Nothin' much to be said

I know it’s Friday and I’m supposed to be funny. But I haven’t found very much of this week amusing, so you’re on your own today.

It's all happening at the zoo

Ah, those merry folks at Copenhagen Zoo are at it again. You recall them—the ones who killed a healthy young giraffe last month because his genetic makeup was already represented in their breeding program, and then butchered his carcass in front of a crowd of families out for a Sunday jaunt. Then they fed Marius to the lions.

Well, turns out that this week they put down four of those very lions because they’re now surplus to requirements. At first I thought maybe they'd run out of ungulates to slaughter for lion chow, but it turns out that's not it.

They’re introducing a new male into the population—I guess for genetic reasons—and to make way for the import, two older and two 10-month-old males were, ah, terminated with extreme prejudice, as we’d say in another jungle.

This is on account of…well, I’m not entirely sure. The old ones might have objected to the new punk in the hood? And consequently the zoo’s ROI in the stud feline (well—isn’t that what he is?) might have been adversely affected? As for the cubs, described by the zoo in a statement as “not old enough to fend for themselves”, they would have been killed by the new male “as soon as he got the chance.”

Now there are some things about this that disturb me. The zoo’s statement says that these animals had to be killed “because of the pride of lions’ natural structure and behavior”. But there’s nothing natural about a group of lions (or any other type of animal) in a zoo. They are not in their natural environment, they enjoy none of the conditions they’d experience in the wild, their behavior is de facto not what it would be on their home turf, and none of those lions (of any age) probably knows how to fend for itself because they’re (supposed to be) looked after by humans.

Even their sex lives are controlled. That’s presumably why the new breeding male was brought in; as with Marius, evidently the existing genetic composition didn’t suit zoo management’s purposes. (I mean—they didn’t import him because he has some skillset not already present, right? He doesn’t speak rhino, for example, or know how to macramé?)

So citing a need to honor “natural structure” is bogus on the face of it.

They also used the term “euthanize” to describe the killings, which, as with Marius, I object to, since these lions’ lives were not ended “In order to relieve pain and suffering”, which is the definition of the term. They were killed because the zoo’s product roadmap has changed and they no longer fit in with the offering management thinks will provide the best customer experience.

The Guardian story mentions that Danes did not get the international reaction to the killing of Marius—some unnamed “leading expert” on animal ethics denouncing the “Disneyfication” of zoo inmates. Actually, while there might be some of that, the outrage encompasses the very anti-Disneyfication of animals—because not anthropomorphizing them is what makes you realize how much is wrong with the whole zoo setup. If you see them as members of species that were never intended by nature to live in small enclosed spaces for the entertainment (or even the edification) of humans, then you realize that killing them because they’ve become inconvenient for the institution’s breeding program is neither humane nor natural.

(Even in the horse-breeding business, once a stud has fulfilled his part of the bargain, they don’t slaughter him; they put him out to pasture. Of course, since all the wild animals kept in captivity have no residual notion of what their natural “pasture"’ looks like, much less how to survive in it, I do see the problem facing the animal keepers who want fresh bloodlines in their limited populations and constrained spaces. It’s like moving out the old sofa to make room for the spiffy new three-piece suite you think will look better in your living room.)

And it’s a good thing that the animals in the Copenhagen Zoo aren’t Disneyfied. Because if they were, there might be some yelps, screeches, roars and hisses of organized mutiny around the place. I mean—if this were a Disney movie, the critters would start to notice and remark on their comrades who keep disappearing. ‘Cause clearly ain’t nobody safe there.

Recruiters 36

I’m “working” with a recruiter for a solutions marketing position with an ad tech company here in the Valley they call Silicon.

Well, by “working” I mean she contacted me initially, couldn’t manage the schedule of the phone conversation she dictated, and when I did reach her, she neither gave nor solicited information.

If you don’t know, the recruiter’s job is much like a matchmaker’s: gather all relevant information from the hiring company/hiring manager about the company, the department, corporate/divisional goals, job requirements, what they’re looking for by way of background and personality, compensation budget, etc. Thereupon s/he trawls the jobseeker pool to find candidates that at least match the basic requirements.

But there’s more—now the job is to supplement the information on a prospect’s CV, find out where this person came from, where s/he wants to go; and determine whether there’s enough of a fit to pass on the credentials to the hiring manager.

(This obviously doesn’t apply in the contractor/body shop sphere, where all the recruiters care about is flinging CVs with some of the job listing’s buzzwords on them at clients, and hope that out of 50 one may stick. And that they can pay that person as little as possible.)

But this chick—oh, I’ll call her Myra—was having none of that. In the 12 minutes I spoke with her (these conversations usually last a minimum of half an hour) she asked me no questions about my background, what I’ve been doing or what I’m looking for. And when I asked about the corporate culture and what they’re looking for in the candidate, her answer was (and I am not making this up), “Well, I don’t live there, so I don’t know.”

She also said, “I don’t negotiate salaries”, which is interesting because generally recruiters for this kind of search get paid a percentage based on the offer salary, so it’s in their interests to try to get you as much as possible.

But, as I’ve noted in these pages in the past (just search on “Recruiters”), I long since gave up the notion that I could make sense out of these people. I just hope to God that the hiring manager has more skin in the game than Myra.

Spicy stuff

Yesterday’s post about recipes—particularly for French apple pie—put me in mind of a rather recent Muppet moment.

When you fling about half a teaspoon of thyme on your slice of French apple pie because the bottle of TJ’s thyme looks a lot like the bottle of nutmeg and your hand is moving faster than your brain or eye, what do you do?

If it’s the last piece of pie, you use your fingers to scrape off as much of the thyme as you can, slap on a scoop of vanilla bean ice cream and eat it.

A girl’s gotta do what a girl’s gotta do.

Gratitude Monday: the gift of recipes

You know how you can tell the best recipes? They’re the ones on yellowing paper with the tattered edges, stained and sticky from reuse. And today I’m grateful for all the ones in my collection, for the ones shared by and with friends.

Recipes are powerful things. They invoke much more than lists of ingredients and preparation instructions. They tie you to memories—not only of the actual food, but to who gave it to you and whom you’ve shared it with. Maybe to meals or occasions shared with them.

They are so evocative that women in the Terezín ghetto during World War II reconstructed menus and recipes for meals in their past, meals that they would have no hope of actually preparing in their present circumstances. But remembering and recording those recipes sustained them in different ways than actual food would have done.

A few years ago I went through my recipe box and got rid of maybe a couple hundred cards; the ones I have left definitely fall into that yellowed-and-stained category.

I have a recipe for fresh strawberry pie that came from our family friend, Mrs. Dyo. You can substitute ripe peaches for the strawberries, but only if the peaches are really, really ripe and flavorful. Then it’s about the best summer dessert ever.

My carrot cake recipe came from a colleague of mine at Fort Lee, Virginia (you know—where I learned to drink coffee next to the Chemical Capital of the South). The only reason my copy of this is readable is that some years after I got it, I shared with colleagues at Hughes Aircraft Company, and one of them typed up and distributed new copies of it. That puppy’s been sent out across two continents; it’s that good and that easy.

I got the recipe for red beans and rice from Mary Pyke in grad school. The first time I tried making it I kept having to move it to larger pots because it just wouldn’t stop expanding. When I yelped to Mary about my predicament, she replied, “Oh, yeah. I should have specified that ‘Serves six’ means ‘Serves six Viking warriors.”

I’ve had my recipe for French apple pie since I first discovered that pie didn’t have to taste like the God-awful frozen things my mother passed off as dessert. It came from my friend Leilah, and has recently been amended to include variations that she and her husband John use to make regular two-crust pie. (Major up: use tapioca instead of flour to keep the juices from making the bottom crust all soggy.)

Then I adjusted the crumb topping based on input from a couple of friends who responded when I put out a Facebook cry for help. Now the topping is loose and crunchy, not hard and resembling something Xena Warrior Princess might wear.

Maybe one of my newest acquisitions is a lovely salad of grilled steak and asparagus on cress with mango slices and a ginger-hoisin dressing. That came from my friend Danger Girl, via Twitter. It’s wonderful. You’ll know that even before you stick a fork in the salad because the recipe—not six months old—is already stained from splashes of the dressing.

I don’t know where I got the recipe for English toffee. The card is not only sticky and yellowed (even though by now I can make it from memory), it’s got a scorch mark from me leaving it on a burner I didn’t realize I’d turned on. I also don’t know how many times I’ve shared that recipe—people love it, and it’s easy as pie to make.

(Although, actually, pie isn’t all that easy. At least not pie crust. You need a “touch” with pastry to get it right. But I have a great recipe and I’m happy to share.)

Cornish pasties (oh, lord—the pastry has both lard and suet; I swear the filling is just my socially-acceptable rationale for making and eating that tender, tasty crust) from my grandmother, bread dressing from my great grandmother (marjoram instead of sage), cottage pie (lamb is expensive, so no shepherd’s pie) from Hugh Featheringill-Whittlestonefordly (whatever his name is), shortbread from my friend Bridget Navarro in Korea, fresh cranberry relish (mash-up from several sources)—I’ve shared them all with friends, who now have them in their collective memory.

Going digital—putting recipes on computer—is good, because I have a tendency to scribble things on paper, clip stuff out of newspapers, etc., which I often lose. But the recipe you look at on your device is never going to be an indicator of how good it is—you wipe the floury fingerprints off the screen after making it, and move on. It looks the same whether you’ve made it once or once a month. The ingredients and instructions are always neutral; no scribbled annotations of variations you’ve tried or outcomes. No memos about which occasions you served them on—they’re just there, like any other domestic tool. So I’m always going to have printouts to carry around with me when gathering the ingredients.

So, really grateful for recipes that nourish me and connect me in so many tangible ways with my friends and family. As an aside—if you know anything that smells better than apple pie baking, I want you to tell me what it is and give me your recipe for it.

Last laugh

It’s Friday of Saint Patrick’s week—I’ll leave you with a few Irish jokes and resume normal operations on Monday. Whatever "normal" is.

Yes, I realize that only the one in Belfast requires an Irish setting; the others could substitute any ethnicity and still be funny. (Well, maybe the one in Kerry…) But it was hard to find any that were funny at all.

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

Six Irishmen were playing poker when one of them played a bad hand and died.

The rest drew straws to see who would tell his wife. One man drew the shortest straw and went to his friend’s house to tell the wife.

The man says to her, “Your husband lost some money in the poker game and is afraid to come home.”

The wife says, “Tell him to drop dead!”

The man responds, “I’ll go tell him.”

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

A man was walking on a Belfast street late one night when suddenly he was confronted with a masked man who had a gun pointed right at him. 

The gunman said "Are you Protestant or Catholic?"

The man was scared out of his wits but figured that he had to give some kind of an answer.

Praying for guidance he replied, "Neither - I'm Jewish!"

Silence for about 5 seconds, then the gunman's reply - "Is that so?  Well let me tell you, you're talking to the first Arab in Belfast!"

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

An American tourist was driving in County Kerry, when his motor stopped. He got out to see if he could locate the trouble. A voice behind him said, "The trouble is the carburetor." He turned around and only saw an old horse.

The horse said again, "It's the carburetor that's not working."

The American nearly died with fright, and dashed into the nearest pub, had a large whiskey, and told Murphy the bartender what the horse had said to him.

Murphy said, "Well, don't pay any attention to him, he knows nothing about cars anyway."

*           *           *           *           *           *           *           *

Finally, from a beer company from St. Paul, Minn., I leave you with a visual:

Irish soul

As you know, March is Women’s History Month. And since we’re in Saint Patrick’s week, and I’m on a roll, I’ll just share a couple of my favourite songs from Irish women.

First up, the Corrs, here with The Chieftains:

And then The Commitments. Technically, not a girl group, but the three women take the lead here:

(Look, I didn’t say it would be Irish music, did I?)

I can watch The Commitments over and over—well, it’s hard to go wrong with a movie based on Roddy Doyle. It’s got some great lines, as well as fab music. One of the best is when Jimmy Rabbitte, the would-be impresario, is psyching up his band on why they should be at home in soul music:

“Do you not get it, lads? The Irish are the blacks of Europe. And Dubliners are the blacks of Ireland. And the Northside Dubliners are the blacks of Dublin. So say it once, say it loud: I'm black and I'm proud.”

Don’t get much better than that.

Writing (and other things) on the walls

Oh, what the hell—as long as I’m talking about the Irish I’ll share my impressions of Ulster. Overall, let me just say, tough crowd.

I’m not going to go into the 800-year history of Anglo-Irish contention. I’ll just point out that Ireland was Britain’s first colony (courtesy of Henry II), and is her last remaining colony.

My visit occurred in 1994, only a few months after the Downing Street agreement between the governments of the UK and the Republic of Ireland, as well as the cessation of military operations by the Provisional IRA. The Provos didn’t lay down their arms, but it was a step forward. One of their main opposing groups, the Ulster Volunteer Force (UVF), reacted with the full force of their pent-up testosterone, as I noticed on various walls:

On the other hand, the UVF may have a bit of a planning/estimating problem when it comes to propaganda graffiti. Your message has more impact if you don’t make yourself look like someone who can’t even see the end of your canvas.

Well, knowing the history and walking into it are two different things. Belfast was quite the eye-opener. Basically, it felt to me like Beirut with bangers and colcannon.

I went to an indoor shopping center because I lusted after one of those Filofaxes. (Look, it was the 90s, okay?) I was looking for a stationer’s when I noticed a pair of Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC) members patrolling the place in Kevlar vests and with automatic rifles at the ready. Not shouldered. At. The. Ready.

This is the only time I’ve ever seen that kind of thing in a First World country. Armed soldiers with the power to stop you for any reason was something I had to get used to in Korea. (Oh, also the nightly curfew, during which they could shoot you for any reason before they stopped you.) But frankly, it freaked me out to see it in Western Europe. And, I was the only person in the mall who even seemed to take notice of their presence.

They also had stop-and-search zones within the city. That’s where the guys with the Kevlar and assault rifles stop your car and give it a good shake-down, including running a bomb detector under the chassis. In the center of the city. In the center of a capital city.

(That didn’t happen to me while I was in Ulster, but back in the Republic I visited the Waterford factory, because you do, and I was stopped at the gate to the car park on the way in by an amiable old fellow—not armed, as far as I could tell—and he had a good root through the interior and the trunk, both of which by that point in the trip were pretty much tips. He did not have a bomb detector. I went through the factory, didn’t see anything there I couldn’t live without, and on my way out I stopped to ask the guard if he’d been searching for explosives. He weaseled just a bit, but finally allowed as to how he was.)

Then there were the police stations. Gotta say that I’ve not seen the like anywhere, not even South Central Los Angeles. Because what you’ve got here is not only not a place where you drop in to report a lost dog or slashed tires, I wasn’t even sure how the hell you’d get in at all.

Don’t know if you can see in this photo, but the fencing runs horizontally to the building, as well as vertically at the sidewalk, completely enclosing that forecourt area in steel mesh. It was as though the cops were caged. My understanding is that this is to prevent any Molotov cocktails that might be heaved at the station from hitting the ground and closing off the doorway. Or maybe from going into any of the windows.

There was another very literal symbol of the political/religious divide in Ulster: a DMZ between the Falls Road (inhabited by Republicans/Roman Catholics) and the Shankill Road (Unionists/Protestants). Here’s the wall on the Republican side:

But it’s not all spray paint and firebombing in Ulster. There are some real pockets of beauty, and the people—while not quite as sociable as their cousins in the 26 counties—could be congenial.

I spent one night at a pub-hotel near Bangor (close to the Giant’s Causeway). I’d had a substantial lunch so wasn’t interested in eating dinner, but I didn’t want to spend any more time than necessary in my poky little single room. (And here’s something for free: if you take a room above a pub, do not expect to get much sleep. You’re welcome.)

So I plunked myself down in the lounge near the restaurant and spent several hours with a bottle of mineral water, my journal and a turf fire. My one and only turf fire.

Periodically one of the waiters checked on me—not to push drinks but just to see that I was okay and to have a bit of a chat between his table runs. He told me that they’d had an American couple staying with them a few days before.

I asked, “Were they nice Americans? Because if not, I’m Canadian.”

But they apparently were, so I could retain my citizenship.

(I was having dinner the week before in Dublin in a restaurant where there was another American couple, from the Northeast, by the sound of them. They had, ah, expectations beyond their location, if you catch my drift. I recall that the female wanted artificial sweetener for her coffee, which the place did not have. Both the older and younger waiter working the room had time to chat with me throughout the night, but they could not be shut of that pair fast enough.)

I’ll close out today with the only Ulster-specific Irish song I know. Not something to sing your kids to sleep, but I've always kind of liked it. You’ll understand its political orientation from the line about cursing the pope. It’s worth it to stick to the end.

Gaol time

Okay, as I pointed out yesterday, the Irish are worth more than just a day.

Writing the Saint Patrick’s post got me thinking again about that trip to Ireland, and the photo of Kilmainham Gaol transported me back to the day I went there.

It was, as they say in country, a fine soft day.

Meaning it was raining. Not hard; maybe more like falling mist. (As I’ve said before, “The Emerald Isle” does not refer to precious stones. More like moss. Wet moss.)

There is nothing like visiting a prison in the rain. Even a former prison, one that’s now decked out with mostly decent lighting and is swept regularly.

(When I was selling my house in Seattle, my real estate agent made me take this photo down from the wall. She said it was "unsettling".)

The atmosphere is not light, either in terms of brightness or weight. They take you around the place in clumps, but somewhere in the execution courtyard I got unclumped because I was shooting photos and not paying that much attention to what they were doing tour-wise.

I was honing in on the door with the lock on it:

(See what I mean about the green?)

Then I turned around to find myself alone and not sure where everyone had gone, or how I was going to get there to catch them up.

Let me just say that if the lighted parts of the Gaol did not fill me with a sense of hilarity, the corridors I stumbled down made me just the teeniest bit—no, a whole lot—ill. Where I was obviously wasn’t a public area, so it wasn’t dressed up for tourist consumption. There wasn’t blood on the walls, or anything (at least that I could see), but it was monstrously dark and cramped and not a place I wanted to linger.

After some time (probably only a couple of minutes, but you begin to understand the relativity of time when you’re lost in a prison) I came across another tour clump. The guide was pissed off that I suddenly appeared from where I wasn’t supposed to have gone, but I just let him think I was an American blonde. With, you know, red hair.

I meekly allowed myself to be herded back to the central area and then walked a few blocks to catch the bus back to my hotel. As I got on and handed in my bus fare, I told the driver, “I just got out of jail.”

He paused for a couple of seconds and then replied, “Welcome back.”

Another reason why I really love the Irish.

Gratitude Monday: Sláinte bha!

Hmm? What’s that you say? Oh, right—Saint Patrick’s Day? Why, so it is.

It’s my take that “celebrating” the day is primarily a function of the Irish in America, who had huge chips on their shoulders what with being second-class citizens here. (They were not seen as particularly good for property values, particularly after the mass immigration following the Great Famine of the 1840s.) So they were putting on a swagger to flip the WASPS the bird.

Back in Ireland—eh, not so much. Yes, it was made a public holiday in 1903 as part of the whole idea of public (“bank”) holidays in the UK. But shortly afterward, another law was enacted that closed all drinking establishments for the day. (That stayed in effect until the 1970s.) So—not really so jolly.

(In the 1990s the Irish kind of woke up to the notion that Americans of all backgrounds used 17^th March as a jumping-off point for huge drink fests—including green beer in copious quantities. So in 1996 the government started “Saint Patrick’s Festival” to showcase the country and its industries. The next year it was a three-day event, kind of like your average Polish wedding.)

Okay, now that I’ve got that background out of the way, on to the Gratitude part of this Monday. I’ve always loved those right-brained, sweet-talking, ballad-singing, beauty-loving, cynically-inclined Irish, both here and in the old country. Especially now that I’ve been working in various areas of the tech industry for 20 years, where my right-brained, clear-talking, synapse-skipping cynical inclination sticks out like a lighthouse in a sea of tee-shirted and flip-flopped network engineers and software developers.

The Irish give me comfort and hope, reminding me that being this different is only a problem if you let the surprisingly cookie-cutter narrow-mindedness of the people here in the Valley they call Silicon (who consider themselves the very vortex of innovative thinking and yet seem to have been implanted with virtual blinkers the instant they set up their first incubator) impose their values on you.

Yeah—Irish history is not a placid sail through drifts of rose petals. Hard, bloody, vicious even, with a lot of beat downs. And the fat lady has not yet appeared on the stage; so there’s a ways to go. But still they rise. Ya gotta love that.

In the past I’ve given you some music from Ireland, and Yeats; of course, Yeats. Feel free to reprise the pleasure; no charge. Even a small treatise on whiskey in Ireland.

So this time around I’ll just share a couple of my favorite photos from my trip there.

Kilmainham Gaol was built in 1796. It was intended to be a model of new prison management philosophies; but two years later there was a rebellion, and the building had to take on a slew of political prisoners, so that whole enlightenment thing pretty much went out the window.

It’s perhaps best known for holding 15 leaders of the Irish Uprising after the British suppressed it in April 1916. They were all executed in the courtyard by firing squad. One, Joseph Connolly, had been so badly wounded in the fighting that the Brits had to sit him in a chair for his execution; he couldn’t stand. It’s an ugly place, that courtyard, and the Irish pretty much keep it that way as a reminder.

I was taken by one of the doors—long since bolted shut—in that courtyard, and this is what I shot.

But then, we’ll return to the whole drinking aspect mentioned earlier. Here’s a pub in Dublin, early afternoon. 

This is how you should drink, not crammed up against 1673 people you don’t know, all wearing green and yelling “begorrah” while slurping down green beer.