The truth about cats and dogs

I really got a giggle out of this research undertaken at the University of Tokyo: it seems (after an eight-month study of 20 animals) that cats actually do recognize their, uh, owner’s voices when they call. But they just don’t care.

The astounding thing about this study is that anyone felt the need to conduct it. All you’d have to do is ask a couple of feline-servants, and we’d have told you. For nothing.

Actually, I believe that Gary Larson nailed the whole cats/dogs vocal recognition thing 30 years ago. Tokyo researchers—I give you this for nothing, too.

Farewell to Mandiba

Word has come that Nelson Mandela has died today, aged 95. He had been in frail condition for some time—not only was he in his nineties, but he’d suffered respiratory problems that dated back to his nearly three decades in prison for his anti-apartheid work.

What was neither old nor frail were his strength of character, his absolute integrity and his quiet dignity. You’d think a man as vilified and abused for most of his life by the white power structure would have a legitimate case for invoking the wrath of God when he and the ANC took office. But his presidency of South Africa was marked by his focus on national reconciliation.

It has never ceased to astonish me whenever I’m reminded of his gentle strength and genuine forbearance. Ninety-five years old, marked by a third of his life in prison, and he had the physical and moral uprightness of someone with the hand of God at his back.

South Africa is not without its problems. But I wonder where it would be today were it not for this amazing man who cast light wherever he found darkness?

There is a Yiddish term that is entirely appropriate to apply to Mandela: he was a mensch.

We don’t have many of them in our human history. He added grace to our lives.

It's in the mail

Following on my post about making candy for holiday presents, let me share with you an experience I’m decidedly not grateful for:

Dealing with the US Postal Service to mail nine packages, five to the UK.

I’d collected some flat-rate Priority Mail boxes from the Sunnyvale Fremont post office (where the guy behind the lobby window looked at me like I’d lost my mind when I asked for them), and had my nine boxes and envelopes in carry bags when I went to the Sunnyvale main station.

I even had Max Hastings’s All Hell Let Loose to read while in line. I figured the 450 pages I still had to go would keep me occupied while I waited.

Well, the adventure began when I pitched up at the counter and the woman informed me that I had the wrong boxes to send things to the UK, and also the wrong customs forms (which I’d filled out beforehand).

Now, I’ll be buggered if I can figure out exactly what the difference is between these two—except for a slight variation in size. But what the difference amounted to was about $20 per package. Plus redoing the customs form.

(Also, let me just say that if I ever come across the ass who designed those self-assembly boxes, I’m going to break all his fingers. You’re welcome.)

However—if all I did was wrap over the boxes, everything would be copacetic. Evidently it’s something to do with the pre-printed markings.

Although, as you understand—every damned one of them is official USPS kit, available for pickup without any explanation of appropriate use. And it made me wonder what the hell is the significance of all the boxes they print—and don’t explain to you until you hit the shipping counter.

I got a bit of a giggle out of her warning me that “You won’t get a tracking number” if I didn’t have…something, not sure what it was.

Because the USPS “tracking” system is pointless. I know for a fact—from multiple experiences as both a sender and recipient of packages they “track”—that their letter carriers often just dump parcels that won’t fit into mail boxes in public places like lobbies instead of hauling their lazy asses up to the actual office or residence. Once so dumped, they log them as “delivered”.

And once “delivered”, the USPS refuses all responsibility.

So, yeah—not worried about having your damned tracking number.

Well, so I went home and wrapped up the offending parcels. Then I took them to the Fremont station (again with All Hell Let Loose), where Mary actually gave me an injured look when she realize I had five packages to send to the UK. It was like I’d asked her to prove Fermat’s last theorem.

“It’s going to take time,” she intoned.

Whatever.

But—with Mary at the helm, it did indeed take time. Because she just couldn’t seem to grasp the whole notion of sending things outside the US. (And before you ask, Mary is not a twenty-something; she’s been around the block a few hundred times.)

She laboriously weighed each package (sighing with each), and painstakingly typed with two fingers something into a computer from the customs forms—are they now adding that sort of crap to the big data miasma? Every single one. She chided me for writing “confections”—what’s that? Candy? She scratched out “confections” and wrote in “candy”, apparently convinced that no one in either the USPS or Royal Mail would understand “confections”.

She also demanded, “How many?” How many what? Candy? What the hell does it matter? I made stuff up.

She was so concerned about that stuff she never once asked me whether my packages contained anything dangerous, flammable, alcohol, perfume, etc. I’d have thought that would have been more germane than how many candies were in each box. But I’d probably have to explain “germane” to her, if I brought it up.

The postage charged wasn’t what the woman at the main station had quoted—I’m guessing that you’d not get two workers across the USPS to come up with the same story.

In the 25 minutes or so I watched Mary go through her painful routine I got a bit of a laugh out of the worker at the next place on the counter—I swear, not one of the people who came to her got away without having to redo something. “You have the wrong form!” “Is this right?” “No!” She was the Queen of Denial, and boy, did she relish it.

Anyhow, eventually I paid a ridiculous amount of money and left. Mary was so dispirited she didn’t even ask if I wanted to buy anything else, which is the big USPS thing—they’re much more interested in upselling you than in doing the transaction you came there for.

One thing I’ll say for the Sunnyvale staff (at both locations) is they’re not as crabby as the Cupertino crowd. I swear—those people are the surliest humans outside a Dostoyevsky novella, even when they’re trying to get you to buy other stuff.

What I learned was that the USPS is still the bastion of the quintessential time-serving government worker, still giving the rest of the public sector a bad name for plodding, indifference and obstructionism. I suppose it’s good to know that there are some things that never change.

Feeling like a cabbage head

I belong to a couple of professional organizations, and joined three other women from one of them yesterday to sort food at Second Harvest Food Bank.

I had no idea what “sort food” meant—but in this case it meant packing five heads of cabbage into a carton (to make 16 pounds, roughly). Seems that in the Bay Area, they get produce pretty much all year round, so the hungry people they serve in Santa Clara and San Mateo counties don’t have to depend on canned goods.

Even though both the organization and SHFB were disappointed in our turnout (they were expecting more members to show up), in a little less than two hours we met the goal of packing 150 cartons (and I assembled about 120 of said cartons).

That’s more than a ton of cabbage, and my muscles are telling me about it.

So if you don’t mind, I’m going to slap some more pain patches on my shoulder and do some stretches.

Is it fraud prevention or is it spending analysis?

A while ago an email came into my queue purportedly from American Express, telling me that they’d noticed some unusual activity on my account and I should give them a shout.

Well, you always have to wonder about anything that suddenly pops up and requires action that could involve you giving someone Personally Identifiable Information (PII). So I went home and called the general AmEx customer service from my landline.

And it turns out that there had been two attempted transactions at a Bloomingdale’s somewhere, and AmEx’s algorithm had sent up flares.

The customer service guy transferred me to a woman in their fraud prevention division, who asked me the same security questions the first person had, and then she went to town. The Bloomies attempts (AmEx blocked them) were definitely not mine, and there were a couple of other odd things, which she flagged up. She deactivated my account instantaneously and sent me a new card by overnight.

This happened just as one of the people I follow on Twitter was whining that his (non-AmEx) credit card was suddenly declined at a bar for no apparent reason. He was stomping about metaphorically—I don’t know whether it’s his only card, or he was just chagrinned by the refusal. But it made me think about AmEx’s approach.

On one of my annual trips home to Virginia from the UK, I went to Tyson’s Corner mall, to Nordstrom. Then I went to Tower Records (yes—it was a while ago). By the time I got to the sporting goods store in Reston and was ready to buy new runners, the POS register flashed, “Get picture ID.” In less than a couple of hours, they’d spotted the anomalous behavior (or at least the location), and were ready to step in.

This time they probably rolled within a couple of hours, too. 

In contrast, NatWest, my UK bank, took almost two weeks to notify me (by snail mail to my US address, where they’d been sending my statements for more than two years) that they’d noticed more than £700 in charges to my debit card (all made in the London area), and had I by any chance made them. 

(Keep in mind that in the entire three years I'd resided there, I'd used the card a total of three times.)

Well, no, I hadn’t, and when I finally got one of their reps on the phone, you could just hear her squirming because they had to eat all those charges. (They wanted me to file a UK police report, but when I asked her whether it should be with Thames Valley Police, where NatWest were, or the Met, because I’d lived in London, she kind of petered out. Well, maybe they could waive the police report…)

(She also informed me that it was all but a sure-fire bet that the charges were made by Royal Mail employees—they’re apparently well known for filching credit and debit cards from the post; and a card going to a US address was practically screaming to be stolen. NatWest didn’t have any provision for activating your new card from a secure/known phone number; no, no—that might have cost them a bob or two.)

So I’m continually impressed by American Express’s professionalism and customer service, especially when reminded that not all credit card companies deliver like they do.

On the other hand, I do have a suspicion that they replace my card so quickly because they’re not sure thieves could spend as fast as I do.

Which is why this resonated with me:

Gratitude Monday: sweet rituals

I think it was some time back in the 90s that I decided that baking Christmas cookies was too labor-intensive for me. All that mixing, rolling out, cutting and decorating—honestly way too much work.

So I started making candy. One batch of fudge can be divvied up into eight or even more gift baskets, after all. And toffee turns out to be pretty easy to make (once you get your head around the fact that it goes up to 300°F and you shouldn’t try tasting it after that), and it was exceedingly popular.

Then I started adding in pralines (which were actually way fiddly—if you didn’t take the syrup mix off the heat at exactly the right moment, you got something either too soft or too crumbly). And then caramels—which were a pain in the neck when time came to cut them up and wrap them. A block of hazelnut caramels is extremely stiff to slice up, and wrapping involves cutting a gazillion cellophane squares and trying to twist them around something that’s basically solidified butter with some sugar and flavor.

(I was once talking with my sister while wrapping them, and I made the mistake of muttering about how slippery the damned things were. There was a pause before she chirped, “You can buy them already wrapped, you know.” Short call, that.)

Well, after that I went in for truffles; various varieties of truffles, which only upped the chocolate splatter all over my kitchen. And bark. And glass candy.

It got to the point where every December that whole part of the house crunched, and I regularly walked out of my socks because they stuck to the kitchen floor.

The thing is, though—people get fixated on that stuff. One year I gave things that didn’t involve me melting sugar, butter and chocolate in varying permutations. I gave beautiful things, thoughtful things. The comments I got were along the lines of, “Aren’t I getting candy this year?”

In Virginia, when I gave the gift package to one friend who lived in the Shenandoah Valley, the pralines didn’t make it past the Fairfax County line. For another friend, it was the caramels that never saw Prince William County. What are ya gonna do?

I realized that I’d completely lost the plot he year I had 17 kinds of candy to apportion out among 21 bags/boxes to be shipped all over the place. I had become my own worst enemy.

So I backed off.

Since then, there’ve been a couple of years when I didn’t make candy at all. But this year, I felt in the mood. Not for the full-bore insane double digit output, but to make a few batches of a few favorites and get them out to people before Epiphany, which deadline I’ve been known to miss.

Starting on Thanksgiving day, I did just a couple of batches a day, working my way through five pounds of butter, eight pounds of sugar and six pounds of chocolate. (Listen, for the toffee alone, 18 ounces of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate only covers two batches.) And between the routine and the music I put on to sing to, I realized that candymaking is kind of a Zen thing for me, something I’m truly grateful for.

First of all—there’s the pounding of the chocolate to break it up to melt. I used to chop it; then it occurred to me that I get a sore wrist every year from going through blocks of chocolate. But pounding it with a mallet both breaks it up just fine and is really kind of therapeutic.

Then there’s the chopping of the walnuts—using a food processor just makes them into a damp Baklava-like mush, so you have to keep manually chopping them very fine in small handfuls. Chop, chop, chop, chop. I’m singing along to “My Back Pages” and chopping my little heart out, the knife just rocking back and forth across the board.

When it comes to fudge, that’s where you have to pay attention. That mixture of evaporated milk and sugar will burn in a New York instant if you don’t keep stirring it constantly from the moment you set it on the heat. Which means standing at the stove for about twelve minutes stirring until it comes to a boil, and then another eight or so before it hits the soft-ball point on the candy thermometer.

(I’ve also developed an annual ritual: ten minutes finding the church key to open the evaporated milk, because that’s pretty much the only canned thing I ever have in my house, and I only ever use the opener for this purpose.)

You have to keep stirring it, but it still kind of spits up bits of syrup. I learned a long time ago that when you’re doing this, you wear long sleeves, no matter how warm the environment might be. You have to respect the syrup.

Because—sure enough—this time it poofed a little volcano of hot milk-and-sugar straight into my hair as I was leaning over the stove trying to wipe something up.

Same with the spiced pecans—you have to stir and stir them as the mixture gets more and more syrupy to coat them completely before you pop them into the oven. And then you’ve got the aroma of five-spices and garam masala throughout your house.

It’s a very good process to go through—lining up sugar, chocolate, butter, pecans, walnuts, pans and wooden spoons along the counter. Then steadily working through each routine. To tell you the truth, I’m sick of chocolate from about the second batch of toffee; and I don’t seem to be able to keep it from splattering around the place—not even after all these years—when I’m working with it and the Bain Marie.

But I’ve got four types of confections ready to give my friends (and a trip to the Post Office in my immediate future).

And so on Gratitude Monday I’m thankful that I can make something that people really love, and which they won’t receive from anyone else. And for the ritual that has become part of me over the Christmas seasons.