Flying wonders down under

As though commercial flight wasn’t harrowing enough, two antipodean airlines are pushing the envelope: Qantas features John Travolta dressed as a pilot to bookend their safety announcement video.

And Air New Zealand has tarted up their video with Richard Simmons in sequins.

Travolta seems superfluous; Simmons is just plain OTT. (And, BTW—watch the ANZ video all the way to the end.)

So no change there.

Still—I’m wondering why the Aussies and Kiwis felt the need to import talent for these announcements. Haven’t they got enough home-grown loop-the-loops of their own?

Home disimprovement

Ordinarily I wouldn’t promote (or even much notice) a TV commercial. But this one from Allstate really resonated with me.

Dean “Mayhem” Winters, spokes-disaster for the insurance company, absolutely captured the destruction of raccoons in your attic.

The reason I know this is that my house in Virginia seemed to have some secret symbols marked on it that translated to “Procyonidae Lying-in Hospital—All Are Welcome”. There was a small gap right at the junction of the rear and side of the roof, just pregnant-raccoon sized, apparently.

And, having the entire attic to birth her litter, where did Mama R choose to create her nest? Smack above my bed. Not a word of lie.

And you’ll recall that raccoons are nocturnal. Night after night, rustling noises as Mama popped out to the procyonid 7-Eleven and came back to her brood, who peep-peep-peeped a lot more than you’d have expected.

I didn’t know what it was right away, so one evening I climbed up to the attic and picked my way along the rafters until I got to the approximate spot of all the rustling and peeping. Mama had hidden them well, though—it wasn’t until I picked up a piece of insulation that I found the little clutch of teeny-tiny raccoons.

And along the way I also encountered a lot of ripped-up padding. Exactly as in the Allstate commercial.

I left the babies untouched and went downstairs to have a think. And a couple of hours later I went back up with my camera—thought I should have proof when telling my raccoon tale. Only just at I got my head and shoulders through the hatch there was a furious hissing/chittering from the front of the attic. The babies were in the back and I was between Mama and them.

I apologized profusely, crept back down the ladder and replaced the hatch.

That night Mama moved her family out, probably pretty pissed off at me.

Well, I wasn’t that happy with her, either. Seriously—take another look at that commercial. It’s amazing the destruction one little critter can cause before you close up its egress.

And, BTW—you can get squirrels out of your attic by tossing mothballs around. Sometimes a lot of mothballs, so that you don’t have to worry about moths in the rooms closest to the attic. And I know this because…well, never mind.

Proclamation 86 redux...not

Yesterday marked the 150^th anniversary of Proclamation 86, by which Abraham Lincoln prohibited any trade between states remaining in the Union and those in rebellion. I.e., since the Confederate States were at war with the United States, residents of the latter were forbidden to buy or sell goods from/to residents of the former.

Now, you’d think that this would be decreeing something as obvious as “residents will obey the laws of gravity and not go floating up into the atmosphere.” I mean, when you’re engaged in a shooting war with a country, it seems counterproductive to enrich its treasury by purchasing materials from it and to support its combat capabilities by selling it technologies, food & supplies.

However, you would be wrong. Throughout the Napoleonic wars, it was the business of British businessmen to sell to France. And, of course, our servicemen and women are even now coming up against unfriendlies who are equipped & armed by goods manufactured and sold by Corporate USA.

Now, whether or not the business of America is, in fact, business—ah, no; the hell with it.

We really need another Proclamation 86, because it’s criminal that either directly (via straight sales) or indirectly (through US governmental aid programs), American companies are profiting literally through the pain and suffering of American soldiers. (And you'll notice that trade with the Confederacy was prohibited by executive order, not act of Congress. Even 150 years ago Congress wasn't going to interfere with a Godly profit.)

Of course, two things stand in the way of such a proclamation these days:

We’d need a President with the moral stature to tell businessmen to stuff it.

And we’d need to be able to define who, exactly, are our friends and who are not.

Not going to happen, is it?

Cocoa hacking

Lest you think there’s any place on the Internet that is not an attractive target for hackers, here’s news that last week the Hershey’s consumer website was breached.

Hershey’s advises that consumers’ names, addresses, emails and birthdates were accessed. (At least whoever hacked the chocolate didn’t publish that information, the way Anonymous, the self-styled “hactivist” group did when they crashed the BART website on Sunday, allegedly in “retaliation” for BART blocking cell phone service to foil groups threatening to stop the trains on Thursday to protest several things. Look—it’s SF, and therefore a very long story.)

Also, the hackers messed with one or more of the site’s recipes.

Hershey’s assured us that they “have reviewed the recipes on this site to ensure their quality”, so, whew!

Still, just in the space of a few days we’ve seen that it doesn’t matter how serious or silly the motivation, determined hackers will try it on with just about any site. And consumer websites do not seem to prove all that big a challenge. So think about that when you slap up your personal details somewhere to get a $.50-off coupon or an email notification of Lindsay Lohan’s latest court appearance.

Turkish coffee

I went out to dinner the other night, walking the 50 yards from my place to the closer of two Persian restaurants at the corner of Wolfe & El Camino Real.

The meal itself was not what I would call really special—for the prices they’re charging I’d have expected more than paper placemats and napkins; the “rack of lamb in the Persian style” was such that apparently “the Persian style” means “grilled without any herbs or marinades”; and the bread had all the flavor and much of the consistency of Saltine crackers.

I finished off with a Turkish coffee, which tasted surprisingly weak (considering that this style of java is a couple ounces of water to a couple of heaping teaspoons of fresh beans pounded to a powder, with sugar pre-added) and wasn’t nearly as hot as it ought to have been. But it got me thinking about Turkish coffee in my life.

My introduction to it was at age 19, when my friend Gretchen and I took the Illinois Central up to Chicago from her home in Champaign. We spent the night at some hotel before I had to fly back to LA and head off to UCLA. I didn’t know from any foreign food other than Chinese or Mexican, but Gretchen was dead set on Middle Eastern, and; we somehow found a place where she could get lahmajoun.

The thing I recall about that meal was the Turkish coffee—thick, hot and sweet. I probably drank all the sludge, since my upbringing was such that you don’t leave any food or drink on the table when you leave.

My next recollection of this beverage came from the Armenian family that lived behind our house on the north side of Pasadena during my last year at college (not UCLA).

(The city has long had a sizeable Armenian community—my pediatrician was Dr. Hovsepian, & there’s been an Armenian Orthodox church on Colorado boulevard for decades. In addition to healers and holy folk, Pasadena was also a hotbed of anti-Turkish activism by Armenians. Every few years there’d be some incident involving the Turkish consulate in LA that was traceable back to Pasadena, & one night in the early 80s some minor consular official’s VW bug was firebombed with him in it a couple of blocks from the house where I was living. I have no idea what he was doing in that part of town, which at the time was described as a “neighborhood in transition”; but it was definitely not salubrious for him.)

Anyhow, our neighbors were refugees from the civil war in Lebanon. There was a mother, a grandfather and a daughter somewhere in her 20s. We had two distinct backyard areas, a kind of not-quite-landscaped garden next to the house and then a wilderness that also had a couple of rows of grape vines. I was working back there one day trying to get a vegetable garden going when the daughter popped her head over the fence and asked if they could collect some of our grape leaves. I said sure and we started up an acquaintance. (My dad ended up running several vines across the fence so they wouldn’t have to walk around the block to get them in the future.)

They invited me over for coffee, which was the Turkish kind. And the daughter read my fortune by having me swirl the sludge detritus around the cup and upturn it onto the saucer. I don’t recall what the fortune was. I was just kind of surprised that you could read it in coffee grounds as well as tea leaves.

And then when I was living in Virginia Beach, one of our friends knew of a Mediterranean restaurant in a strip mall in Princess Anne—basically a hole-in-the-wall, run by a Greek emigrant then in his 50s or 60s. Jay had struck up a friendship with this guy, so we got personal attention when we went in.

There was both Greek coffee and Turkish coffee on the menu, exactly the same price. I asked what the difference was and the owner grinned. None, it seems. Exactly the same product: powdered beans, sugar, hot water, no filtering. Having them both just gave the menu variety.

And maybe it allowed Turks and Greeks both to finish off their meal with a coffee without aiding and comforting the enemy.

The last time I had Turkish coffee was in Istanbul, in 2000, so it seems I was overdue for it. I’ll have to see if there are other places in the area where I can find it.