I am excited to announce that guest poster B will occasionally be posting commentaries on education. She’s a former school teacher who worked in the Oakland school district, and she actually has her very own site at Being Light Skinded. I think that her perspective on education issues will be interesting to a lot of you (and to me as well), and I am really pleased that she has agreed to devote some time in her busy schedule to guest posting here. I’m also hoping that her posts will get you thinking about the American education system and the ways in which it needs to be fixed; this is an election year, and it’s a good time to be thinking about issues like this.

B is also my first guest poster, so y’all need to be nice to her!

It’s my father’s birthday today. I made him a lemon meringue pie. Actually I made the pie last weekend, because we both tend to be busy during the week, so I thought I would have a better chance of luring him over for pie if I did it on the weekend. He suggested chess pie, which I did briefly consider, but I had a pound of lemons that needed to be used.

I like the process of making lemon meringue pie. It is both exacting and gloriously messy, and the end result is generally universally enjoyed, combining tart glorious lemon with airy meringue which melts away as soon as it gets moist. I’ve also enjoyed making variations like lime meringue and tangerine meringue (which, for the record, did not turn out as fabulously as I might have desired). The trick, I have found, is cutting the sugar dramatically, allowing the tart flavor of the lemons to come through without drowning the tongue in sweetness.

As I was making the pie and experimenting with a fancy-pants yuppie pie crust that turned out like cardboard, I was reminded of the great coconut cream pie adventure, which took place many years ago, when I wore stripes with floral prints and sat at the end of the bar in the Coast Hotel drinking Shirley Temples as my father worked.

My father and I have both been long-time fans of coconut cream pie. Every now and then, as a treat, we would go to the Laurel Deli and have a slice of coconut cream pie together, or sometimes chocolate cream pie. This was in the days when the Laurel Deli was on the East side of Main Street, for those of you who remember those heady times.  And although my father and I were great baking adventurers, for some reason we never tried making our own.

At any rate, a friend of my father’s went to Hawaii, and she mailed back a coconut. I’m not sure you can still that, but you used to be able to just slap a mailing label on a coconut and send it. On my first trip to Hawaii, I sent coconuts to everyone and their sister because I was so excited by the novelty. This particular coconut was decorated from head to toe with delicate pastel drawings, and the label had a finely painted miniature beach scene on it.

For the first few days, we just looked at the coconut, turning it over now and then and trying to decide what to do with it. Finally, my father (or maybe it was me, my memory is thin on this point) said:

“Let’s make a coconut cream pie.”

For some reason, we took the coconut with us when he went to work, perhaps to ask for advice from the Mayan kitchen staff, whom we assumed were coconut experts. When we arrived, it was still early, and I was fired up with enthusiasm, so we proceeded to the loading dock and started hurling the coconut repeatedly against the ground to get it to crack open. This, of course, did not work, so we tried hammers, and mallets, and any number of things, until the whole kitchen staff had arrived and was lined up at the window laughing while they did prep.

Eventually, a small fissure opened in the coconut, and the coconut juice poured out. We, of course, did not realize that coconut juice and coconut milk are not the same, so we had a moment of panic, until one of the prep cooks took pity on us and said that “the milk is in the meat.”

So we took the coconut home and painstakingly chiseled out the meat, which predictably did not yield milk when squeezed, because we did not realize that there was a process for coconut milking. I was surprised to learn that coconut cream pie is not made with coconut milk (or cream), but rather that the recipe called for vanilla cream pie with coconut flakes added. As I recall, we made the cream filling as directed and just threw the chunks of coconut, complete with streaks of grease from the chisel, in. (The recipe called for toasted shredded coconut.)

We decided to eschew the meringue, either because neither of us felt like making it or because someone’s impatience had clouded our judgments, and we popped the pie in the oven and waited with bated breath for it to come out, discussing the delicious and satisfying flavor of coconut cream pie, and how excellent it was going to be to make coconut cream pie from a coconut someone had sent us. Personally. From Hawaii.

When we took the pie out, the filling had developed a definite list to starboard, with a cracked and pitted surface marked by inclusions of leathery coconut meat which stuck out like nuts in brittle. We began to have doubts about the coconut pie mission, but my father gamely cut two slices, pulled two forks out of the silverware drawer, and settled down at the table.

I’ve had a few things in my life I haven’t enjoyed. Durian, for example. But few things will ever equal this coconut cream pie, which has to be one of the most disgusting things I have ever eaten. The filling was way too rich, with a mouth-clogging creamy texture which wasn’t helped by some sort of faint curdling which had happened during the baking process, causing it to form cheesy chunks. I think this may be because we used straight whipping cream, for reasons I cannot recall. The coconut meat, which was coarsely chiseled instead of grated, turned out leathery in places and wooden in others, and it was utterly tasteless.

My father took a few more bites, as did I, as we hesitantly peeked at each other  over our slices.

“Hrm,” my father said.

“Er,” I replied.

And we quietly got up and put our plates on the sideboard, where they rested like unexploded grenades for several hours as we played a game of Monopoly. We really hate wasted food, so there was a quiet underlying tension as we battled for capitalist control of the yellows, with neither of us wanting to say that we should throw the pie away.

“Maybe we should top it with whipped cream,” he said.

“That will be $26,” I replied as he landed on Pacific Avenue. “I think we would still taste the coconut chunks. Maybe we could pick them out. We could serve slices with crab forks.”

“Or maybe we could rinse the filling off,” he said, ignoring the fact that the filling was the most expensive ingredient, “and start again with the coconut chunks.” He peeled $30 off his roll of cash and waited for change.

At the end of the night, I won the game and we tossed the cake, throwing the shreds into the bushes in the back yard. I secretly hoped a coconut tree would grow there.

And I haven’t tried making coconut cream pie since.

The Periodic Table Printmaking Project is exactly what it sounds like. It is also awesome, so go look.

Systems biology is the new big thing, apparently. It involves creating simulations of the complex systems in the human body; of course, it’s going to be limited by computer power, but it still sounds pretty neat.

The FBI didn’t pay its phone bill, and this has some interesting ramifications.

Our puppet regime in Afghanistan just sentenced a journalist to death. For reading about women’s rights.  There are times when text cannot adequately convey my anger, horror, and outrage. This is one of those.

Police powers in Great Britain are being radically expanded under a new measure from the Home Secretary. I’m interested to see what Inspector Gadget has to say about this.

Pet prescriptions? As in prescriptions for visits from pets while in the hospital? In England, it’s a possibility.

Afghanistan and its forgotten war are facing some serious problems.

If you’re new to the Book Project and wondering what the heck this is all about, I am writing about every book I read in 2008. Here are details from my post announcing the Book Project:

Within reason, I will also try to read every book you folks recommend to me. I tend to hit the library for book recommendations, in case I don’t like the books, so that I don’t have to buy them, but I should warn you that my library is not the greatest. Although it does try very hard. The point is, I may not be able to get every recommended book through the library. If you really want me to read something, you can mail it to me: s.e. smith, PO Box 2764, Fort Bragg, California, 95437. I will pledge to read every single book that is sent to that post office box. If it’s some sort of rare one of a kind book that you want returned, I will also mail it back to you, as long as you include a slip with a note indicating that you want it back, along with your name and address. This pledge holds true even I get BoingBoinged or something and end up with thousands of books to read. Which would actually be kind of neat.

Now, on to the statistics:

In January, I read 21 books for a total of 6,261 pages. Technically I read a few more pages than that because I am halfway through The Wind Up Bird Chronicle, but I’ll stick to completed books. That works out to an average of 2/3 of a book and 201 pages a day.

The Sparrow was my favourite book this month, because it’s a book with so much depth and complexity that I find myself reading it again and again to know it better. And because it plays on a lot of themes which have come to be important in my own life. My least favourite book was Rule Number Two, which was poorly written and indifferently constructed. The book which had a most unexpected impact on me was probably Girl Meets God, which turned out to provide a lot of food for thought, and to play a role in a cathartic moment which happened mere days after reading it.

If you have suggestions or book recommendations, add them in the comments!

But to explain why, you need to see the following chronicle of my workday yesterday.

I started out in The Chair with Mr. Bell. We have a good working relationship; he curls up in the front, I rest my keyboard on him, and we call it good. Then he got up, and Loki came over.

Loki is not so familiar with being a keyboard stand, but he started to get the hang of it. He actually makes a pretty good keyboard rest, because he’s so broad. And warm. It was cold, so it was nice to have a foot warmer.

This post gets pretty image heavy, so I am sticking it behind a jump so that it doesn’t totally clog your browser. I am also doing this because stories about cats are not fascinating to everyone, so I wanted to provide you with the option of not reading this one.

[...]

Treatment of fat people in the doctor’s office is finally making national news, with a pretty well balanced article in the Washington Post.

The situation in Kenya is getting intense; an independent journalist is photographing it and writing about it. This site is really amazing, and if you only want to click on one thing on my sites of interest today, this should be it.

Demonstrators are calling the parrot Giuliani on his tendency to use the 11 September attacks in his campaign. Except these aren’t just any demonstrators, they’re firefighters. And family members of dead firefighters. And they’re pissed: “My brother had an antiquated radio in his hand on 9/11,” she said. “That means he was deaf, dumb, and blind in that situation.”

Neighbor rage is serious business. You know how I joke about doing dastardly things to my neighbors? Yeah, I’m not actually serious, but these people in Italy were.

An advertising campaign raises some interesting questions about brand integrity, as Subway is suing Quiznos over derogatory material generated by fans. If Subway wins the suit, such publicity stunts could become a thing of the past.

Ever been told to “eat dirt”? Well, people in Haiti are, and not for fun; extreme poverty and lack of food security is leading Haitians to eat cookies made from dirt.

The Health Institute of Nutrition is a valuable educational resource for all people who are concerned about nutrition, with helpful tips, hard facts, and useful articles about what to do when confronted with a potato. (If you don’t have highly refined parody sensors, you may not want to visit THIN.)

I don’t know how closely you have been following the national ID issue in Britain, gentle readers, but a leaked document from the British government has recently surfaced, and in this document, the option of “coercion” to force people into getting government IDs is discussed. Needless to say, I don’t think this is a good thing.

A British group called NO2ID has asked people all over the world to mirror this document, spreading it through the delightful diffusion process which is the intertubes. You can read the .pdf version of the National Identity Scheme Options Analysis-Outcome on my site, but I want you to do more than that. I want you to share it with people. If you have a server of your own, I want you to mirror it, and send the link to as many people as possible. The document is annotated, and well worth reading, especially for those of us who don’t want to live in a nanny state.

Information likes to be free. So free it.

“She looks just like a big slab of bacon,” one of them was saying as I took out the garbage on my way into town to pay the rent, and a gale of deep throated male laughter arose, the kind of laughter that makes me nervous. I nodded genially as I dropped the recycling in, and the Neighbor With the Chainsaw nodded back, a bit sheepishly, as I took out the garbage. I hope he hasn’t been reading my blog, I thought, wondering what the expression was about and then shrugging my shoulders and heading off down the alley.

I had bigger fish to fry, like my rage over Saturday’s mail, and I was a fair way down the alley when I heard the next comment in the conversation, pitched specifically for my ears, I’m sure.

“You oughta go hoggin‘,” one of them says, and a gale of ugly laughter rose up as I realized that they were talking about me. The jokes, the ugly laughter, were about the passive aggressive neighbor who nods genially when she takes out the garbage and writes blog entries about chainsaw usage. Only they don’t know that I write passive aggressive entries about chainsaw usage, all they know is that I’m a little weird but generally friendly. Oh, and I’m fat. I did the only rational thing I could do in the circumstances, which was to square my shoulders and keep walking as if I hadn’t heard.

They must eat some moldy-ass bacon, I thought, looking down at my fuzzy green zip-up hoodie.

I’ve been thinking about my place in the fat activist world lately. I was actually going to write an entry today about how I am hesitant to classify myself as a fat activist because of the implied baggage which comes with that, and that I prefer to think of myself as advocating for health at any size, and then as I was walking down the street thinking about how someone had just compared me to a piece of bacon, I realized that this is unacceptable. I cannot keep walking as if I haven’t heard, and I can’t say I advocate for health at any size (although I do), when I really advocate for acceptance, and for treating people like human beings. To restrict myself to a health at any size view is to say that some fat people shouldn’t be treated like people, to suggest that it’s ok to go be mean to those other unhealthy fat people.

I wonder why they chose bacon. I think of bacon as a delicious, flavorful animal product which is filled with goodness. To paraphrase Mark Twain, to compare me to a pig is a credit to me and an insult to the pig. But I think really that guy was just saying I’m a pig as in fatty. Lardo. Porky. A big ole fat slab of bacon ripe for abuse.

And no one should be treated like that, healthy or not. We don’t shout at lepers anymore, so why the fuck is it acceptable to call someone walking down the street a slab of bacon? The only appropriate response to that situation is anger, whether or not the person is healthy. And that is why I am a fat activist, because you don’t need to think that fat is beautiful (I don’t always think so), and you don’t need to think that fat is right (it’s not, for everyone), and you don’t even need to think that fat is healthy (although it is, for some), but you do need to think that fat people are human beings. And fat people have emotions and feelings, and our weight is not a good excuse to insult is, to belittle us, to refuse to hire us, to deny health insurance to us, to treat us like second class citizens.

I personally think that protruding tumors are gross, but you don’t see me heckling stage IV cancer patients. I’m also not a big fan of dreadlocks on white people, but I don’t harass hippies when they walk down the street. Because these people are human beings. Because what they do with their bodies is not my business. Because I don’t know what they might be struggling with, the complex emotions and permutations that have gone into their physical presentations. I listened to an interview with several fat activists yesterday in which the interviewer kept saying “you’re saying you think fat people deserve acceptance,” in this horribly skeptical and horrified way, like the activist was saying “I think we should kill all old people,” and the activist just kept saying, simply, “yes. I do.”

On the way home, I stopped by Purity and picked up a Cappuccino It’s-It. I drew out my consumption of my favourite ice cream treat until I was walking down the alley on my way home, and I happened to hit the last bite right as I passed the now shrunken group. As I delicately picked it up and bit down, I looked right into their eyes and smiled.

“Those spics,” one of them was saying, “they need to come into the country like anyone else.” As he was talking, he turned, and realized I was passing, and there was a moment of awkward silence.

Chinga tu madre, cabron, I thought. Chinga tu madre. And I dropped the It’s-It wrapper on top of the garbage and went inside to make myself some coconut lemongrass soup with brown rice.

The Prince of the Marshes is about a year in Iraq.  But it’s a pretty extraordinary year; Rory Stewart, the author, worked with the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) in an attempt to rebuild Iraq, establish some sort of government, and prepare the country so that it could be handed back to the Iraqis.

It was quite fascinating to read, because the workings of the Provisional government largely went unsung in most of the world, and to hear Stewart’s description, that’s pretty unfortunate. He talked about spending millions to rebuild schools and hospitals, constantly working with feuding tribes to try and establish some sort of order and to create infrastructure, and butting heads with the military and his assistants as he struggled to do what he thought was best for the Iraqi people.

He also described the slow breakdown in the province he worked in, in such a way that by the end of the book, he felt as if he had never been there. He started out in Amara and later moved to Nasiriyah; when he returned to Amara, no one remembered that he had been there. In Nasiriyah, he endured three days of mortar attacks from insurgents while the Italian military refused to help him, and they ultimately had to abandon the office and their work there.

Stewart has a love for the Arab world which really shows in this book. He made an active effort to learn as much Arabic as possible, and he is obviously very knowledgeable about Iraqi culture and history; if half of the coalition government authorities were as dedicated and selfless as he was, it is a bitter disappointment that their efforts bore so little fruit.

He talked about meeting people in his office one day and being shot at by them the next, which must have been incredibly frustrating, to say the least. He also discussed constant battle with Baghdad over things like getting monies for payrolls, and establishing policies which he thought were sensible; it sounds like authorities in Baghdad didn’t seem to really realize what was going on in the provinces, and weren’t prepared to deal with the complex issues there.

In his epilogue, he discusses many of the problems with the way that the CPA was set up, and ways in which administration of occupied nations might be improved in the future. For example, rotating administrators every six months or so is crazy, because it doesn’t give them a chance to connect with the community and actually do things. This point has also been made by many members of the military. He points out that the debate over measurements of progress in Iraq is pretty meaningless, that we need to rethink  our place there; he believes that only the Iraqis can rebuild the nation we have destroyed, and I think he might be right.

Demographics:

The Prince of the Marshes, by Rory Stewart. Published 2006, 405 pages. Travel.

Seriously. I am getting so much spam from political organizations, it’s insane. And apparently I can’t complain because political groups are “protected organizations.” I swear to God, if I hadn’t already voted, I would be automatically not voting for every candidate who sent me unsolicited mail or email. Especially the ones that say they “care about the environment” in eight pages of glossy brochure.

In other news…

UCSC is one among many universities which installs software designed to find “copyright violations” on its student networks to capitulate to the RIAA. One residential network technician is fighting back.

The problem with student loans is coming from the way we approach them, argues Mary Ellen Bell. Right now, they serve lenders, not the public interest, and that’s something I tend to agree with.

The Tough Guy Race sounds truly awesome. I’m so going into training now for 2010. Or maybe 2015.

We’ve finally deigned to send peacekeepers to Darfur, but it’s going to take a year to deploy them, apparently. Well, that’s nice.

A pathologist is on trial for abusing his position (but not, thankfully, for abusing the dead).

A battle of the economists is being waged in the Los Angeles Times this week.

A class action lawsuit which may change the way forensic examiners deal with the dead is underway; at issue is the common practice of removing organ samples for further testing.