2012 in review

Obviously this is the point where you think, "holy cow, where has the year gone!" Well in my case, straight in the crapper*.  And yet, it ended on such a hopeful and uplifting note, it made everything else worthwhile.

Of course, if you're reading this on my blog you can already see what happened to me throughout the year, and so it hardly seems worthwhile to summarize it. However, I may be able to distill its effects on me.

The most painful event, of course, was losing my aunt and uncle in May and June respectively. I have not recovered from that, and find myself avoiding people as a way of avoiding dealing with that. However, as I'm going to be visiting my family in 3 weeks, I won't be able to avoid it much longer. I am hoping my cousin will get her act together and I can go back to spread their ashes soon.

Much of 2012 was spent making up for my lack of dating in my youth. I didn't find any lovers, but I did pick up 5 or 6 friends along the way.

Spiritually, I continued to be impressed by, and drawn further into, Judaism. After accidentally volunteering for security duty in March, I seem to spend more time outside the synagogue than in, but ironically this makes it easier to get to know other members, which in turn makes me feel more like part of the community. I've also read several books and went to a Jewish conference, which was brilliantly held over Christmas!

My job has roller-coastered between having very little to do and having an insane amount to do, but at least for most of it I could work from home, or very near to home. That ended last month when I was asked to work in Runcorn four days a week for the next 6-12 months! If you look up Runcorn on a map, you'll see it's halfway between Manchester and Liverpool. What the map won't show you is that there is *nothing* around it! A couple of chain hotels, a couple of dodgy restaurants, and at least 40 minutes in any direction to find anything interesting. When I get back from California I think there will be some negotiation on how many days I need to be up there, whether or not I can get a corporate apartment rather than stay at hotels, or whether I need to start looking for a new job.

So that's 2012 in a nutshell. I really don't know what to expect from 2013, but I can tell you what I'm hoping for. :-)
*For the record, early toilets were already referred to as "crappers" before the unfortunately-named Thomas Crapper began manufacturing them.

Inquire vs Enquire

I've never been sure of the correct usage of 'enquire' so I finally looked it up...and it turns out it's only relevant in Britain, as "enquire" is rarely used in American English.

According to the Oxford dictionary:

The traditional distinction...is that enquire is used for general senses of 'ask' while inquire is reserved for uses meaning 'make a formal investigation'. In all senses inquire and inquiry are the more usual forms in US English, whereas enquire and enquiry are chiefly restricted to British English.

I think "chiefly" is also chiefly British...

Happy Hanukkah

The bible defines five holidays: rosh hashana, yom kippur, pesach (passover), shavuot, and sukkot. So where did hanukkah come from?

According to the Bible, when the Jews settled in Canaan (now Israel) the first task was to build a temple to hold the Ark of the Covenant (of Indiana Jones fame), and lit an "eternal flame" that was never extinguished. After David (of Goliath fame) united Israel (Judea), his son Solomon (of wisdom fame) built the second Temple.

In 175 BCE, Judea was under the control of Syria but had religious freedom.  Unfortunately it was also involved in a civil war between the Hellenizing Jews, who wanted to be like the Greeks, and the Ptolemaic Jews, who wanted to be like the Egyptians.  The Hellenizing Jews were expelled, so they invited the king of Syria to intervene.  Unfortunately the king went a little further than expected, captured Jerusalem, outlawed Judaism, ordered an altar to Zeus be erected in the Temple and called for pigs to be sacrificed there.

The Jews, who were never good subjects (just ask the Pharaoh), revolted.  Mattityahu, a high priest, and his five sons led a rebellion which took two years but was ultimately successful.  Judah Maccabee ('Judah the hammer') ordered the Temple to be cleansed, a new altar built, and the eternal light to be lit.  However, they found only enough consecrated oil to last one day, and it would take eight days to press new oil.  Miraculously, the oil lasted eight days, and this 8-day period is celebrated as Hanukkah.

However, as my rabbi pointed out, the real miracle was that a tiny little country was able to win its freedom against one of the greatest empires in history, and by comparison celebrating oil burning for eight days just seems ridiculous.

That said, a 'festival of lights' during the winter is common to many cultures, and the 'hannukiah' (the 9-branched candelabra) is supposed to be displayed in a front window to reinforce the Jewish 'differenceness' that has kept the culture alive for over four millennia.

Independence lasted until 63BCE, when the Romans conquered Israel.  The Jews rebelled against them three times.  In the first (66-70CE), a group of Jews holed up in Masada, on a mountain, for two years while the Romans laid siege and finally built a massive earthworks to breech the walls.  (The Jews, known as Zealots, killed themselves rather than be captured.)  In retaliation, the Romans destroyed the second Temple; the remains still stand as the Western Wall.

In the third rebellion (132–136 CE), Simon Bar Kokhba established an independent state of Israel for two years, but the Romans sent six legions (30,000 soldiers!) to crush it, and then barred Jews from Jerusalem.  Another effect is that as the Christians did not support the rebellion, Romans began to consider Christianity separate from Judaism.  (Until then, Christianity was considered a sect of Judaism.)

The photos suck, but I had a wonderful time

...and 66 more photos.

View album

Religion

If you're wondering why I converted to religion, check out this cartoon and you'll understand.  For those with a short attention span, I'll transcribe the relevant bit at the end:

Would you kill for your religion?
Would you hurt, hinder, or condemn in the name of your God?
Yes?
Then you probably suck at your religion.
You should give it up.
Maybe take up windsurfing or ping pong instead.
However, does your religion inspire you to help people?
Does it make you happier?
Does it help you cope with the fact that you are a bag of meat sitting on a rock in outer space and that someday you will die and you are completely powerless, helpless, and insignificant in the wake of this beautiful cosmic shitstorm we call existence?
Does it help with that?
EXCELLENT!
Carry on with your religion!
Just keep it to your fucking self.

California itinerary

I was watching an old episode of The Big Bang Theory the other day, and Sheldon suggested that if you only have one day in Los Angeles to make it a "train day" -- lunch at Carney's in Studio City, the afternoon at the Travel Town museum (near Griffith Park), followed by dinner at Carney's in Hollywood*.  While I'm not going to stick with that formula exactly, I am bringing a friend who wants to see California, so I've been working on an itinerary.

Personally, for me the first step in any visit to California would be getting the hell out of Los Angeles, but in this case it's complicated by the fact that she wants to see LA, I want to see my friends, and the airlines want to charge £200 ($300) more to fly into LAX and leave from SFO.  So I'm not sure exactly how this will work, but what I am sure is that I will get an angry email from my mother when she sees I've only slotted her in for 3 days...

Day 1: Arrive Los Angeles
2: Beach
3: Hollywood
4: Downtown
5: Monterey
6: arrive San Francisco
7: pier 39/Alcatraz
8: napa valley
9-12: My family
13: Sequoias
14: Fly out of LAX

This is tentatively scheduled for January 10-22, but I'm hoping to have it firmed up by the end of the week.

*Yes, the order is important -- dinners are only served at Carney's on Sunset Strip.

AOC

An "appellation" is just an identifying name or title, but it has also come to be known as a system of protection to identify where a product is made or grown. For example, Idaho potatoes or Maine lobsters, which carry a set of expectations.

This is nothing new -- the Bible references wine of Samaria, Carmel, Jezreel, and Helbon -- but until the 19th century, it was just a convention, not a law.  In 1891, the treaty of Madrid gave legal protection to sparkling wine produced in Champagne, France.  Thus, you won't see the word "champagne" on a bottle of California sparkling wine.

In 1935, the French formalised this as the Appellation d'Origine Contrôlée, or AOC. In 1951, the European Union extended it.  Today, it applies to wines, cheeses, hams, sausages, seafood, olives, beers, Balsamic vinegar and even regional breads, fruits, raw meats and vegetables.

On the face of it, this seems like a good idea: If an area becomes associated with a particular product, you wouldn't want others to be able to claim their product was from the same region, right?  It's the same as trademark law -- if any IT company could call themselves "Apple," how would the Apple brand fare?

However, as with all things, whenever government protection is involved, things quickly become ridiculous.  I was intrigued by a news story yesterday that Britain now has 50 products of "protected designation of origin," the latest being Newmarket sausages.  Newmarket is a small town (pop. 15,000) in Suffolk that is more commonly associated with thoroughbred horse racing.  However, it has the distinction of two local sausage makers, who use two completely different recipes to produce two distinctly different sausages, and yet somehow the fact that they were both from Newmarket was enough to make "Newmarket sausage" a protected designation.  (Obviously I haven't tried them, but the "rate my sausage" blog doesn't give them high marks, anyway.)

In another example, "Newcastle Brown Ale" -- which was a trademark of a particular brewery -- was given protected status in 2000, but in 2004 the company moved the brewery to Gateshead, literally on the other side of the river, and had to petition the European Union to revoke the protected designation!  So just to recap, before the protection was granted only one company was allowed to create Newcastle Brown Ale, and if the protection hadn't been revoked then no companies would have been allowed to make Newcastle Brown Ale.

Cheddar cheese, by all rights, should be allowed protected designation -- after all, it originated in the town of Cheddar, in Somerset, around the 12th century, and there are still a number of artisan cheesemakers in the area -- but it was considered to be too "generic" to be given protected status.  (However, cheddar produced from local milk within four counties of South West England may use the protected name, "West Country Farmhouse Cheddar.")

"Buffalo mozzarella campagna" does have protected status in Europe (it must be made from the milk of water buffalo raised in Lazio and Campania, Italy) but not the rest of the world.  (And don't get me started on that low-moisture cow's milk product produced in the US and labelled "mozzarella"...)

Obviously these sorts of restrictions are just silly; if you're going to have the government enforcing appellations, the obvious solution would be to put a blanket restriction on geographic references; hence Parma ham has to come from Parma, and Darjeeling tea has to come from Darjeeling.  However, there was a bit of scandal a few years ago when the winner of the annual Cornish pasty competition did, in fact, come from the county of Devon, next door.  The rules were changed so only residents of Cornwall could complete, and then the following year Cornish pasties were given protected status, so even if the best cornish pasty came from Devon, they are now prohibited from calling them "Cornish pasties."  Of course, that's exactly what these laws do, reduce competition, regardless of whether it is better or worse than the original.

Today there are 1,123 products with various protected designation status in the EU.  Here is the full list of British products.  Of the 50, I recognise 8.  That is, less than 20% of these products with government protectional actually have enough of a brand presence to differentiate themselves from similar products from other locations.  (I don't even know what a "perry" is.)

Beer
    Kentish ale
    Kentish strong ale
    Rutland bitter

Cooked meat
    Cornish Pasty
    Traditional Cumberland Sausage
    Newmarket sausage
    Melton Mowbray pork pie

Cheese
    Beacon Fell traditional Lancashire cheese
    Bonchester cheese
    Buxton blue
    Dorset Blue cheese
    Dovedale cheese
    Exmoor Blue cheese
    Single Gloucester
    Staffordshire Cheese
    Swaledale cheese
    Stilton - White cheese
    Stilton - Blue cheese
    Swaledale ewes' cheese
    Teviotdale cheese
    West Country farmhouse Cheddar cheese

Cider and Perry
    Gloucestershire cider
    Gloucestershire perry
    Herefordshire cider
    Herefordshire perry
    Worcestershire cider
    Worcestershire perry

Cream
    Cornish Clotted Cream

Fish
    Arbroath Smokies
    Cornish Sardines
    Lough Neagh Eel
    Scottish Farmed Salmon
    Traditional Grimsby smoked fish
    Whitstable Oysters

Fresh meat
    Gloucestershire Old Spots
    Isle of Man Loaghtan Lamb
    Lakeland Herdwick
    Orkney beef
    Orkney lamb
    Scotch beef
    Scotch lamb
    Shetland lamb
    Traditional farmfresh turkey
    Welsh Beef
    Welsh lamb
    West Country Lamb
    West Country Beef

Fruit and Vegetables
    Armagh Bramleys
    Jersey Royal potatoes
    Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb

Spices (final)

More than you ever wanted to know about brassicas, which include mustard, horseradish, wasabi, rapeseed, broccoli, cauliflower, turnip, radish, and cabbage. 

• Mustard comes from three plants: black mustard, brown Indian mustard, and white mustard. (Not sure why it's called white mustard when both the flowers and seeds are yellow.)
• The earliest reference to mustard is from India in the 5th century BCE. When a mother loses her only son, she takes his body to the Buddha to find a cure. The Buddha asks her to bring a handful of mustard seeds from a family that has never lost a child, husband, parent or friend. When the mother is unable to find such a house in her village, she realizes that death is common to all, and she cannot be selfish in her grief.  (Mustard seeds are also mentioned in the New Testament and the Quran.)
• The Romans mixed grape juice (known as "must") with ground mustard seeds (called sinapis) to make mustum ardens — "burning must" — hence "must ard"
• Dijon, France, became recognized for mustard by the 13th century. In 1777, one of the most famous Dijon mustard makers, Maurice Grey, started making mustard with white wine, called Grey-Poupon.  It was the first mustard to use automatic machines.
• The use of mustard on hot dogs was first seen at the 1904 St. Louis World's Fair, when the bright-yellow French's mustard was introduced.  (George French actually thought of his mustard as a salad dressing.)  The bright yellow is from turmeric.
  
• Powdered mustard lacks any potency; it must be soaked in water to develop its heat.
• Mustard does not need to be refrigerated, but will retain its flavor and spiciness much longer if it is.
• Horseradish is poisonous to horses.  (Oh, the irony.)
• In the west, wasabi is often referred to as "Japanese horseradish." In Japan, horseradish is referred to as "western wasabi."  Wasabi and horseradish are different species.
• Wasabi is difficult to cultivate, which makes it quite expensive, so a common substitute is a mixture of horseradish, mustard, starch and green food coloring.  Real wasabi is darker and more coarse than the powder-made paste, and isn't nearly so astringent and head-searing.
  
• Rapeseed oil was produced in the 19th century as a lubricant for steam engines, but was not used for food because of its bitter taste and contained more than 50% erucic acid, a known toxin. Varieties were developed with a better taste and less than 2% erucic acid.  One strain, bred in the 1970s at the University of Manitoba, Canada, was labelled "Can.O., L-A." for Canadian Oilseed, Low-Acid.  The name was trademarked, but soon become generic (like Xerox, Kleenex, and Band-Aid).
  
• In 1998, a disease- and drought-resistant strain of canola was produced by genetic engineering. In 2011, 96% of canola crops were genetically modified.
  
• The noun rape comes from the Latin word "rapum," meaning turnip. The verb rape comes from the French raper, "to seize, abduct,"
• The rapeseed blossom is a major source of nectar for honeybees.  The state of Oregon prohibits it from being grown in three counties for fear it will attract wild bees away from crops such as carrots, which require bees for pollination.
  

Spices (cont.)

• Black peppercorns are actually the cooked and dried fruit (with seed) of a flowering vine. White pepper are the seeds with the fruit removed.  (Salt is a mineral, not a spice.)
  
• in the Victorian era, the term "pepper" become synonymous with "spirit" but has since been shortened to "pep" (as in a pep talk).  When Christopher Columbus first encountered spicy fruits in the New World, he called them "peppers" after the spice.
  
• Paprika is made by drying and grinding bell peppers or chili peppers.  Cayenne pepper is the same.  Chili powder is usually a mixture of paprika and other spices.
• Carobs are a legume, like peas, and the seeds -- known as locust beans for some reason -- are used as animal feed, while the pods are dried and crushed to make an imitation chocolate.  Locust bean gum is often used as a thickening agent in food.
  
• The term "carat" is from an ancient practice in the Middle East of weighing gold and gemstones against the seeds of the carob tree.  In late Roman times, the pure gold coin known as the "solidus" weighed 24 carat seeds (about 4.5 grams). As a result, the carat also became a measure of purity for gold. Thus 24-carat gold means 100% pure, while 18-carat gold means the alloy contains 75% gold
• Celery seeds are actually the fruit of the plant. In the UK, a different variety of celery is also grown for its root, which is called celeriac and is used in the same way as celery stalks but lasts much longer.
• Chicory roots are baked, ground, and used as a coffee substitute or additive, especially in New Orleans. Other varieties of chicory are grown for their leaves, and are known as Radicchio or Belgian endive.
• Dill seeds are what create dill pickles. (Duh.)  Pickling is a method of preserving food by storing it in an acid solution, such as vinegar, and adding antimicrobial herbs and spices, such as mustard seed, garlic, cinnamon or cloves.* (I should note that the term "pickle" is actually a 16th century Dutch word meaning brine; before that, a pickle was a mixture of fruits, vegetables, and spices served as an accompaniment.)
  
• The flowers of Sambucus nigra are used to produce elderflower cordial, very popular in the UK.
• The phytochemicals responsible for the sharp flavor of garlic are produced when the plant's cells are damaged, and are a defense mechanism to deter animals from eating the plant. (Oh, the irony...)
• Traditionally, safflower was grown for its seeds, used for colouring and flavouring foods, and making red and yellow dyes. Safflower dyes have been identified in Egypt c. 2000 BCE. It is only in the last fifty years the plant has been cultivated mainly for vegetable oil.
• The use of marshmallow to make a sweet dates back to ancient Egypt. The stem was peeled back to reveal the soft and spongy pith, which was boiled in sugar syrup and dried to produce a soft, chewy confection.  In the early 19th century, French confectioners extracted the marshmallow sap and whipped it with sugar to make a confection similar to modern marshmallow. In the late 19th century, French manufacturers began using egg whites or gelatin, along with corn starch, to create the chewy base.  In 1948 an American patented a fully automated machine to make marshmallows which extruded them into cylindrical shapes. Since gelatin is made from animal collagen, most marshmallows are not vegetarian.
• Annatto is extracted from the flesh around the seed of the achiote trees. (Think pomegranate seeds.) This yellow to orange food coloring is used in cheese (e.g., Cheddar, Velveeta), and margarine.  In the 16th century, high levels of carotene in the grass during the summer months would have given the milk an orange color which was carried through into the cheese. This orange hue was regarded as an indicator of the best cheese, so inferior cheese was dyed with annatto. In the UK, yellow cheese is now considered inferior.
• Oil from the dried root bark of the sassafras tree was a primary ingredient in root beer until the FDA banned it as carcinogenic.  Today, however, it is a precursor for the manufacture of MDMA (ecstasy).
• Turmeric is a rhizome, like ginger, and in fact they are part of the same family. (Cardamom is part of the same family, but it is the seeds that are used.)
• For longer-term storage, ginger can be placed in a plastic bag and refrigerated or frozen.
• After saffron, the most expensive spices by weight today are vanilla and cardamom.

Badger cull

After 4 years in England I've still not seen a live badger (although I've seen quite a few roadkill) and if the government has its way, I may never see one.

That's because badgers carry bovine tuberculosis, and last year 26,000 cattle in England had to be slaughtered after contracting the disease.

A nine-year trial showed the spread of the disease could be slowed *slightly* if more than 70% of badgers in an area were eradicated. But it also found that if less than 70% were killed, the spread of TB could *increase*. (I don't understand it, I'm just reporting it.)

The alternative is to vaccinate the badgers, which is only 50% to 60% effective. The Welsh government opted to vaccinate while the English decided to cull. (Scotland is officially TB-free.)

Needless to say, there was a huge public outcry against the cull, leading to at least two years (and no doubt millions of taxpayer pounds) in legal challenges, but the court finally gave the go-ahead this year in two counties.

Except now there's a problem: It appears badger numbers are higher in Gloucestershire and Somerset than previously thought. A government spokesman said, "It would be wrong to go ahead if those on the ground cannot be confident of removing at least 70% of the population."

Brian May, guitarist for Queen who has campaigned against the cull, said, "Let's be very clear: this is a scientifically flawed, ethically reprehensible, economically unjustifiable and reckless policy that needs to be abandoned, once and for all."

The government insists it will do the cull next year.