreement with something another person had said or something that they had done.  I immediately started using that term and right away it caused me to be respected and sometimes feared in meetings.  I became good at pushing back, even if there was no real reason to do so.  So far, so good.

The next term I learned was "circle back," which means to check up on something later or follow up on the subject currently being discussed.  It made others think that, if they agreed to do something, I would be checking later to make sure they actually did it and there would be dire consequences if they decided not to.  They (rightfully) decided that I would probably forget about it.  Once you say you're going to "circle back" on something you have to make sure you actually do it.  I started to circle back on everything.  In retrospect, it probably made me a better manager and greatly increased my effectiveness for the most part.

The next one was "reach out."  This one means that you are going to contact someone.  During a meeting or call you would say "I'll reach out to him."  There were many ways to "reach out."  You could call the person, send them an email, send a text message, or simply walk into their office and speak with them face-to-face.  A couple of times when the subject was important enough I even reached out by getting on a plane, flying to their location, and storming into their office to have the necessary discussion.  After such a trip I would "circle back" to make sure they had completed the instructions I had mercilessly imparted to them.

Another great one was "that is like herding cats."  This was used to describe a task that would be very difficult due to it's complexity or the fact that it would require work from a large number of resources.  Resources, by the way, are people.  You assign resources to a project.  You don't assign people to a project.  Resources, not people.  If you've ever had a cat, you know that it's next to impossible to get cats to do anything they don't want to do.  If you have several cats then you might as well just give up.  It isn't going to happen.  Sometimes during project meeting a manager or director would ask a project manager for the reason their project was behind schedule.  Their response was usually "This project has so many moving parts it's like herding cats."  This usually resulted in the project sponsor assigning one or two directors to join the project and apply a "scorched earth" policy to get it back on track.  That usually meant that people were going to be fired and whole careers were going to be irreparably damaged.

Another good one was "Let's eat that elephant one bite at a time."  This one is used to describe a very large project that seems overwhelming due to the large amount of work needed to complete it successfully.  Essentially it means "Let's break up all that work into smaller, more manageable chunks and address them one at a time."

One of the really good ones was "I'll get my team together for a team building exercise."  This one was usually heard when a manager or director was being chastised publicly for his team's poor performance on something.  You would think that a team building exercise would involve getting the team together and conducting activities that help them appreciate each other's work and to develop a consensus on how the team is going to work together more effectively.  In some companies it means that management would take the team out for dinner and drinks at a nice restaurant and let them have some casual time together.  In others it means putting the team up at a local hotel and having a series of uplifting meetings to help everyone bond with each other and encourage the team's cohesiveness and mutual support.  But where I worked it meant "I'll schedule a mandatory team meeting where I will get everyone in the same room and kick their asses like never before to get them to work harder."  

Another one is "I'm building a high performance team and it takes time."  This one actually means "I'm having a hell of a hard time finding employees who are qualified to do the job and actually want to work.  Be patient and it will eventually happen."  Managers could usually get away with this only once or twice before being fired or demoted.

The next one is one I'm currently experiencing on my job.  About a year ago my Team Lead started added the word "right" to almost every sentence.  "We're going to look into this, right? When we find a solution we'll implement it, right? The first step is assessing what we already have, right? Then we'll be in a position to move ahead, right? Afterwards we'll be in a position to circle back and verify everything, right?"  Incidentally, the sentences in quotes are actually real sentences recorded during a meeting.  I'm not kidding.  Drives me absolutely nuts, right?

The absolute crown jewel that I've encountered is something called Model-Netics.  The organization where I worked decided that we could be more effective if we were better communicators.  This is not an unreasonable statement.  One part of communicating effectively is to convey a concept to others using a common lexicon.  The English we've learned since birth is apparently not good enough.  They contracted with a company who designed a library of over 150 small stick  figures, each representing a concept that we might want to communicate to others within our organization during our day-to-day work.  As an example, one of them was a stick figure doing something and this figure was the symbol for "information hoarder."  An information hoarder is someone who only shares a very small part of what they know about something, feeling that they were more valuable to the company if they are the only one who knows certain information.  Just about every organization has one or two of these.  

My company bought this program for the entire IT Department of over 300 employees.  It wasn't cheap.  I looked up the current price per employee and it currently starts at $995 and goes up depending on how the system is delivered and probably a host of other factors.  My company designated a dozen or so SMEs (Subject Matter Experts) to train the rest of us.  We had about 6 hours per week of training time scheduled for classroom instruction.  They were very serious about it.  There were quizzes.  There were tests we had to pass and not completing the training or not passing the tests were going to be reflected in the annual "calibration" meetings where raises and employee longevity were determined.

After a short time, I started to hear Model-Netics phrases being used in meetings almost on a daily basis.  People had learned all the models, but no one really understood how to use them to communicate more effectively with each other.  The Vice President who signed the purchase order declared the program a resounding success, but all it really succeeded in doing was to reinforce his grip on the organization and thoroughly convince the employees that they were being gaslighted by their employer.  By the time I left the organization shortly after Model-Netics, only a few people were using the new Model-Netics terms and the majority of us still had no idea what they were actually trying to say.

So, after years of listening to corporate speak I can confidently say that if you use it, then it may help your career advance to a point, but you're probably not going to endear yourself to your fellow employees.  Most people can only listen to it for so long before tuning it out entirely.  I tuned it out about almost 15 years ago and I haven't looked back.  You might go a long way in your organization if you "reach out" and "circle back" often and you demonstrate an above average success rate at "herding cats," but you still have to look at yourself in the mirror every day and ask "Am I really that superficial and is this who I really want to be?"  Whatever your decision, best of luck to you.

Yes Chef, No Chef

 Have you watched "The Bear" on TV yet?  I won't spoil all the fun for you if you haven't, but it's about a world-class up and coming chef whose family owns a fast paced roast beef place in Chicago.  The family member who is the head guy at their restaurant dies and the up and coming chef returns to run the family business.  Without divulging too much detail, the plot is about the drama caused by the changes he makes to the restaurant to improve food quality and make it a super successful upscale business.

The reason I bring this up is that during the course of two seasons you hear the phrase "Yes Chef" about a million times.  Every person in that kitchen addresses everyone else as "Chef."  The cooks.  The dishwasher.  Everyone.  In fact, the actual Executive Chef of the restaurant addresses the Maitre'd as "Chef."

This was perplexing to me.  In my restaurant career, the only person addressed as Chef was the actual Executive Chef or maybe a particularly talented Sous Chef.  Except for those two people, we used real names to speak to each other.  After I thought about this for a bit I realized that the practice of calling anyone and everyone "Chef" was prevalent on most of the Food Channel's so-called "reality" shows about kitchen life.  Before I retired from foodservice I was also hearing that more and more from the younger men/women who were just starting out in the industry.  I never thought too much about it because by that point in my career I was usually the Executive Chef of the restaurant or club and that's how you address the person holding that position.  I remember that the first time I heard a Sous Chef call one of the prep cooks "Chef" it struck me as odd, but I didn't think it was worth discussing so I just forgot about it.

Before I get too far down the "Yes Chef, No Chef" rabbit hole, you should know that I started working in kitchens in the 1970's and things were very different back then.  In a traditional kitchen there is one Executive Chef, one or more Sous Chefs, and maybe a Chef de Cuisine, a Pastry Chef, and sometimes a Banquet Chef.  Then there are line cooks, pantry cooks, prep cooks, and maybe some other guys who do specific things and inhabit the lower rungs of the kitchen hierarchy just above the dishwashers.

The Executive Chef is the undisputed king/queen of the kitchen.  He/she is ultimately responsible for every plate of food that goes out of the kitchen, food purchasing, food cost management, food preparation and quality control, hiring and firing, menu design and implementation, labor cost, sanitation, and basically anything else even remotely related to kitchen operations.  He/she is highly respected and usually feared to some extent because of the exceptional skill level required to do all these things better than anyone else.  Some of these duties are usually delegated to Sous Chefs.  

Some Executive Chefs never spend a single day in the kitchen due to the difficulty of juggling all of their duties.  Others, like myself, believe that working alongside the other kitchen employees every single day is absolutely essential to building a high performance team that takes pride in their product.  Those of us who actually prepare food handle our administrative duties before the rest of the kitchen staff arrives for work or after they've left when their shifts are over.  I learned this from an IT Director who once told me "Never ask your employees to do something you wouldn't do yourself."  I think this philosophy works.  Only once have I ever had a kitchen employee try to kill me. 

In a large kitchen the Chef de Cuisine position falls right below the Executive Chef.  The Chef de Cuisine handles much of the administrative duties of the kitchen, menu development, vendor relations, and many operational functions.  Chef de Cuisine roughly translates to "Head Chef."  The Executive Chef may oversee multiple kitchens/locations.  The Chef de Cuisine oversees one location and reports to the Executive Chef.  He/she may or may not cook very much on a daily basis.

The Sous Chefs occupy the next rung of the ladder.  They are responsible for the daily food preparation and service.  You will typically find them in the kitchen almost all the time.  They report to the Chef de Cuisine.  

There are several more layers of the kitchen hierarchy, but these are the top levels.  You might wonder why there are so many people required to serve a restaurant menu.  It seems like a lot of people just to turn out some nice food and you would be right to wonder this.  The structure I described above is a traditional kitchen hierarchy.  In reality, most restaurants just have an Executive Chef, one or two Sous Chefs, and a bunch of line cooks.  Smaller places will just have a head cook and a few line cooks.  You don't need an Executive Chef to serve burgers and fried pork tenderloin sandwiches.

So back to "Yes Chef, No Chef."  In all my years in kitchens, until recently I had never heard kitchen employees say "Yes Chef" when speaking to each other in a real working kitchen except then they were addressing the Executive Chef or maybe a Sous Chef.  This was true in every kitchen I have worked in. From TGI Friday's all the way through to exclusive country clubs and Michelin-starred establishments.

I can only surmise that this phenomenon was manufactured by Food Network TV shows for entertainment purposes.  Unfortunately, there are a lot of younger culinarians who grew up watching Gordon Ramsay degrading everyone he meets or some kind of cooking competition packed with all kinds of drama and suspense around cooking a turnip in less than an hour.  The young people who watched those shows enter the foodservice industry thinking that it's just non-stop drama and excitement.  Now you hear "Yes Chef, No Chef" in professional kitchens.  Everyone thinks these TV shows are what working in a restaurant is really like and they go to culinary school expecting to dive head first into what they saw on TV once they graduate because they think that's what it will be like for them.

Let me tell you: It isn't.  It's fucking hard work and you have to work your ass off doing boring, unglamorous things for a long time in order to make just enough money to feed your family.  At the end of the day we don't sit around in a plush lounge drinking expensive wine and discussing our feelings.  It just doesn't happen that way.  I'll save the Food Network rant for another post, but by now you probably know how I feel about it.  Interesting entertainment, but it's caused a lot of people to embark on foodservice careers for the wrong reasons and ultimately fail at them.

So let's stop with the "Yes Chef, No Chef" for a minute and use our real names. And let's stop glamorizing something that really isn't that glamorous.  Ok?

40 Years After 1984

 As we close out the last few weeks of 2024 I've been thinking about 1984, the dystopian novel and cautionary tale written by George Orwell in 1949.  It talks about the dangers of mass surveillance, totalitarianism, and repression of individuality in our society.  If you haven't read it then you should get a copy and read it.  You might want to locate a copy soon as it will probably end up on a "banned books" list sometime in the next year due to the actions of the incoming administration.

I remember reading 1984 in a literature class in middle school.  Everyone in the class liked the book, but we had a sense of security, thinking that our country's democratic principals and our system of checks and balances would keep our future safe from the horrible 1984 scenario.  To us, 1984 was just an amusing curiosity and the chances of mass surveillance, unchecked repression, and totalitarianism ever actually becoming our collective reality were very small.  When the year 1984 actually arrived, the country gave itself a pat on the back, secure in the belief that George Orwell was wrong.  His book was considered an example of exceptional literature, but thankfully hadn't turned out to be historically accurate.

Over the next 20 years I heard many references to 1984.  These references were usually in response to a company's policy of limiting its employees' ability to do things that would, in the opinion of the company's leadership, harm the company or give people outside of the company a bad impression of the organization or it's leaders.  We usually just laughed them off, but occasionally they felt a little too much like what was described in Orwell's book.  

At one company where I worked they implemented software that mainly monitored network devices and generated alerts when a device became non-functional.  The name of this system was "Big Brother," a clear nod to 1984's phrase "Big Brother is Watching You."  

One of the capabilities of this software was that it could capture network traffic from a user's computer, save it, and later decode it so that it could be reviewed by Human Resources.  They requested this a few times, but we made sure to provide so much data to them each time that it would take a team of 10 dedicated people at least two lifetimes to review.  Everyone was used to URL filtering and reporting, but this was different.  After all, it was understandable that a company doesn't want to pay someone to hide out in their office and troll the internet for porn all day.

Those of us responsible for the care and feeding of this monster were older and had experienced the internet at the beginning when it was a learning and collaboration tool for academics and scholars rather than the money-making cesspool it is today.  In those early days you could be confident that the content you found there was considered, at least by it's creator, to be accurate.  Today you can't believe hardly anything you find on the internet is actually true.  Most of it was created to get you to do something that you wouldn't otherwise want to do.  It's mostly just marketing something, whether that's a product you order (and may or may not ever receive), a subscription to some publication of little or no value, or the promise that if you make a donation then the world will be a much better place for it.  I know that's a cynical view, but I believe it's pretty accurate.  As a side note, I'm not going to ask you to buy anything, subscribe to anything, or donate to anything.  You can go figure out how to make the world a better place on your own.  You don't need me for that.

Ok, back to 1984.  The incoming Trump administration has a roadmap for what they perceive to be their "roadmap for governing."  It's called Project 2025.  Trump has claimed that he doesn't know anything about it, but he's already packing his cabinet with Project 2025 authors.  I'd like to go through all 900+ pages with you, but that would be ridiculous so I just want to sum up a few points and if you're curious about what will shape the next 4 years of your life (and likely much longer afterwards) you can go read it for yourself.

First, I want to admit that I haven't read through the whole thing myself.  I've read several sections and that was enough to make me terrified of what it contains.  I'll just tell you about one section here.  It's the section regarding the Federal Communications Commission (FCC).  You might think the FCC only deals with radio and TV, but it does much more.  One of those things is that it has the power to regulate the internet transmission of data.  

Currently, the content allowed in internet transmission of data is regulated by the carriers and platforms.  An example of a carrier would be Verizon or Unite Networks.  An example of a platform would be Meta (Facebook), X, ABC News, and the countless other news platforms and social media apps.  The platforms are responsible for content moderation, which means they are controlling what users are allowed to post on the different platforms.  For example, you would get banned pretty quickly on Facebook by posting hate speech directed toward a minority, minors performing sex acts, etc.  You get the picture.  Generally bad stuff.  The platforms are responsible for deciding what permissible content means and they can act to prevent it or to permit it up to a point.

Project 2025 wants to save us all from our content being censored by the platforms and carriers.  In their opinion, Facebook not allowing us to post negative remarks toward a group or an individual is an infringement on our First Amendment right to free speech.  And not just for Facebook.  It is for all social media platforms, internet carriers, and broadcast media.  Project 2025 wants to save us from this horrible scenario by placing responsibility for content moderation squarely in the hands of the government.  They will decide what is allowed and what is prohibited.  On the surface it may sound like it will level the playing field and make social media and other platforms safer places, but let's really think about it for a minute.

Do you really want a bunch of Washington bureaucrats deciding what news you're allowed to see and what is blocked from your view?  Would you trust them to decide what's important to you?  Are you ready for social media platforms to be banned in the US because they won't submit to the Trump administration's demands to control their content?  How will you communicate with friends overseas?  If other countries don't agree to to US government content moderation on some scale then messaging to and from the US (email, social media, web) could be blocked entirely for those countries.  

Basically, you'd be cut off from anything the government doesn't want you to see.  Does this scenario sound familiar?  To me it sounds like 1984.  And it sounds like Germany in the 1930's.  As Hitler rose to power the first thing he did was control the media and the flow of information.  Then he created an "us and them" scenario in which he blamed the Jews for everything he perceived to be wrong with Germany.  According to Trump, our country's problems are caused by immigrants.  Us and Them.

There are many more jewels like this in Project 2025.  Every section is presented in terms of their benefits to the country, but if you take the time to really think about it then you'll find that, in actuality, it was developed to concentrate power in the hands of a few people and remove the checks and balances that keep them from doing bad things to us for their own gain.  It implements the same environment as Germany had in the 1930's and places Donald Trump, a convicted felon and lifetime con man, in a position of unchecked power.

I guess you can decide if that scenario is ok with you, but for me it's not.  

 

The Most Powerful Potato Salad in the World

I had the craziest dream last night.  It was a restless night and I don't really feel rested at all this morning.  We went to bed at our normal time of about 11:00PM.  For some reason I woke up at 1:10AM craving some potato salad.  After a few minutes of thinking about it I fell into what I thought was a very light sleep and the adventure got started. 

It began with Tanya and I spending every waking moment for two weeks in our tiny  kitchen trying to develop a really good recipe for potato salad.  No jobs, no responsibilities, no bills to pay.  Just potato salad.  We tried countless combinations of ingredients.  We laughed. We bickered. We tripped over our calico cat.  We thought about long passed relatives.  We contemplated man's purpose for existence and speculated about mankind's ultimate and certain demise.  We reminisced about our childhoods, mistakes we had made in life, and all the things that make up two lives well-lived.  

Eventually we hit the target and came up with a recipe for the best potato salad either of us had ever tasted.  Jackpot.  We quickly recorded our precious recipe on a small scrap of paper.  After two full weeks we were done with our masterpiece.

We were having a close friend over for dinner the following Friday and decided to grill out some kind of meat so we could serve our fabulous creation as a side dish.  The anticipation grew every day as we got closer and closer to Friday.  It felt like you feel when you special order a brand new car and the dealer tells you it will be ready to pick up in a few days.  There was electricity in the air.  The dog and both cats knew something big was about to happen.  They could feel it through their special senses that humans do not possess.

We carefully gathered our ingredients during the week.  Potatoes and Duke's mayo from Kroger, onions from Trader Joe's, cage free eggs from Hy-Vee.  It was like we were putting together an epic symphony of flavor.  On Thursday we brought it all together and produced about two pounds of our glorious masterpiece.  The stage was set.

Our friend arrived a few minutes early and, after a couple of cocktails, we grilled some burgers and set the table.  Our guest took one bite of the potato salad and he just stopped moving altogether and then just sat there motionless for an extraordinarily long time, letting his eyes roll well back into his head.  After what seemed like an eternity, he put down his fork and proclaimed that he had just eaten a bite of the best potato salad of all time.  We were all ecstatic and the three of us finished the remaining potato salad without even touching our cheeseburgers.

At this point we knew we had a winner.  Word of our incredible other-worldly potato salad spread rapidly.  Within a few days we had dozens of requests for the recipe.  After some careful consideration we decided not to share our miraculous formula.  Neither of us had robust 401k accounts or government pensions that would actually allow us to retire and live comfortably, so we decided that we might want to monetize our discovery sometime in the future.

Here's where the dream got weird.  When I was the Executive Chef at a fine dining restaurant in Omaha, I briefly employed a very talented cook.  He left after a short time to start his own restaurant and he has since become very successful.  We don't keep in touch regularly because he is a very, very busy man and running a restaurant takes up about 200% of your time.  In my dream he showed up at our door one day and asked for our recipe.  When we politely declined he asked if we would be willing to just make large quantities of our potato salad for him each week so he could sell it in his restaurant.  We also politely declined this request.

Over the next month we were contacted by many other restaurants, cookbook publishers, magazines, and internet influencers who all wanted the recipe.  We did not relent.  To keep the recipe secret we even hid the scrap of paper containing the recipe on page 43 of a Southern Living cookbook.

Then one day the doorbell rang.  Once the dog was confined to her kennel we opened the door only to find Elon Musk standing on our porch.  Although both of us regard Elon Musk as a loudmouth windbag who sucks the very soul out of everyone who crosses his path, he made a very compelling offer for signing over the recipe to him.  When we asked him what he planned to do with it, he said he wanted to fill a 55 gallon drum with really good potato salad and shoot it into space.  We declined, knowing that one day there would be a very real risk that some poor person out watering his or her garden could be killed or maimed by being hit with 300 pounds of potato salad falling from the heavens at supersonic speeds.  He stood on our porch and wailed for some time, eventually climbing into a ridiculous looking CyberTruck and speeding away, all the while shaking his fist angrily at us.  If this sounds impossible to you then please remember that this was just a dream.  The mind can be a terrible thing.

Some time later we received a very official-looking certified letter in the mail.  At first we were a little afraid to open it, but eventually we decided to see what it contained.  It was from Donald Trump.  He was demanding that we turn over the recipe to him immediately, stating (incorrectly, as always) that it was a matter of national security and that he was willing to go to extreme measures in order to obtain it.  After some thought, we decided to ignore the letter as we do for anything originating from Donald Trump.  Shortly thereafter we received a more aggressively worded letter, again demanding that we turn over the recipe.  We decided to ignore that one too.

Ignoring the letter turned out to be a mistake.  We thought that Trump's attention would soon turn to deporting anyone who wasn't old and white or possibly to stripping basic human rights away from all women and people of color.  There are still parts of the USA where the air and water isn't quite fully polluted yet, so we reasoned that decimating Earth's resources and a good part of it's population would keep him pretty busy when he wasn't playing golf at the taxpayers' expense and ultimately he would forget about the recipe.  We were wrong again.  Elon Musk really wanted our recipe and he had Trump's ear, so he kept it fresh in the very front of that feeble little adolescent mind.  

Very early one morning there was a loud knock at the door.  It was about a dozen fully geared-up members of the Nebraska National Guard and the Trump puppet Republican Governor of Nebraska.  They demanded that we hand over the recipe.  Again, we declined and both of us were promptly arrested and ushered into two waiting Humvees.

That's where the dream ended for now.  I've been contemplating whether the events that took place in my dream could actually occur and at this point I think it's entirely possible.  After all, we just elected a person who was arguably the worst President in America's history to yet another term.  Hispanic males just overwhelmingly voted for a candidate who has pledged to deport as many Hispanics as humanly possible.  A large percentage of women just voted for a convicted sex offender who has said he would favor limits on birth control and is more than willing to strip them of any rights to their own bodies.  Strange times indeed.

I hope to be able to go back to that dream again tonight and see what happened.  Sometimes I can do this if I think about the dream a lot right afterwards.  Believe me, I've been thinking about this one quite a bit today.