Bumper sticker philosophy observed

While riding the bus yesterday morning, I saw this bumper sticker:

"It is no measure of good health to be well adjusted to a sick society."

Christmas Ornament House

On the weekend of June 10-11, I attended some of the Marquette Waterside Festival, which is held at a narrow park along Lake Monona. Scheduled for Saturday were mainly international or ethnic music acts. These especially interested me because I like both kinds, but I preferred hearing the sitar act that was scheduled. Food and beer vendors help fund these neighborhood festivals, and some organizations set up booths, such as on protecting WI riverways, the Sierra Club, Amnesty International, and WORT (the community radio station). What most attracted my attention were UW astrobiologists, with microscopes to look at tiny meteorite particles that they explain you can find at home. They also handed out cards on life forms that live in extreme conditions on Earth.

One of the nearby houses has a tree with year-long Christmas ornaments. When I first saw this, I asked the owner about the weather breaking the ornaments, but she said the main problem was squirrels knocking down the balls and even chewing them, especially red balls. Below is a 3D photo of one of the ornaments.

In-house training/Stuff on my garden plot: Cincinnati Market Radishes
Since my last posting on here, I've been busy wrapping up the end of the semester and then taking training classes through Madison Area Technical College. At the Tech Academy, I learned how to run the Telepresence classroom that I'll use for one section this fall, and at the week-long Learning Academy, I took a class on educational evaluation as part of the certification requirements for WI technical college instructors. At these classes, I especially like meeting teachers from other departments/programs and picking up teaching ideas from them.

Cincinnati Market Radishes

In my plot at the Sheboygan Community Garden, I'm trying a less common radish called Cincinnati Market, which is dark red and long like a typical carrot. According to the Seed Savers Exchange catalog description, the length can be about 6 inches; however, mine tend to be shorter--about three to five inches. Mine also taste a little hotter or spicier than typical radishes rather than mild. That could be because of our warm spell earlier this month. I actually don't like radishes that much unless they're really mild. [In the future I'll say more about other less common things I'm growing.]

Last Saturday at the Dane County Farmers' Market, I came across a vendor selling radishes that looked similar, but she called them by a Japanese name. So I decided to do some research and found that old seed catalogs scanned into Google books often listed Cincinnati Market radish along with many other long radishes.



Diameter about one cm and under, but some

are around one inch (2.5 cm) in the top part. 

Some sources say that another name for Cincinnati Market radish was Glass Radish because of brittleness. Mine aren't anywhere near brittle--in fact,I don't understand how a radish could be brittle like glass. [See this entry in Maule's Seed Catalog (1902), which says that they're hard to distinguish from Long Scarlet radishes.]

One of the best sources of info on this I've found so far are books on gardening by Adolph Kruhm published around WW I.  In his Home Vegetable Gardening from A to Z, Kruhm (1918) discusses in relatively great detail when to grow various kinds of radishes. According to him, the White Icicle radish could "be considered the greatest all-around general purpose radish in cultivation"(p. 194), so I might try them. [Kruhm's introduction starts with this claim: "April 15, 1917, will go down as one of the most momentous days in American history. quite apart from the fact that it marked our entrance into the World War" (p. v). His Home Vegetable Gardening (1914), maybe an earlier version of the A to Z book, gives less detailed advice but has a table of contents with links.]
Added on June 18:

Authentic Chinese food--an example 西红柿炒鸡蛋 (stir-fried tomatoes and eggs)
The only food critic to win a Pulitzer, Jonathan Gold of the LA Weekly, delivered a lecture last night titled "Authenticity, Culture, and the Korean Taco" as part of the Humanities Without Boundaries series of UW. During the last half, Gold used his cell phone as a miniature teleprompter to read some of his talk. The best part was in Q and A, such as when he was asked about the worst meal he'd ever eaten.

The issue of whether a dish is authentic reminds me of one of the most common dishes in Chinese homes--tomato and eggs.  In my experience, this can be a main or side dish at any meal, but I've yet to notice it at a typical Chinese restaurant in the US.

Whenever I taught oral English, one of my assignments was to ask students to describe how to cook a dish, and I think that the majority chose tomato and eggs. It basically entails cooking scrambled eggs in some vegetable oil-- sort of into an omelet but then cut into pieces with a spatula. You then cook the tomatoes--either diced (my preference) or in wedges--usually with green onion or scallion and maybe some ginger, although this could overpower the other flavors. Finish by mixing together the cooked eggs and tomatoes. Salt is almost always added at some point, and a little bit of sugar is OK, although not so common.

By the way, another common dish I've had in Chinese homes was uncooked sliced tomatoes with sugar sprinkled on top.

Many of the online recipes seem to call for too many tomatoes, even one for every egg; however, I--and most of the Chinese I've talked to about this--use one regular-size tomato with two or three eggs.

A lot of variations
1. mix with noodles or even rice
2. with garlic (I think that green onions are much more commonly used.)
http://www.beijingmadeeasy.com/chinese-recipes/egg-and-tomato-chinese-recipe

3. with some sugar
http://appetiteforchina.com/recipes/stir-fried-tomato-eggs

4. close to what I describe
http://www.travelchinaguide.com/tour/food/chinese-cooking/scrambled-eggs-tomato.htm

http://www.epicurious.com/recipes/food/views/Stir-Fried-Egg-and-Tomato-352835

Videos
This one has too many variations from the norm
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FRfLNGE2YUo [I think her tomato wedges are too big and she cooks this longer than necessary. Adding chicken flavoring is definitely not typical. I don't push the spatula so much while the tomatoes cook, and mine is not so wet or juicy. Pushing the cooked eggs to the side of the pan while cooking the tomatoes, as she does it, is fine rather than emptying them into a bowl.

At the end she mentions dipping bread into the juices. I think that this would only be good with the very dry mantou (steamed buns) that are common in northern China.]

Some thoughts about the anti-budget repair bill protests in Madison in February and March
"Are we preaching to the choir?" was an important question asked at a March 3 panel discussion held at the Orpheum Theater on media coverage of the Madison protests. But the panel failed to examine this issue carefully, and even one on it suggested that the majority has become the choir, making it a non-issue. 

I had too much to say about those events, so I ended up not posting anything on here for about two months. Another thing is that I had a bad cough from a cold at the end of February through spring break that disrupted my sleep.

Attending a talk on primates while worrying about the WI governor's attack on state employee unions
Friday evening I was torn between watching a Cinematheque showing of a documentary on the Nuremberg trials and attending a talk by a primate researcher. The film was a restoration of a US government documentary made in the 1940s that wasn't allowed to be shown in the US. I figured that I could see it in the future on DVD, so I chose the talk by Jill Pruetz, an anthropologist at Iowa State.[For more info see this article:http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/2008-04/chimps-with-spears/roach-text.html]

The chimpanzees she studies in the savanna-woodlands of Senegal face an environment very different from the chimps in more heavily forested central Africa, such as in the Congo. She got in the news for discovering that the Senegal chimps sometimes sharpen with their teeth the ends of branches to use as spears to kill small monkeys. The chimps poke the spears into the holes of tree trunks where monkeys hide. Before this it was thought that only humans make such a tool.

For my intro soc classes, I sometimes show a Nova documentary on the first day called "The Last Great Ape," which is on bonobos but includes an interesting comparison to chimps. The main point is that bonobos are more empathetic and much less violent than chimps. Some of the proposed causes are genetics, the male dominance in chimp culture versus female dominance of bonobos, the use of sex among bonobos as a calming mechanism, and the competition over resources that chimps face with gorillas north of the Congo River. In the past comparisons of humans with primates would mainly be with chimps, but maybe we can better understand ourselves by also learning more about bonobos.

Bumper Stickers/Eating Jiaozi for Chinese New Year/Music at the Union
"Imagine Whirled Peas"--seen on bumper sticker on car parked near Madison's State Street while I was walking from local library to Memorial Library. [Chinese might want to email me if they can't figure out the message. It's a pun on another bumper sticker.]

I've probably seen this one before, but today it reminds me of a teaching idea of Jack Bowen, a high school teacher in the SF Bay area--asking students to record bumper stickers to discuss the philosophy of the message. Maybe I'll try that with my students. [I first heard of his book, If You Can Read This: The Philosophy of Bumper Stickers, from WPR--http://www.wpr.org/book/100530a.cfm He's interviewed for the third segment.]

Monday is the fifth day of the Chinese new year. Because I'll be busy tomorrow, I made some jiaozi for lunch using pre-made jiaozi wrappers and then finely chopped for the filling Chinese cabbage, green onion, and spinach along with some shredded carrot and one scrambled egg. The typical filling uses ground pork often mixed with Chinese cabbage and maybe some other vegetable. The custom is to eat jiaozi on new year's eve around midnight, the first day, and the fifth day (often leading to people eating jiaozi during the days in between). Another big day for eating jiaozi was the first day of winter. On the 15th day of the new year--called the Lantern Festival in English but yuanxiao jie [ 元宵节] in most of China--the custom is to eat glutinous rice balls--called yuanxiao--that have various kinds of sweet fillings. In about a week, I'll describe how to make them.

Saving students money when assigning textbooks
For the two intro sociology classes that I'm teaching this semester, I've again assigned a reader edited by James Henslin Down to Earth Sociology: Introductory Readings. 14th Edition. The list price is $23 but online sources, such as Amazon, sell it these days for under $17. Most of the readings are abridged research articles and selections from books. It's good for students to read actual research findings rather than very short summaries of them in regular textbooks. Another advantage is that it's an easy-to-carry paperback.

One chapter that I especially like using for teaching is Devah Pager's audit study in Milwaukee on young men--two white and two black--applying for jobs. The men submitted the same information on education and job experience but rotated by week on how they answered criminal record questions. The complete article in the American Journal of Sociology, "The Mark of a Criminal Record," is at her Princeton website. For a quick summary of the findings, see the graph on page 958. [edited on September 18, 2014: Devah now teaches at Harvard, so the new site for the article is  http://scholar.harvard.edu/files/pager/files/pager_ajs.pdf ]

This semester I'm experimenting with using as a supplement a free online textbook that was posted on Flat World Knowledge near the end of last semester: Sociology: Understanding and Changing the Social World, Brief Edition by Steve Barkan. Typical hardback intro soc textbooks cost over $80 or even over $100, so I hope that sites like this one do well.

Breakfast at the Farmers' Market/Only 11% of Americans eat recommended amount of fruits and vegetables
This morning I ate breakfast at the Dane County Farmers' Market. Because the winter market is held indoors at the senior center, which has a kitchen by the lobby, local chefs--assisted by volunteers from local non-profits--are invited to prepare meals using ingredients mainly supplied by vendors. This week the chef, from the Mermaid Café, supervised East High School students taking part in a "Chef in the Classroom" project.

A meal usually costs $7.50--about three cereal boxes on sale--so I hesitate to eat breakfast away from home. But today's menu was an interesting change. Along with fruit juice were "pan-fried trout; country ham with grits and red-eye gravy; corn bread with plum preserves; fresh salad with mixed greens, also including micro greens, pea shoots, and spinach served with a warm bacon dressing and crumbled feta cheese." I try to avoid eating food from animals, except for milk products, fish, and eggs, but the local vendors use more humane methods to raise animals and the thin ham portion was smaller than my palm.

Eating at the winter farmers' market sometimes inspires me to eat greens in the morning. When my grandmother was living in her own home until last year, I sometimes picked greens,such as Swiss chard and beet greens, from the garden I'd planted and cook them together for breakfast.