Ruminations-On the Hoopla Over a Jewish Deli

Ever since All the Best Deli opened its doors, the discussions on the restaurant groups have been vociferous and partisan. Some of it have even become nasty. I suppose that is a reflection of the times that we are in. Even accounting for our present culture’s proclivity for polarization, it is still very surprising from the usually genteel people of the Midwest.

I had seen this report about Steingold’s Deli in Chicago. (https://abc7chicago.com/jewish-deli-chicago-near-me-steingolds/13303768/) and it occurred to me that one of the contributing reasons is the expectations that the general public has when they speak of delis. There is a huge difference between deli’s and Jewish deli’s as the reporter tried to explain in the video. It never occurred to me because as I had lived in cities such as Atlanta, St. Louis, and Ann Arbor, there were Jewish deli’s in those cities. It didn’t bother me that there wasn’t a Jewish deli in Dayton, although I did miss my latke’s, matzo ball, kreplach, and knishes. I also missed the meats: briskets, corned beef, and pastrami that did not come with the Boar’s Head label stamped on the packaging.

Not all delis are the same. Just as not all places who make sandwiches call themselves delis, any place that calls themselves delis are not automatically Jewish deli’s. The difference in price can be attributed to the difference between a place that calls itself a deli and one that calls itself a Jewish deli, it is not apples to apples.

A Jewish deli is a place where the meats are prepared by the establishment, come out of the tables steaming hot, and are then sliced for each order. The bread must be Jewish rye, baked in small batches, unless otherwise requested. There are minimal accoutrements but the menu also has plenty of other Jewish cuisine delicacies to fill my needs.

I need to declare at the outset that I don’t own stock in the restaurant, I don’t work there, nor am I related to anyone who owns of works there.  They don’t pay me for endorsements either. In fact, I have only been once, and I was quite a happy customer. I intend to go back again to sample the menu items that I had not sampled.

Being the curious sort that I am, I did a bit of Googling to see whether there are real Jewish delis in the surrounding area. The only place that I would call a Jewish deli is Shapiro’s in Indianapolis, this is where I would resort to when I needed my Jewish deli yen met. Matzo ball soup, an order of latkes, and big old sandwich on rye bread, the meat being the only variable.

I am unfamiliar with the food scene in Cincinnati and Columbus but in my cursory search, I found Izzy’s (Cincinnati) and Katzinger’s (Columbus)

I looked at the menu of All The Best Deli  and picked out some quintessential staples of a Jewish deli. I then tried to compile a table comparing Jewish deli’s in the other cities. As it turned out, Izzy’s and Katzingers offered less than half of what All The Best Deli offers, so I took them off the comparison.

I selected Steingold’s in Chicago, Shapiro’s in Indianapolis, and Katz’s Deli in New York City, the iconic representative of a proper Jewish deli in my humble opinion. I was able to compare the prices for five menu items that are offered by both All The Best Deli and Steingold’s; seven menu items that are offered by both All The Best Deli and Shapiro’s; eight menu items that are offered by both All The Best Deli and Katz’s. I could not accurately judge the portion size comparisons between the different restaurants, so that is something for people to continue to kvetch about.

Some salient points, I had selected a dozen items from All The Best, three were dropped because they weren’t offered by the majority of the Jewish deli’s I selected; I was down to nine menu items. The restaurants in the Midwest had mostly comparable prices. Katz’s prices were astronomical as compared to the midwestern restaurants.  To put things into better perspective I looked up the cost-of-living comparisons between Dayton to NYC and adjusted the Katz’s prices to bring it closer to a Dayton equivalence. For your information, the cost of Living in NYC is 43% more than Dayton. The farthest right column shows the adjusted price. The comparison between the adjusted Katz’s price and as compared to the All The Best menu price, they are not all that different.  

One last variable in the menu pricing is that All The Best proudly proclaims that they source all of their foods from the best Jewish deli’s around the country since they wanted the best and most authentic Jewish food products available (https://allthebestdeli.com/our-story/ ), which means that they have to pay massive shipping costs to schlep all the food regularly from wherever the other deli’s are and get them to Dayton, which adds to the cost of doing business.

Here is to the wishful thinking that the malevolent tones of the kvetchers will ameliorate somewhat if they read this. But I highly doubt that.

 

 

Ruminations-Atelic Vs Telic

The term atelic activity came to me while reading Oliver Burkeman’s book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals (Burkeman 2021). The book is about the very contemporary malaise affecting our society: the lack of time, or more accurately, our lack of success in “managing” our time. Burkeman approaches time management from a different perspective, an alternative one, as Burkeman is wont to do. The definition of atelic appears in Chapter 9: Rediscovering Rest. Burkeman cites Kieran Setiya’s book (Setiya 2018) for the original definition, which is: an activity whose value does not derive from its telos, or ultimate aim. We are conditioned to live our lives in a goal-oriented world, a telic world, which is a world where we have lost our ability to pursue an activity for the sake of taking part in the activity. One synonym that is often equated with atelic activities is that of a hobby, because a hobby is something we do just to do. The example Burkeman uses is hiking: just hiking, to partake in nature, to just do rather than hiking for the sake of something tangible, like better health or to travel from one point to the other.

Hobbies have come to have a negative connotation in our society; hobbies are judged to be purposeless and inconsequential because hobbies are something we do outside of our serious mission of being cogs in the economic engine. This bias becomes obvious as we seek a definition for atelic. Words like unfinished, incomplete, dreadful, revolting or repulsive are used to define the term. Atelic pursuits have been judged as an activity best befitting a dilettante; someone whose interest in any subject which is considered to be of a superficial rather than professional nature. Which leads us to another distinction that is also assumed in our culture, that of the generalist.

David Epstein’s Range (Epstein 2019) dives into the distinction between generalists and specialists: a generalist would be more likely to pursue a subject, any subject in an atelic  manner. Epstein discourses on the advantage that a generalist, an amateur who is more likely to study a topic as an outsider; someone, who by virtue of their ignorance of the prior arts, are concomitantly, more likely to treat any problem with curiosity while not being affected by opinions and experiences that are distorted by insider bias. This is often the difference between having unconventional ideas for solutions versus staying with the same solutions that loops around the same assumptions and well-trod solutions.

The generalist, i.e., amateur, is more likely to pursue subjects in an atelic manner. Their purpose is not to search for A solution for specific situations within specific contexts. Their purpose is to learn and gather information, accrue experience, integrate those into knowledge, with their sights set on learning and doing for the sake of learning and doing.  The amateur solutions may often be unfeasible, unrealistic, or illogical, but that is where the most original thinking comes from. It also goes without saying that the amateur’s process is probably the least efficient and most time-consuming.

Burkeman specifically emphasized that we hobbyists/dilettantes/atelic activity pursuers are more likely to be only good enough at whatever it is that we choose to indulge in, but not be at an expert level. We are amateurs in the best sense of the word. The key driving force is our passion rather than necessity, hence the aversion to deadlines and timetables. Deadlines and timetables dampen, defuses, and deflates the passion.

It wasn’t until I was knee deep in the muck of my professional engineering life that I discovered that I not only did not fit into my well-defined and constrained role as R & D engineer as dictated by the industry, but the role was also antithetical to my natural inclinations. Of course, I didn’t know enough at that time to classify my passions as being atelic or that I was better attuned to be a generalist. One of the first indications that I was a round peg trying to fit into square holes was early in my career while I was having a conversation with a fellow engineer. We were speaking about Number Theory, he just could not understand the value of something that cannot obviously be applied to engineering, asserting that if it doesn’t serve a practical purpose then it is just a waste of time. While I had always marveled at the broad vision and insight demonstrated and are needed by mathematicians. This is not to say that my head was completely in the clouds. After all I was trained in engineering and not in the pure sciences, I appreciated engineering and more often than not, I indulged in the same applications orientation.  Even as I reveled in my role as a problem solver, I also enjoyed the opportunities that my “hobbies” gave me to wander aimlessly.

Nothing made me happier than when I was researching and learning for my job, ostensibly in search of practical solutions to the short-term problems that occurred in my daily engineering responsibilities; but I found my thrill in the act of learning, the application of the result of the learning was a natural follow-through. I reveled in the discovery rather than the implementation of the solution. 

This is the reason that David Epstein’s idea of the generalists versus specialists resonated with me. I finished reading his book after I came to the realization that my efforts at being an engineer in the corporate environment were desultory, that my intellectual inclinations were mismatched with the needs of my chosen role in an industry-oriented profession, which caused me to be intellectually disengaged. My temperament was more aligned with that of a generalist, someone who Stays Calm and Know Things. Someone who has a hard time justifying their existence in a corporate culture, where answers to specific questions in a timely manner are required. No one knew what to do with someone like me, someone who has a broad general knowledge of many things. I was fortunate that I worked with many managers who saw value in my skills and temperament, even though I hadn’t been aware of those skills and temperament myself. I served my employers well when their needs and my talents aligned, they did not waste their time or money on me, but I also did not fully develop into what they wanted. It was at this point, after I made the connection, that I narrowed the focus of my attention to my atelic pursuits.

My passions were for learning, for the accumulation of knowledge which served to satisfy my own curiosity rather than satisfying external needs. The word curiosity appeared prominently on my radar at that point in my life. I indulged in reading, researching,  and learning to answer my curiosity. Yet, as happy as I was doing what I was doing; I was still feeling guilty about not having an anchor, a project-oriented focus to my intellectual life, a timeline to measure against. I convinced myself that I was doing all these things to help my teaching and coaching just to justify the time that I was using to happily meander, pick up digressions and tangential topics at will as they piqued my curiosity. Even though my research did eventually help me in my teaching and coaching, the result was beside the point rather than being the point.

Indeed, my experience as a generalist and practicing atelic work has an added benefit. Doing for the sake of doing put me in the rarified space that many have experienced, and I had previously spoken of: being in the flow. (https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2023/01/volleyball-coaching-life-thoughts-are.html).

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi defines the state of flow as: “Being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away.  Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you’re using your skills to the utmost.” (Csikszentmihalyi 1990) Which nicely links the atelic with being in the flow.

Edward Slingerland defines wu-wei , the Taoists term for the idea of flow as: the dynamic, effortless, and unselfconscious state of mind of a person who is optimally active and effective. (Slingerland 2014). Which also ignores any mention of results or constraints, time or otherwise.

I will inevitably lose myself to the flow as I apply myself to my atelic activities. Time disappears and labor is not labor but joy. In other words, I was Doing by not Trying. Applying effortless effort to my activities. Accomplishing without trying. The ideas have intertwined in my mind so that being atelic is  synonymous with being in the flow.

My opus operandi now are to have open-ended inquiries at various stages of disarray, both in my mind and in what I had written down. Termination dates of all the inquiries are not even secondary or tertiary, they just aren’t important, as my curiosity drives me to continuing the path towards just doing without end. Completion or mastery are not the central questions, my curiosity comes first. The benefit of this approach is that I never give up on any activity, I just put them to rest for a bit as I contemplate the intellectual difficulties and conceptual challenges.

I still have telic tasks, and I do them diligently, with the internal logic that the sooner I can get it done the sooner I get to wander and wonder. It is impossible to just do the atelic things in our lives, one just cannot survive in the world. Burkeman acknowledges this, his point is that societal pressures and pragmatic considerations have driven us to the point where even if we were to pursue anything in an atelic vein, most would be unable to do so because our socially programmed and acculturated response would be to subconsciously treat the atelic as telic. We would set goals, create Gantt charts, and place undue psychological pressures on ourselves because that is what we do through our procedural response to anything.

I would conjecture that my life is now split evenly between the atelic and the telic. Too much of a good thing can become mundane and rob me of the pleasures of the change of pace. We should not nor do not live by bread alone.

1.     References

Burkeman, Oliver. Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals. Dublin, IRE: Vintage, 2021.

Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. NYC: HarperCollins, 1990.

Epstein, David. Range, Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World. New York : Riverhead Books., 2019.

Setiya, Kieran. Midlife: A Philosophical Guide. Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018.

Slingerland, Edward. Trying Not to Try: The Art and Science of Spontaneity. NYC: Crown, 2014.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ruminations-Thanksgiving 2022

Last year I had talked a little bit about Thanksgiving in my blog post, it is my favorite American holiday. https://polymathtobe.blogspot.com/2021/11/ruminations-memorable-thanksgiving.html

This year I will delve a little bit more into why I have such a love of the Thanksgiving celebration.

When I first moved to the United States. We lived in Littleton, Co. My mom had no idea on what to do about the turkey, never having seen a turkey, nor ever having cooked the turkey before coming to the United States. We were invited over to our friends’ house and had the whole feast with their family, their in laws, and their friends; it was my first real taste of American roasted turkey. I can't say that I had a very deep memory of the turkey itself, although I enjoyed the dressing, the mashed potatoes, all of the fixings, and, of course, the pumpkin pie.

Years later, we decided that we would get together with some of the other expatriate Chinese people in Littleton since they were our family in Colorado. Everybody was assigned a dish and my mom volunteered to cook the turkey herself. After much teeth gnashing, she reached out to the mother-in-law of the family which hosted us on our first Thanksgiving  to learn the art of cooking a delicious moist bird. The mother-in-law marched mom through the paces, taught her how to truss up the turkey, taught her the tricks of her experience, like putting bacon on the turkey’s joints so that the skin doesn't crack and get dried up. I don’t know if the bacon did the trick, but it was delicious. If I remember correctly, it was a very popular bird.

Of course, being a gathering of Chinese ex-pats, everybody brought the traditional Chinese holiday dishes to augment the turkey itself. The dining table was groaning under the weight of dumplings, roast duck —the  backup turkey— fried rice, fishes, and all sorts of non-Thanksgiving feasting foods.

This is where I think my vision of Thanksgiving came from, even though we've had other large parties and celebrations with lots of people, this was the official picture that I had of what  large celebrations with others feel like.  Thanksgiving made an indelible impression on my mind, a very American ideal of fellowship, of friendship, of sharing meals with  people that you choose to spend time with rather than having to spend time with. This idea appealed to me deeply, even to this day.

As I got older, the nature of my parents’ traditional Thanksgiving party evolved. The nature of the people who came changed. The guests became  children  of my parents friends who were faced with the prospect of spending the scant holidays alone in a cold dorm because it was too far and too expensive to take a trip home, as well as friends who were alone for that time.

I'd like to think that our family introduced them to the American tradition of Thanksgiving. At least I hope so. It was always a big deal for my parents. It was always a time of conviviality and friendship; it was always a time of togetherness and warmth with people. That is what drew me to this particular holiday the most.

Christmas just wasn't as big of a deal in my mind, mainly because it felt like the gratitude and thankfulness so much of an afterthought. The focus is on the Christian rituals for the birth of Christ rather than celebrating the very human love of being with other humans. Thanksgiving is a celebration of people, of us, of friends, of people that we felt liked us, people that we have something in common with. It is a celebration of friendship and amity. I'm not sure how it got to be so important in my mind, but it has.

I have much to be thankful for this year. I am enjoying what I do very much, I have had many chances to indulge in my polymathic curiosity, as scattered as they are. I have had chances to interact with some very intelligent young people, to teach, to lead, and to mentor at two universities.

I am most especially thankful that I still have my mom with me, and she is healthy despite her 97 years of living.

This time of year though, given the cold weather, the early darkness, and the waning of growth, seems more poignant,  it also brings forth my own gratitude to life, to people, and to the humanity that surrounds us, because that is what we need to focus on. At this point of time of divisiveness, I feel extremely thankful and lucky.

I am especially thankful for all the people who are in my life because it is those of you who are reading this that  I am the most thankful for.

Happy Thanksgiving to all.

 

Ruminations- On Chinese Food

I don’t like food. I love it.

If I don’t love it, I don’t Swallow.

Anton Ego, Ratatouille

Since I am Chinese, having eaten Chinese food all my life. I consider myself somewhat fluent in the ways of Chinese cuisine, but particularly in the Chinese food here in these United States as I spent most of my life here.

My perspective is also colored by the foods that I ate while I was growing up in Taiwan, the foods that my mother prepared while we lived here, the foods that other Chinese ladies made as a part of our cultural celebrations. So it is that I observe with equal parts bemusement and befuddlement the way others view and experience Chinese food in the US. I mostly stay silent as my American friends rave about their personal favorites. I don’t want to burn bridges, and I don’t want to insult my friends, as they are mostly enthusiastic but lack the experience with the Chinese cuisine. I am sure my Indian, Greek, Italian, and Mexican friends feel the same about my bubbling enthusiasm.

We love food for many reasons, not the least of which is the eating experience, involving all five senses: taste, texture, aroma, aesthetics, and the sound of food being cooked or eaten, all make the experience unforgettable. Chinese food for me however, is something more. It is an emotional and nostalgic experience reminding me of the past, the people who were in my life at those times: my relatives, friends, and people who look like me, speak like me, and feel like I do because we shared the common culture and heritage. Hence my attraction to the “authentic” Chinese food. It is a way to regain that emotional center in turbulent times and reminders of emotional attachments to who I was, who I am now, and forever.

I have been to some very fancy culinary palaces along with some real hole in the walls, all in search of the elusive authentic Chinese cuisine.

Authenticity is a food court stand brave enough to serve deep fried stinky tofu filling the food court with the unique smell of frying stinky tofu while knowing that the people who matter don’t mind and the people who mind don’t matter.

Authenticity is a Buddhist temple operated vegetarian restaurant that serves vegetarian dumplings so full of flavor,  with the perfect mouth feel, so aromatic as to make me feel like smelling the fresh steamed dumpling was worth the trip; and so satisfying that almost every American vegetarian cook would fall to their knees and join the Buddhist temple in reverence.

Authenticity is a nondescript dive housed in a basement in the side alley of Boston’s Chinatown, hidden in the shadows of the massive chop suey palaces that caters to the tourist crowd; but whose food is so real and so good that it brought tears to my parent’s eyes as they were transported to their childhood tastes from their memories of China. That little basement dive, parenthetically, ended up owning all three floors of the building where they started.

Authenticity is walking into a serendipitous discovery in Muncie Indiana, a restaurant that just happened to be owned by the same person who owns the Asian grocery store next door. A restaurant where they served real hand pulled noodles that had just that perfect tension and bite as I devoured a steaming bowl of Zha Jiang Mein; where I hesitantly ordered a dish of mouth-watering chicken and experienced the most exquisite heat, spices, soft texture of the chicken, and the pleasure of the hot oil dripping down my throat, drop by heavenly drop.

Authenticity is walking into a seafood palace with multiple walls of aquarium which houses uncountably many different kind of sea creatures, where the unknown sea creatures are brought to your table to demonstrate that not only are they alive, but they are so vicious that they may eat you for dinner instead of the other way around. Yeah, seafood for the Chinese has to the alive and vicious or else they are no good.

Authenticity is also going into a nondescript American Chinese chop suey house in a forlorn town, have the owner walk to your table apologetically and begging your pardon because none of the dishes that he serves is recognizable to a Chinese person, and then having the chef cook up a simple but magical bowl of noodle soup that fills your heart as well as your stomach.

Authenticity is having the waiter of your favorite local place sidle up nonchalantly and whisper their specials that day that are not on the menu because they don’t often get the ingredient; it could be as simple as fresh pea shoots stir-fried with garlic, or as exotic as fresh razor clams. The magic word is fresh.

I treasure those authenticity experiences, but my taste in Chinese foods isn’t limited to the specific, elegiac experiences. As the following quote on the walls of Dorothy Lane Market in Dayton spells out:

Whatever is rightly done, however humble, is noble.

Quidvis Recte Factum Quamvis Humile Praeclarum

Henry Royce. British engineer who was a co-founder of Rolls-Royce.

There are happy discoveries of little gems throughout the mass of Chinese restaurants throughout the world.

There is a Chinese buffet that always have steamed flounder on their steam tables. Contrary to the belief that most American customers will not often opt for steamed fish, that dish disappears quickly. Steamed flounder is not a unique dish, many sit down restaurants offer it on the menu, but their version just doesn’t meet the quality of this buffet place. I once asked the owner what the secret was. He said: we go to Windsor Canada every couple of weeks to buy the fish, to make sure we have the best fish in the area. He does this for a buffet place!

There are specific dishes that I will order repeatedly at specific restaurants, whether it is a simple stir fry dish or a soup, or a dim sum dish, they execute the dish the best out of any other, for whatever reasons. This does not guarantee that they do everything well, it is just that dish, or a few dishes. The chef has achieved mastery for a very limited bunch of dishes.

There was a very tiny Chinese restaurant in the downtown area where I grew up, it seated four tables of four, at best. A seemingly dismal listing of the dishes available was at the order counter, I was disappointed that we were eating there. My dad proceeded to converse with the lady at the counter. He came back to the table grinning from ear to ear, saying that we were in good hands. We were. It was an amazing tour de force by the chef. I lost count of how many dishes we had, each one more spectacular than the last one. My parents would have dinner parties in this tiny little place and their friends would spread its reputation by word of mouth.

Another place that I discovered myself was in a small strip mall. They offered a lunch buffet, nothing spectacular, just a couple of buffet tables worth of food. I found shrimp toast on that table. It was amazing because shrimp toast is expensive and difficult to execute. It is very easy to fry the toast too long and make the bread too greasy and soggy, and having it sit in the bin for too long can make the toast taste stale. This was perfectly executed. Intrigued, I started to order off the menu. As I became familiar with the owners, I come to find out that the chef, one of the family of owners, was a line cook in the Grand Hotel in Taipei, the showplace hotel and restaurant in the 1960’s and 1970’s in Taiwan. The state dinners for the government are often held at the hotel because the hotel is owned and operated by the government. The food at this little place was simple yet sophisticated.

There is a practice amongst the Chinese places of having Chinese menus available for those who can read Chinese characters. Many will complain that this is discriminatory, but the real reason they do this is because the waiters are tired of apologizing for those who insist on ordering these dishes and then complaining that they are not what they are familiar with, the stereotypical Chinese restaurant fares: egg fu yung, General Tso’s chicken, crab Rangoon, and moo goo gai pan. This separate Chinese menu business has disappeared somewhat because of the many American customers who have travelled to Asia. They have learned to know and like the traditional dishes there, and they, like us, are craving for those dishes. Note that as I also enjoy Korean and Japanese restaurants, those owners have quietly slipped a short menu in Korean or Japanese with the regular menu because they think I am Korean or Japanese.

As I had stated previously, I consider any dish that is rightly done worthy of my praise. I have found that the American Chinese restaurants can execute amazing versions of the stereotypical Americanized dishes, although they are rare. There are definite turn offs as well.

I never understood the crab Rangoon. The irony is that many Chinese people develop lactose intolerance. I grew up not eating a lot of dairy, when I moved to the Americas, I developed a definite love for cheese. I hit the pizzas hard and often when I was in undergrad, especially as I had access to some excellent Chicago deep dish pizzas. But middle age stopped all that dead in my tracks. The idea of cream cheese in fried wonton skin seems an anomaly at best, and stomach turning at worst. I do enjoy some fried wonton skin scattered through my hot and sour soup, so it isn’t the fried wonton skins.

The glow in the dark sweet and sour glop some call a sauce is another head scratcher. Too much of both, too sweet and too sour.

For me, a test of the chef’s “chops” at a Chinese restaurant is how they cook beef. Beef and broccoli are a good test. Mike Xing Chen of Strictly Dumpling YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/c/strictlydumpling fame rails against broccoli in any Chinese dish. I actually like broccoli, but it is very hard to stir fry correctly. It is either too raw and end up breaking teeth or too soggy and muddying the taste of the dish completely. It takes skills to stir fry broccoli, I don’t even try. The trick, as I understand it theoretically, is to blanch the broccoli and hold it out of the wok until the very last possible moment. One needs to cook the beef until it is still rare and then throw in the broccoli for a quick stir and then immediately send it to the table. The residual heat from the quick stir fry will cook the beef the rest of the way while the broccoli still retains an al dente texture. Understand that this is all a theoretical exercise for me as I have yet to succeed in doing this. I usually err on the side of overcooking the beef and undercooking the broccoli. I also don’t order the dish unless I had to. This skill of knowing the sequence and timing of cooking protein and vegetables applies across the menu for all stir fry dishes. Chinese connoisseurs call it controlling the heat. The family Chinese restaurants adds carrots, bamboo shoots, pea pods, water chestnuts to “fill out” a stir fry dish; that is to make it seem like the dish is more substantial than it is without using too much meat, saving on cost. But there is nothing worse than undercooked vegetables to detract from the dish. By the way, I have not seen places like Panda Express or PF Chang’s pass this test, it doesn’t fit the business model, although many Chinese owned restaurants cannot pass this test either.

I have had some decent General Tso’s chicken in my life. Not many, the sauce is usually too cloyingly sweet, and the breading makes the chicken too crunchy to chew.

Lemon or orange chicken is the same, too sweet.

Don’t even bring up chop suey.

The egg roll is a ubiquitous part of the Chinese menu in the US, the thick-skinned chewy egg roll is an unknown part of my youth. What I did know is the spring roll, thin crispy skin, tender and hot filling. The spring roll is the way to go, the egg roll is an abomination. Although some Chinese places are corrupting the spring roll as well.

Since I have become a fan of Uncle Roger, a British comedian whose schtick is to critique the fried rice techniques of celebrity chefs https://www.youtube.com/c/mrnigelng, I became much more discerning about the restaurant fried rice. What was once just fun and games as I watched the Uncle Roger videos became reality to me as I explored the nuances of cooking egg fried rice My own line in the sand is the brown colored egg fried rice. Brown comes from drenching the rice with too much soy sauce. Not only is the rice too salty but it changes the nature of the rice so that the soy sauce obscures the taste of the other ingredients. I am not saying don’t put soy sauce in the fried rise, tried that as well, to an unsatisfactory conclusion, but a balance of salt, MSG and soy sauce does the trick. How to get the correct proportions? Trial and error for your own taste. This is yet another test of the chef’s “chops”.

An interesting book written in 2008 by Jennifer 8. Lee is titled: The Fortune Cookie Chronicles, http://www.fortunecookiechronicles.com/blog/about/author/. She tracked the historical artifacts of some of the dishes I have spoken about. Very interesting read.

There are some specific types of Chinese places that hold a place near and dear to my heart. These are culinary specialty establishments that makes my heart go pitter patter.

The Cantonese dim sum place and the roasting place usually are co-located. Dim sum had always been a special treat for those of us who do not live in cities where there is a large Chinese population. The diversity of selection is the key, they must have the traditional dim sum dishes, but they also must also have some variety; most places have incorporated the Shanghai dim sum along with the Cantonese dim sum. The roasted ducks, chicken and pigs hanging in windows of restaurants are ubiquitous in the cities with large Chinese populations. It entices my vision and my stomach, to the point of almost visibly drooling.

Relatively new on the Chinese restaurant landscape is the hot pot restaurant. Chinese hot pots are very different from the Swiss fondue yet are similar in principle. The Swiss use cheese or oil as the cooking medium, the Chinese hot pot uses a broth. In Szechuan hot pot, the broth is filled with a deadly combination of hot oil and Szechuan peppercorn, a dangerous surprise in every spoonful, especially as the broth cooks off as people cook the meats in the both. The Szechuan hot pot place became popular relatively recently, I welcome the innovation, although my own digestive system groans in anticipation of the pain elicited from both ends of my body as it realizes we are approaching a Szechuan hot pot place.

While ramen noodle places are becoming popular in many cities, and I love a good bowl of ramen, I still crave a traditional bowl of noodle that is not ramen.

I love the jam-pong, a seafood laden noodle soup from the Korean Chinese restaurants, as I do the Zha Jiang Mein, from both Chinese and Korean Chinese restaurants. Laksa’s from southeast Asian restaurants feeds a deep need in me.

One of my two most favorites are the Taiwanese beef and noodle soup, with rich, beefy and five spice infused broth, coupled with stewed and tender chunks of beef, and Chinese noodles; the second is the preserved cabbage and pork noodle soup, not spicy but rich in flavor; as well as the juxtaposition of  the crispy texture of bamboo shoots and preserved cabbage with the soft pork.

This is just a short summary of the Chinese foods that makes me happy and a summary of what does not make me happy.

 

Ruminations-On Historical Accuracy of the King James Bible

I recently posted a meme on my Facebook page, it made light of the way the King James version of the New Testament bible came into being. The meme itself did not skimp on historical facts, it did neglect to mention what one of my friends noted: All English translations were originally from Greek, which was translated from either Hebrew or the original Aramaic. The meaning of many Aramaic words was guessed at. So basically, the words read today are translations of translations of translations. In other words, a massive game of telephone, over many years.  

Here is the meme:

·       The King James bible was completed by 8 members of the Church of England in 1611.

·       There are no original texts to translate. The oldest manuscripts were written hundreds of years after the last apostle died. There are over 8,000 of these manuscripts, no two are alike.

·       The King James translators used none of these, they edited the previous translations to create a version that their king and Parliament would approve.

·       21^st century Christians believe ‘The Word of God’ is a book edited in the 17^th century from the 16^th century translations of 8,000 contradictory copies of the 4^th century scrolls that claims to be the copies of lost letter written in the first century.

·       And the snarky remark that drove people crazy: “That’s not faith, that’s insanity.”

      A few of my religious friends, and yes, I do have some of them, took me to task about this meme. They proceeded at long lengths about how they were able to come to determine the “accuracy” of the Bible. I will paraphrase what they have said to avoid quoting or misquoting each person. Those words in bold are my thoughts.

As a Christian I struggled with this very issue. I took a Biblical History class. I learned our NT was canonized at Council of Nicaea. [A group of mortal men].  [While later another group of mortal men] decided the 4 books of Apocrypha didn’t belong. I was disillusioned. But then I am affirmed that thru history God has and is inspiring these works. Hence one must approach the Bible with faith in God and His divine works. Otherwise it is indeed insanity.

­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­­I have read the Apocrypha and the Nag Hammadi codex, which includes most excluded books. In my view, it is clear why they were determined to not belong in Scripture when you read them (and your view speaks for all of Christianity?). But as [the previous person] said, at the end of the day, it’s a matter of faith informed by prayer.

I would also add that the interpretation of Scripture over the centuries primarily by white males is the real issue. I take comfort in the fact that when I read Scripture, I do not see the condemning language pushed by evangelicals.

My belief  is rooted in the recognition that the Bible is an evolving set of texts that requires continual study using the best scholarship available from a variety of traditions (to what purpose? To what end?). The King James Version is more interesting for what it says about English Christianity than anything else. If we believe God created our brain, why would he/she expect us to check it at the door of the church? (Exactly, which makes me think that if you are using your brain and you questioned the verity of the messages in the bible, why would your God object because you are disagreeing with his supposed words, since you are using his gift of a brain to come to your questions?)

The King James version is a poor example of Biblical scholarship and should never be held up as the crowning achievement. Although very poetic, it is an abysmal translation of source documents (The meme addressed that, they didn’t even follow the ‘source documents.). Luther's work and use of Hebrew scholars almost a century earlier did a far better job in translating those documents into German (How would you know the translations were better? Does it matter if the source documents are centuries old translations themselves?).

We also have a large amount of knowledge about the original texts by studying the variations between the different texts which came from texts being copied by hand. Having gone to seminary and worked in yeast genetics labs, I find the similarity between the evolution of DNA sequences and hand copied biblical texts fascinating. (What percentage of these ‘knowledge of ‘original texts’ is directly verifiable? Is your proof just a guess as well?)

While I agree that the KJV has its weaknesses when the textus receptus is compared to the Nestle-Aland because of the authority of earlier texts over the byzantine texts and the Latin vulgate. It is an amazing feat of transcription among all of these texts and all that time for them to have such agreement that nothing of theological or historical is in disagreement. No other extant historical document has such consistency. The assertions of this meme are inaccurate in the extreme. (Is it consistency of agreement or is it groupthink and wishful thinking working its magic?)

Note that the defenses that these friends of mine calls up do not challenge the historical facts listed in the meme, instead, the arguments involve mental gyrations that dances around the scholarship of the historians who research the documents and the translations. It doesn’t matter how stellar the scholarship is, if the translations, interpretation, and conclusions have a dodgy foundation. Given the nature of what we have, it is a heroic attempt at historical research to cobble together something that resemble an historical account, but their work sits on quicksand. No amount of congruency or consistency can overcome that because no matter how much work and how exalted their scholarship, they are still leaning their ladders on the wrong wall.

Having said that, my mind asked another question: why does anyone care? Does it matter to the believers and non-believers that the verity of their faith and beliefs is dependent on the factual historical records of the written word?

The question of the historical basis for translations, interpretation, and conclusions from incomplete documents is an old and very common issue in history and in philosophy.

Socrates was adamantly opposed to writing down orations. He prided himself as an orator, he felt that memorizing what he had to say and giving his speeches to his pupil was the sole method of communication that mattered. He railed against the act of writing because he felt that writing distorts meanings since humans are forgetful and are susceptible to error. What was left unsaid is that the scribes’ biases and fallacies may, more than likely, skew and distort the spoken words, deliberately or not. His students did write down his speeches, which is how we came to have books of his thoughts. How authentic are those speeches? No one is sure because those words went through the same process as the King James bible. Does anyone care? We have debates and discussions about the substance of those lessons as we explore the ideas in the context of Socrates times, as well as in the context of our time. The richness of his words, whether he said them or not, are still feeding our curiosity and our resulting explorations.

Epictetus’s Discourse and Echeiridion are some of the founding basis of Stoicism, even though oral traditions tell us that Stoicism started out with Greek philosophers, before their ideas, through mostly oral means, were passed to the Romans. Indeed, any writing that is attributed to Epictetus were written by his student Arrian. We are, and have been, playing telephone with the Stoics as well. How much of Discourse and Echeiridion is Epictetus? How much of it is Arrian? Who knows?  There is a recent revival in Stoicism, many authors have written volumes based on their interpretation of unverified translations from the ancients. This fact has not deterred Stoicism from becoming popular, after many years of being ignored.

In the Chinese tradition, Tao Te Ching is attributed to Lao-tzu, as he has been identified as the founder of Taoism. Yet, there is no evidence that such a person ever existed. Some believe that the Tao Te Ching is a collection of wisdom from many teachers, aggregated to form the Tao Te Ching. Meanwhile, there is an apocryphal story of Lao-tzu, a contemporary of Confucius, who grew disenchanted with his unsuccessful attempt to teach the way of the Tao, the creative and binding force which runs through the universe. Legend has it that he was making his way to the borders of the known Chinese kingdoms and into seclusion when someone convinced him to dictate his wisdom to the student so that the lessons can be recorded for posterity. Romantic story, but is it historically true? Who knows? Who cares?

Indeed, the basis of western civilization is based on incomplete and impossible to prove hypothesis and interpretations of artifacts and texts from the distant past. These conclusions drawn by contemporary interpreters were skewed by values and morals of the ancient as well as the contemporary viewpoint. A concatenation of skewing.

As we examine our opinions on historical and philosophical truths, as we know them, rarely do we care about the verity of historical records regarding ancient ideas. We accept that the knowledge that we have is flawed and possibly skewed, but it is what we have, so we adjust our interpretations of the past as more scholarship and artifacts become available by hewing to the scientific method to make our determination as to their verity.

We take the philosophies, histories, and other ancient traditions that have been passed on to us, both Eastern and Western, at face value, even as we understand and accept the ambiguities that is introduced into the accuracy of the interpretation of the knowledge because of historical indeterminacy.

I decided to practice omphaloskepsis over the question of: why would someone be so adamant about a practice that is so commonplace, so pedestrian, so accepted? The following discussion is entirely my own conjectures and wonderings; keep that fact in mind. Any lapses in logic or reasoning are entirely due to my own carelessness.

It occurred to me that the tenets of the religion are not what is debated here, the tenets of the religion could be seen as distilled truths that are travelling the same intellectual path as philosophy, indeed they are travelling in parallel paths in most circumstances. Specifically, regarding the ideas on the ideals and morality of our behavior. What makes people accept or reject the teachings of philosophical schools is not blind faith, it is the individual person’s judgement on how those teachings are aligned with our personal experiences in life. Our philosophical ideas are affirmed or disaffirmed by what our experience and what our reasoning tells us, using both our empirical knowledge and rational instincts. The same can be said of religious tenets. All religions have basic beliefs are mostly shared with one another, the commonalities between religions outnumber the differences. Why is that? I believe that these commonalities are the basis of our survival as communities. I believe that should be the basis of where we start: our humanity.

I thought about how to separate the ethereal philosophical part of religion so that I can get at the answer to my question; I arrived at the idea of the church, or the religious organization, that man-made institution employed to organize the great unwashed constituency of the believers as the difference maker.

We know that we humans have a need to form communities based on our historical need to survive, there is strength in numbers. Once we have been socialized to the idea of a community, we sought to form more communities based on our commonalities. This is not an earth-shaking statement. As we form these communities and organizations, we make a social compact to create constraints that are placed on those who are in those organizations; these constraints are necessary for the peaceful coexistence within the community. One constraint is a means of survival, in more crass and contemporary terms, they need to have a business model, after all they have to ensure the survival of the organization in the future, ethereal things live on in the minds of the believer, but brick and mortar houses of worship needs gold to survive, as with all other organizations, although the monetary needs are a function of the size and ambitions of the organization.

The business model also needs an identity, to define to the members of the organization their official identifiable points of commonalities. Unofficially the statement of identity also separates those who are members of the community from those who do not belong to the community, this can be both an intended and an unintended consequence. This need for identity eventually morphs into a tangible list of beliefs, something that clearly differentiates ‘us from them’; it also morphs into  something to defend, something to identify the non-believers; this is human nature, we want to identify strongly with our preferred community, and we want to know whether others are in the same community. This is an organic practice; the problem usually appears when the members of the community seek to clearly and forcefully differentiate themselves from those who are not in agreement with the community identity and they seek to treat those non-conformists as their enemies.

Why would anyone treat those who are not in their community as enemies?

Which brings us to the third constraint: the organization to expand, to grow, to attract new believers, something more expedient than the natural way: have lots of babies. This of course, applies across all cultures and religious organizations, All major religious organizations, Christians, Buddhist, Muslims, Hindus, Jews, et. al. has the priority mission to proselytize and expand their membership of the religious organization to expedite the first constraint: maximize the income from the business model to survive. To get more members and more importantly, to prevent people from joining other religious organizations that they perceive to be in conflict with their organization: there is strength in numbers. There is a perceived need to market their beliefs as being superior to other religious organizations, to ignore the universal humanity of their common beliefs and to exaggerate the advantages of their organization. If, we assumed that there is such a thing as universal humanity, then it is difficult to argue about the differences between organizations unless one dove into the granularities such as the historical authenticity of their book of beliefs.

Why do people care about the King. James bible being authentic and is the real transcribed words of the Christian god? Two reasons, first, it goes to show those who are about to be converted that they are joining an organization that have history on their side, no matter how dodgy that history is; second, to continue to impress on the already converted that they are on the correct side of their god, because you cannot trust anyone to not use their brains and question their faith.

I had stated previously that belief in philosophy does not depend on the historical authenticity of the source of the message, that adherents to most philosophies believe because they have found that the lesson from philosophy generally agrees with their experiences. This alignment with human experience is the most powerful way to ingrain beliefs in humans; if it is true in my experience then I will doubt the veracity of the amorphous and ambiguous much less. We are practicing our own ability to judge, to be critical, to question, and most importantly, to verify to the best of our abilities. If we happen to experience the contrary to what we believe, we can and will change. It is all in the context of the situation. Some religious friend refer to it derisively as moral relativism, I think of it as a natural part of being human and living on a world where context is changing continually, our philosophical foundations must keep pace as well.  The counter argument usually involves changing our beliefs as the wind changes direction. It is a valid counterargument, but we still have our brain and our perception to question the veracity of the changes brought forth by context. I think the human’s natural inclination to fear of change makes that option less likely.

Another question that appeared from my bout of omphaloskepsis is: why do the non-believers derive such joy in poking the believers with memes such as this one?

I see it as a reaction to the absolutely determinacy that the believers act and react with when dealing with those that they find are opposed to their beliefs. One problem with the staking an unchanging identity is that there is no fluidity to your espoused belief even as the context of the problem changes, those who are a part of the organization are forever chained to tenets set forth by, in this case 8 members of the Church of England in 1611. This is how heresy and persecution of heretics happen. Therefore Copernicus, Spinoza, et.al were branded as heretics. I see the same problem with the original intent argument from the Scalia cabal of conservative thought.

The more humans adhere to the beliefs that are not defensible under their contemporary context, the more their fellow humans will delight in pointing out the contradictions and hypocrisy inherent in their arguments. Because we do use our brains, whether it was God who endowed us with brains, or not.

 

Ruminations-Moral Deserts

Moral deserts is a term that I learned from the book written by Michael Schur titled: How to Be Perfect: The Correct Answer to Every Moral Question. Schur is a television writer; he created the show The Good Place. The book is a summary of moral philosophy that was the basis of the television series, a summary that is easy and non-philosopher friendly, but easy does not mean facile or devoid of nuance. Easy means that Schur was able to digest the difficult philosophical concepts in all their complexities and successfully communicate them without losing the meaning.

Moral deserts is a mental assumption that we seem to have ingrained in our minds. It can be explained as a transactional view of doing the good, that we  keep a moral ledger which tallies up all the good and moral acts that we perform in our daily lives —a metric for our own altruism and laudable acts — and subsequently, our belief that we are entitled to be rewarded for our morality. The reward is recognition for the good work, whether it takes the form of being lauded publicly or a subconscious credit in our ledger, a credit that we can cash in for some later moral failure.

Charities and organized religions employ the idea implicitly in their appeal to the public. In the case of charities, the listing of contributors and boosters serve as an extrinsic reward for the donors, thereby giving the donors a reason to feel good about themselves, which also serves as a reminder/motivation to donate the next time the charity comes calling. I am not against this practice, after all, charitable fund raising is their raison d’ etre.

On the other hand, there is something uncomfortable when it comes to organized religions using the same ploy for their fund raising. Many will say that the two cases are equivalent. I would argue that there is a significant difference, that difference is that the charity benefits their main mission: serving the needy, whereas in organized religion they serve the needy as well as serve the church. One can argue that the charity organization and the church are merely clearinghouses for the donations; but the church gains much more. In the end, the beneficiary of the generosity of the masses is not necessarily the needy; depending on the organization’s relative honesty, either secular or religious, the beneficiary may be the organization itself.

Religious organizations are more overt however. All religion reward good work, kindness, and generosity — all intrinsic qualities — by dispensing extrinsic rewards: recognitions, status, and indulgences. Moral desert is deployed pervasively in all religions, it cuts across all cultural divides.

In Asia, Buddhist monks and nuns depend on the largess of the believer for their daily subsistence. It preys on the giver’s sense of moral desert by framing it as an act of mercy for those who devote themselves to their religion. This appeal to our transactional morality exists in all  religions however, because all religions need to elicit material support from their believers in order to persist, subsist, and propagate; it is an essential part of their business model. It is a doctrine that is well defined within their religious structure. Our own demand for a return of our investment in being moral is a powerful tool for these religions, such practices as tithing and the selling of indulgences is moral desert on steroids.

Even though I take exception to the  deployment of moral deserts as a business ploy for organized religions, it is their prerogative, and it feeds the extrinsic material needs of their organization which enables that organization to serve their constituents through good work, kindness, and generosity.

Even as religions attempts to systematically appeal to our moral desert to act morally and to do the right thing, it is anomalous to me that we, as individuals, should need to be motivated by the promise of rewards and entitlement to be moral. There just seem to be something hypocritical and immoral about employing moral desert as our motivation for living and acting morally. Some would argue that motivation should not matter as long as the ultimate goal, acting morally, is achieved. I beg to differ.

When I was young, one of our family friends was devoted to studying Buddhism,  Taoism and Confucianism, he was unsparing in recognizing his own moral failings. He was the first example of someone who lived the right life in my life. We had a few long conversations about the topic of religion and morality. He was adamant that any act with a moral dimension should always be done willingly, without hesitation, and anonymously, that any benevolent act should always be anonymous and should never be advertised. He believed that the integrity of the moral act is compromised if one did it for the recognition; in other words, if the moral act was performed as motivated by moral deserts.  One must act morally because it is the right thing, rather than because we are being rewarded by attention or because we feel we are entitled to that attention.  

This line of reasoning is emphasized  by the Stoics.

The Stoic Virtue of Justice.

Justice is our duty to our fellow man, and to our society. It’s the morality behind how we act, specifically in relation to our community and the people within it.

Maimonides defines eight levels of charity in his writing, the very top definition of charity is: anonymously giving to people who are anonymous to the giver.

Both of those two reasoning appeals to me. I am of the belief that the ends do not justify the means, that this idea of moral desert is too transactional and an anathema which corrupts the meaning of our existence. It shifts the emphasis from morality for a selfless reason to morality for a selfish reason. Having to balance out an imaginary ledger, a ledger that does not actually exist, a ledger that is used as a justification for us to live and act morally because we are petty and need to be bribed.

Schur argued that there are benefits to moral deserts, that seeing others being moral will motivate us to be the same in order to take part in the groupthink, that in the end it is the accumulation of needed donations which eventually will benefit those who we are trying to benefit. I can see his reasoning, but I don’t agree completely. In the end, it is more important to do both: act morally and to do so humbly.

Ruminations-Old Ways Vs New Ways

https://www.wsj.com/articles/san-francisco-giants-coaching-staff-11651493931?mod=e2fb

This article was posted on a volleyball coaches’ group as an example of what the San Francisco Giants of Major League Baseball is doing in putting together a coaching staff, thinking outside the usual boundaries of credentials and skillsets that were the unchallenged constraints of what the coaches need to have under their belts. The diversity of the staff and the courage that it took for this manager to hire these people for his staff is laudable and long overdue.

The article had also made a statement ascribing the Giants recent successes  to this group of coaches and their diversity in backgrounds, skillsets, and knowledge. Someone in the group disagreed with that assessment, as do I, but for a different reason. I don’t believe that the coaches have had enough time with the team to say definitively that their successes are directly caused by their  influences. I am not saying that they had no impact, I am saying that conclusions should not be inferred from the immediate results.  It is once again the very human to draw the  conclusion that correlation is causation.  We all know that is false, both qualitatively and quantitatively.

The diversity addressed in the article does not just mean the usual definition of diversity: by race and gender. Diversity in this case means that the coaches for the San Francisco Giants are diverse in their baseball and intellectual background.  Much staff are players who never made it into the major leagues, which is contrary to the baseball hiring practices, they played at a level well below the Major League level. They had coaches whose previous professions were not strictly athletic, which gives them a different perspective regarding the context of the everyday decisions that needed to be made. It is interesting that one of the coaches is a Japanese player who worked for many years as a bullpen catcher in the major leagues because he was not skilled or athletic enough to make it a player; it is interesting because it is a baseball truism that the bullpen catcher usually makes the best managers because they're the ones that must observe the game from a most fundamental level. They have the investment in time and are passionate about the game to invest themselves into understanding the ins and outs of the game.

The original person who disagreed with the inference that  the recent success of the Giants are due to the non-traditional backgrounds of the coaching staff used the argument that because the LA Dodgers are the class of that division, and the efficacy of the Giants’ hiring philosophy cannot be celebrated until the Giants have overtaken the Dodgers. He argues that winning and losing should determine whether the hiring philosophy is worthy.  He goes further in saying that the successes of the Dodgers are based on traditional ways of building a strong farm system by spending money and paying for great players. His point is well taken, but no one ever said that the Giants were not doing that. He did not really address the merits of a diversified coaching staff. It was a head fake.

Many successful leaders and coaches have preached the mantra that you have to surround yourself with the best people and you need these people to speak truth to power, to disagree with the leader and be allowed an opportunity to sway the leader.  This is not to say that chaos and discord needs to be introduced within the organization; what is needed is people who are willing to challenge rote thinking and the status quo, to stir the pot, to make decision makers examine their assumptions, logical fallacies, and internal biases.

This disagreement is a matter of the fixed mindset versus the growth mindset.

There are obvious advantages to staying with the known, everyone in the organization knows what is expected of them and any dissent can be resolved or tamped down quickly because the decision making becomes procedural and immediate rather than be conceptual, exploratory, speculative, and time consuming. A typical argument in defending the status quo is that everything new is not necessarily always good, that there is a reason for the traditional and procedural, and it is ill advised to throw out the baby with the bath water.

When someone employs that tact, they are saying by inference that the jury is still out. But they go deeper by eliciting the skepticism that comes with that line of thought which lightly insinuates that the old way is the best way. Which is a dead giveaway to a leadership in a rut. One that is dying a slow death internally,

The subject of the impact of a diverse coaching staff does not and should not be judged by only considering strict wins and losses. It should be judged by the human factor: the amount of player and team development and how that impacts player production; how invested are those players in their team and organization — so much so that they are producing above and beyond their ceilings. The hiring philosophy should be judged upon the return on what the organization had invested. It appears that the players are happy, and they are buying into the what the coaches are saying, which is more than half the battle.  They are producing on the field as well, perhaps not as much as some would like as a litmus test.

On the other hand, having a diverse staff is a welcoming change but just making the change does not naturally infer that the new philosophy is going to pay off 100%. I remember one day while I was working in corporate America that one of the human resources person addressed a room full of middle aged engineers; saying, without any apology, that all the old engineers should be fired and replaced with new and inexperienced engineers straight out of school because the young engineers are more creative, more willing to change what doesn't work, they are more aggressive, and  they have the newer ideas. What happened was that the new engineers became the old engineers within a few years, bought into the corporate ways within a few years and became stalwarts of the old ways in a few years.  Indeed, all the experience that had resided with the older engineers were lost and now needed to be rediscovered. So new is not necessarily better and old is not necessarily better.

A key fallacy that we all readily employ is to view this situation through the prism of a dichotomy, of a win/loss end game. There is much intelligence that are embedded  in the old because there's value in it;  there is much intelligence that are embedded  the new because there is value in it. The question is:  how to integrate the two views and resolve the surface incongruencies between the two sides and overcome the  either/or mindset.  How can the sides achieve win/win?

The real magic is finding a way to leverage, combine, integrate, mix, and blend the new and the old: intelligently leverage the diverse coaching staff and what they bring to the table with what we assume to be tried and true. I am an optimist in this regard, I believe that it is possible to diversify the composition of coaching staffs, challenge the mythology of the tried and true while also retaining the embedded wisdom inherent in the procedural and time honored. Playing the either/or game is silly and counterproductive; most importantly it does not serve the team or the individual athletes at all.

The first thing that needs to be of course is to stop being so defensive and start thinking critically, fully acknowledging our individual fallacies and bias.

Ruminations-A Prime Birthday

It is customary to go into an extended period of nostalgia, summing up a lifetime of remembrances, memories of the life lived, lessons learned, while pontificating on and on about the perceived wisdom while marking a landmark birthday. Usually that would come on the birthdays ending in fives or the zeros.  I did not do so when I turned 60 last year holding true to my contrarian impulse. Unfortunately, you did not dodge the bullet. I just delayed it a year. 

Numbers have been an important part of my life, partly due to my chosen profession, partly due to interest, although my interest did not translate to talent or natural insight.

60 marks in our minds a landmark in our internal timeline because  the number  ends with the number zero; that zero stands out because we chose a base ten numerical system early on in our mathematical evolution. 60 also leads with a six, which is divisible by 2 and 3, making the number divisible by the first two primes.  

60 is categorized as a highly composite number (sometimes called anti-prime ) because it is the sum of its unitary divisors (excluding itself): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Highly_composite_number

·       60 is the smallest number divisible by the numbers 1 to 6: there is no smaller number divisible by the numbers 1 to 5. 

·       60 is also divisible by 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20, 30, 60, demonstrating its claim to being highly composite.

·       https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/60_(number)

To jump from 60 to 61, however, is jumping from the ease and flexibility of a highly composite prime to the depths of inflexibility, a prime number.

• 61 the 18th prime number. The first 17 primes are: 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13, 17, 19, 23, 29, 31, 37, 41, 43, 47, 53, 59.
• 61 is also a twin prime with 59. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twin_prime
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/61_(number)

It gives the number a certain cachet, an air of mystery. Mathematicians are fascinated with the primes and prime numbers are also the basis for cryptographic encryption.

By that token, this 61^st year of my having the ability to fill my lungs with air portends to be one of uniqueness. Although this omen may or may not be wholly beneficent.

There are other numbers from my birthday metric that could also be examined. My birthday: March 27, 1961 has some interesting numerical significance: March is the third month of a year and 27 is 3to the third power. The year 1961 in the Gregorian calendar is not a prime, but it is the product of 37 and 53, the 12^th and 16^th prime, a simple composite number.

If I was a real mathematician I would propose some conjecture about some mathematical profundity from those numbers, but I am not a real mathematician, nor did I stay in a Holiday Inn Express last night, so I won’t.

Here comes that pontification on wisdom.

As I look upon both my external and internal lives, I am proud of the equanimity that I have consciously tried to cultivate, as it came to me late in life.

While my personal philosophy is a bricolage of formal philosophies, life experiences, hot takes, and cold reason, I have become content in the maelstrom because of the equanimity cultivation. It is a work in progress, as is everything.

All that I am are a tribute to every one of the friends and family who unknowingly or knowingly  impacted my life in all my 61 years. Your fingerprints are all over my life, my mind, and my behavior. You have made me who I am; ergo, you are as guilty of shaping me as me.  I am not sure if that is good or bad. I just know that it is. So, I thank you.

I look forward to seeing the 19^th prime birthday, which is 67. But one birthday at a time, prime or non-prime.

I will do my best to live my prime year of 61 well. If Amazon doesn’t sue me for copyright infringement first.

Peace.

Ruminations-A Memorable Thanksgiving

I love Thanksgiving. All of it. From the food to the time of the season. The change of season from Fall to Winter is especially poignant as the weather becomes colder and the land takes a deserved rest. The spectacular foliage color spectacle signals the end of the time for growth and the beginning of the time for the earth to rest and rejuvenate. It also signals the time for people  to stay indoors and appreciate the warmth of home and hearth. It is a time of respite and recovery.

One of the most memorable Thanksgiving I had ever spent was, ironically, not with family or close friends, but with some strangers in the basement of a sterile institutional building.

Thanksgiving is an awkward time for gradual students, they are in the midst of the push towards the end of classes, ongoing research, performing never ending experiments, or writing interminably. It is a slight four days off, but really just one day off as most gradual students assiduously put their noses to the grindstone on the other three days, trying to make up for lost time that aren’t really lost and only take Thanksgiving Day off. Some take Thanksgiving Day  off because everything in town is closed and they are having to fend for themselves. It was during this situation that my friends Rick and Joy came up with a grand plan. Rick was a doctoral candidate at Georgia Tech, as was I, and Joy is married to Rick. They both matriculated at University of Illinois for undergrad, so we had something in common which created an instant bond. They lived in the married student housing buildings just north of the Georgia Tech main campus.

Architecturally, the buildings were plain ugly, but they served their purpose well for the families that lived there. The institute own the buildings and the rent was reasonable. They were probably built in the 1970’s as the lack of character suggested a utilitarian intent; that is, no thought was given to the aesthetics, both interior and exterior. This was as close to a building in a Soviet Gulag as I could have imagined.

A few weeks before Thanksgiving, Rick came to me and asked if I was doing anything for Thanksgiving. I frankly had not thought that far ahead. My parents were overseas and I was maybe planning on going out to a restaurant that was open and just grab a meal there. Having spent my first Atlanta Thanksgiving eating a chili dog, onion rings, and a Frozen Orange in the TV room of The Varsity, any hot meal is a good Thanksgiving meal. Rick said that he and Joy were going to host a potluck Thanksgiving feast with their neighbors in married student housing, and would I like to join them. I leapt at the chance.

The ground rules were that they were going to make the turkey and everyone else brought a dish from their country. The vast majority of the married American student couples had plans to go home, so the people who said yes were foreign gradual students. There were a few other single electrical engineering gradual students that joined in the festivities. I had no idea what to expect, and I suspect, neither did they.

That Thursday came and I schlepped my single guy contribution to the feast. I don’t remember what I brought, it might be alcohol, or it might be store bought goodies, this was way before I cooked for real, and had discovered food programming on cable. As I entered the basement of the common area in the married student housing, the smells wafting from the room guided me to the right place. I was a bit early but there were a few dishes already sitting on the large tables in the center of the room. A few of the neighbors were there, politely nodding hello and perhaps wondering what they had gotten themselves into. I set my meager contributions on the table and went into the kitchen. Rick and Joy had hedged their bets and made a few traditional Thanksgiving side dishes, just in case. They shouldn’t have worried. As time wore on, more people appeared, until the tables were groaning under the weight of the accumulated goodies. The conversations became livelier as the time for indulging drew closer, the kids became used to the strangers and all shyness went away as they worked hard at their playing.

I don’t remember all that was served, but there were dishes from all around the globe: Chinese, Korean, Indian, Icelandic, French, Lebanese, Greek, etc. It was a global smorgasbord. When the time came to partake, no one was a stranger, everyone jumped at the chance to serve some of their dishes to their new friends. The sound of conversation grew louder as everyone was describing their dishes as well as articulating the traditions behind their dishes. It was obvious that everyone took seriously their mission of introducing their cultural heritage to their friends and took great care in thinking about this strange American tradition of Thanksgiving and relating it back to their cultures.

I remember that not much food was left after the crowd was done. Everyone had that fat and happy warm after glow that can only result from great gluttony. Even the children were slowed to a mere trot by that meal. The conversations continued to flow, some were about our research work, much of it was about making it all work here in a foreign country, and the challenges of living in a completely different culture and social norms. The few Americans tried to explain American football and why the Detroit Lions always played on Thanksgiving Day, neither one of those topics went anywhere as everyone tried to draw analogies with sports from their own countries in an effort to make heads or tails out of watching large steroid filled men bash each other, continually falling, and getting back up just to have the same things happen again.

The party broke up in the early evening if I remember correctly. I have since colored that memory in the soft sepia tones as one of the best experiences of my life, so the memories are fuzzy, besides it has been decades since I was in gradual school.

I do remember making my way home with an enhanced appreciation for my fellow humans, regardless of our differences in cultures, loving our commonalities in our humanity, and the beauty of the experience of sharing food, conversation, and amity.

That was perhaps the perfect exemplification of the spirit of Thanksgiving. That afternoon in the basement of the Georgia Tech married student housing showed me a glimpse of what could be if we saw one another as individuals with significant differences which we can easily bridge on a one-on-one basis. It is the memories of those times that gives me hope for today.