Soul mates connect in mind and spirit

By Ellen McCarthy, Published: June 2

On May 15, Rick Levy stood before Lisa Tatum and promised to worship her forever. “For I know that you are God,” he said, “thinly disguised as my wife.”

He was not speaking in hyperbole.

Levy, a clinical psychologist, has spent his career investigating the connection between mind, body and spirit. Over more than four decades of work and daily meditation, he says he has learned to see energies and understand the private thoughts of others before they are spoken.

He followed a spiritual path laid out in the teachings of guru Paramahansa Yogananda, and “gradually over time it took me into enlightenment and made me one with the Divine,” Levy says.

The first time Tatum met Levy, in the early 1990s, she was at her wits end. She was in her early 30s and had recently become the guardian of a troubled teenage nephew. At the time, Tatum was working in the Department of Health and Human Services’ substance abuse and mental health division, but her own health had been frail ever since a degenerating disc in her neck slipped out of place and cut into her spinal cord. Even after months of intense physical therapy, the injury continued to cause her severe pain.

Her nephew’s principal suggested Tatum take the teen to see Levy. Once there, she recalls, “my nephew was trying to be evasive — going off in this direction, that tangent. Rick was just herding him in like an expert sheep dog — something you could only do if you understood how the other person’s mind was working.”

At the end of the session, though Tatum wore no brace, he turned to her and asked, “How long have you had that terrible pain in your neck?”

He told her he could ease her discomfort by moving energy with his mind. “And in the span of five minutes in his office, he cut the pain in half,” she says. “So then I was just wildly curious.”

Tatum began studying with Levy and joined a group of people who meditated together in his office before work. She, too, learned to see and move energy, and began to feel that God was calling her toward a new professional path.

In 1994 she quit her government job and became a Methodist minister, moving first to Chicago and then San Francisco. Along the way, Tatum, who’d been divorced, met a new man, remarried and had a son.

Levy, who’d been married since 1970 and had two daughters of his own, stayed in touch with Tatum and became her son’s godfather, even flying out to be with them when the little boy, who was born with special needs, had open heart surgery.

In April 2001, they met up at a retreat center in Southern California. Both were privately struggling with their marriages. As they sat meditating in a garden near the Pacific Ocean, Levy felt his guru, who died in 1952, speak to him. Yogananda, Levy says, told him he understood his agony. “He said to me, ‘Go back and try to save your marriage. See if you can fix it. But if you cannot fix it, you cannot let it kill you, like you’re planning on letting it do. Because I have important work for you to do with the person sitting next to you.. . . I want the two of you to come together to do a holy work.’”

Startled, Levy opened his eyes to tell Tatum what he’d heard. Before he could start, she repeated the message word-for-word. Yogananda, she said, had told her the same thing.

Tatum returned to San Francisco, but when she could not save her marriage, she retired from the ministry and moved back to Washington to join Levy as a pastoral counselor in his Gaithersburg practice, the Levy Center for the Healing Arts.

When Levy and his wife separated two years later, he stayed with Tatum, who had an extra room at her house. By then their lives were fully intertwined, and devoted to a mission they see as helping others come into full communion with God.

After his divorce was finalized, the two were standing on the deck of Tatum’s home when they were overcome by a jolt of energy. “I didn’t have a mirror handy, but I think my hair stood on end,” Tatum says. “It was really just overwhelming.”

That, she says, was the force that turned their relationship into romance. “Only in the experience of it do you realize how lonely you’ve been,” says Tatum, now 54. “In some religions this is like a blasephemy — the idea that there could be such a perfect unity between persons that they have this perfect harmony. Spiritual, mental physical — and that at all those levels, the joy is ecstatic.”

And the energy they felt that day on the porch has never receded. “I experience her as God,” Levy says. “And I should know, because I know God. I look at her and I’m not talking to a woman. I’m talking to God.. . . So it is a feeling of worship.”

Both say the relationship has imbued their work with new verve and purpose. “There is something almost enchanted in the presence that we feel with each other that makes everything kind of alive and meaningful and deeply spiritual at the same time,” says Levy, 62. “And it propels us out into a larger role in the world.”

They were visiting an ashram in Northern India in 2007 when they found an emerald ring at a bazaar. That night, during a crowded religious celebration along the Ganges River, they dipped the ring in the water and decided to marry.

After a four-year engagement the pair invited almost 90 friends and family members to gather at the Lodge at Little Seneca Creek in Boyds, Md., to watch them wed before an altar that included photos of both Jesus and Yogananda.

Tatum’s pledge echoed that of her new husband. “You and I stand on the shoulders of the giants,” she said. “Because of God and the great ones, we see eternity in this moment. It is in their spirit I vow always to love you as God, always to forgive you when you’re human and always to show up for the next whirlwind adventure.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/weddings/soul-mates-connect-in-mind-and-spirit/2011/05/26/AG6OleHH_story.html

The Impulsive Traveler: The hidden pleasures of the secondhand bookstore

By Lloyd Rose, Published: June 3

The Great Secondhand Bookstore can be a shy creature. The Owl Pen, for example, lurks on a wooded hill about seven miles from the town of Greenwich, N.Y., its wares filling the outbuildings of a former farm. Like a hiding place for treasure in a fairy tale, the store makes itself hard to find.

Not only do you wind through rolling hills and finally end up on an unpaved road, but there are only two signs pointing the way. Tiny signs that your car flashes past in an instant. On my third or fourth visit, I finally stopped and measured one. White lettering and an arrow on a brick-red background, it measured 12 inches by 20 and stood just under four feet high. (Moral: Call or e-mail the Owl Pen for directions.)

What kind of used bookstore is the Owl Pen? This kind: I walked in once looking for three specific books — one on gardening by Eleanor Perenyi, one on architecture by Witold Rybczynski and a paperback of P.G. Wodehouse’s “The Code of the Woosters,” preferably one with a cover by Ionicus.

“Hm,” said co-owner Edie Brown thoughtfully, and vanished among the shelves. Five minutes later, she was back with all three.

The Owl Pen’s whimsical name is a result of, well, whimsy. The founder, Barbara Probst, started off in the mid-1940s as a working chicken farmer. Then she added lambs. Then some pigs. Then some books. The books multiplied faster than the animals. The bookstore opened in 1960 and soon replaced the farm. Probst had cleaned out the old hog-holding building, putting in a stone corner fireplace, and this was where she first put her store. Hog Pen Books, however, didn’t strike her as a salubrious name. The problem was solved when she found a little cast-iron owl on a bracket at a flea market and attached it above the door. Thus, the Owl Pen.

In 1980, Edie and her then-husband, Hank Howard (amicably divorced, they remain business partners), took over the store. Edie reckons that it now comprises some 80,000 books. Most are in the former chicken-shed — a long building with a seasoned raw plank roof and concrete floors softened with strips of carpet. Many of the books sit in elegant old Globe Wernicke glass-fronted shelves. A potbellied stove stands near the door.

“General antiquarian” is how Edie describes the store. There are very strong fiction and children’s books sections, but overall an air of inspired hodgepodgery rules. You feel you might find anything. Such as “Dr. A.C. Daniels’ Warranted Veterinary Medicines and How to Use Them,” self-published in 1892 with a charming portrait of the mustached author on the cover. That was in a box labeled The Loony Bin, which also boasted “John Halifax, Gentleman” and a novel intriguingly titled “The Wine Was Cold.”

“It could be that the general public is not reading as much,” Edie admits when asked about the state of the bookselling business. But she doesn’t regard the Internet as the enemy. “I like it,” she says. “I can buy off-the-wall things” that she knows will sell online, where Owl Pen offers about 12,000 books. She estimates online sales at about 65 percent of her total. “The walk-in trade is down,” she says. “The Internet has saved me.”

In their early collecting days, Edie and Hank learned a lot from John DeMarco, who founded the Lyrical Ballad bookstore in Saratoga Springs in 1971. Lyrical Ballad is another appropriately magical place: It’s in the basement of a 19th-century Saratoga Bank building, where you wind through a warren of narrow corridors among seven rooms. The most valuable and fragile volumes are housed behind bars in the old vault.

DeMarco — whose store specializes in art, architecture, dance and music — thinks that the Internet “has changed the business, definitely.” People travel less just to buy books. A former customer who collected early editions of the humorist Robert Benchley found them all online and stopped coming in. DeMarco hasn’t put Lyrical Ballad online. He knows that something is missing from Web site book-buying: “the mystery of visiting a used-book store.”

Apart from the store’s specialties, Lyrical Ballad has a large collection (this is Saratoga Springs) of racing books and prints. It carries the beautifully designed reprints of classic late 19th- and early 20th-century ghost stories published by Canada’s Ash-Tree Press. Along with children’s books illustrated by Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham, there are signed first editions, early travel books, 19th-century architectural books, finely engraved atlases. There are also lowbrow pleasures — a paperback science-fiction section and oddball things, like a paperback Western whose cover features a bound cowboy and reads, “He Was Bait for the Sheriff’s Posse.”

DeMarco doesn’t see the book disappearing. “The book as form and content, with a fine binding — a beautiful object — can’t be downloaded,” he says.

At Hermit Hill Books in Poultney, Vt., owner Patricia McWilliams is able to say, “I feel lucky that the Internet hasn’t had that much of an impact.” She has about 2,500 volumes for sale online, but 85 percent of her business is walk-in.

The store is certainly a place you want to walk into — light-filled, with a spacious feeling. A glass case contains an Oz book and John Lennon’s “A Spaniard in the Works.” Framed vintage movie posters (Luise Rainer in “The Toy Wife”) hang on the walls. Two fawn and white cats laze about and, on certain days, a pair of Pembroke Welsh corgis make an appearance.

McWilliams is a former editor of the now-defunct Country Journal magazine and once worked in the business department of the New Yorker. She’s an alumnus of the excellent Northshire Bookstore in Manchester, Vt. (where a clerk first told me about Owl Pen). She sees Hermit Hill as “an all-purpose bookstore for the area,” which translates into a lot of literature and history as well as poetry, science and music.

Her customers “buy anything from romance to pretty esoteric philosophy,” and she does lots of special orders “for people who don’t like to deal with the Internet.” Among her favorite books are a first edition of “The Hobbit,” a signed edition of Langston Hughes, a first edition of Kafka’s “Amerika” and the yellow-plaid first commercial printing of “The Joy of Cooking.”

Among the handcrafted pine shelves I found nooks for books on medicine, weather, English and astronomy, as well as a section labeled “Culinary Literature.” I spotted one of Dorothy L. Sayers’s books on theology and a history of New England gravestones. One area is devoted to men’s literature. Not what you’re thinking. More along the lines of Henry Ward Beecher’s 1898 “Addresses to Young Men.”

A light-filled place of books, cats and corgis. An underground maze containing antiquarian treasures. A hidden farm full of wonderful books, a reward for those who take the trouble to find it.

John DeMarco is right: The book as beautiful object can’t be downloaded. Neither can the experience of a great bookstore.

Rose is a former theater critic for The Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/the-impulsive-traveler-the-hidden-pleasures-of-the-secondhand-bookstore/2011/05/26/AGSbCBIH_story.html

Say It Ain't So - History Rewrite Revealed

Two books on baseball, one on its history, the other on the longest game

By Dave Sheinin, Published: May 13

The prevailing myth about baseball’s invention, that Civil War hero Abner Doubleday drew the whole thing up out of his imagination during a stopover in Cooperstown, N.Y., had long been debunked by the time John Thorn, the noted baseball historian, set out to write “Baseball in the Garden of Eden.”

But before Thorn, in his engaging book, gets around to explaining baseball’s true origins, he spends some time on the remarkable Doubleday myth — which was not merely exaggerated but wholly made up. Having resolved to “set matters straight,” Thorn writes, “I found myself more engaged by the lies, and the reason for their creation, and have sought here not simply to contradict but to fathom them.”

What Thorn finds is that the Doubleday myth stemmed from universal human foibles recognizable today — “jingoism, greed, or overweening ego.” Someone, namely Albert Spalding, a former star pitcher and club executive turned sporting-goods and publishing magnate, wanted folks to believe that baseball was “purely of American origin” — as opposed to having derived from similar English games — and so he set about making it so, essentially inventing its invention.

As for the true story of baseball’s origins, it was obviously more complicated than that. Baseball, Thorn says, “had not one father, but several, though none named Doubleday.” If you love history or baseball, you will enjoy Thorn’s impeccably researched tome; if you love both, you will be mesmerized.

Various bat-and-ball games that one might recognize as embryonic forms of baseball were being played in New York, Massachusetts and Pennsylvania as far back as 1735. “Baseball,” Thorn writes, “appears to have sprung up everywhere, like dandelions, and we cannot now expect to identify with certainty which of these hardy flowers was truly the first.” When the New York version ultimately prevailed during the Revolutionary War, it was less because of its superiority — Thorn calls the Massachusetts version “richer in variation and possibility” — than because of its creators’ willingness to embrace three influences that increased the game’s popularity: a friendly stance toward gambling, a recognition that statistics should be compiled and an understanding of how to obtain publicity. That remains a fairly solid, if basic, formula for any sporting venture.

“Why,” Thorn asks rhetorically, “do the origins of baseball matter today?. . . Because baseball provides us with a family album older and deeper, by many generations, than all but a relative handful of Americans can claim for their own lineage; because the charm of baseball today is in good measure its echo of a bygone age.”

If baseball’s primordial steps are worthy of some 300 pages of scholarship, so, too, is what lies at the opposite end of the evolutionary continuum. On April 18, 1981, the day before Easter, the Class AAA Pawtucket (R.I.) Red Sox and Rochester (N.Y.) Red Wings began what still stands as the game’s ultimate expression (at least as measured by length of game): a 33-inning marathon that started at night, continued through the wee hours of Easter morning and finally, after a suspension of play following the 32nd inning, reached its conclusion two months later.

In “Bottom of the 33rd,” Dan Barry, the talented New York Times columnist, explores every musty crevice and tangential detour surrounding that epic, legendary game. Rather than take the easy road — such as leaning heavily upon the star power of Hall of Famers Cal Ripken Jr. and Wade Boggs, both of whom played in the game but who figure only slightly in the narrative — Barry masterfully pieces together his story from the perimeter in.

You get essays, brilliantly rendered, about the demise of industrial East Coast cities; numerous poignant reminders of how thin is the line between a career that culminates in the big leagues and one that peters out one step shy; random odes to many of the players, coaches, stadium workers and even fans (there were said to be only 19 left in attendance when the game was suspended at 4:09 a.m.) whose fates were bound together that night; and the occasional existential riff about the sheer absurdity of what occurred.

“The night seems to have said something about time itself: the deceptiveness of it; the dearness of it,” Barry writes. “Beseeched by older ballplayers to slow the clock, and begged by the younger players to hasten it, the night chose instead to stop time; to place it under a stadium’s laboratory lights and pin it to the Pawtucket clay.”

The book is both a fount of luxurious writing (a manager’s “glorious invective that resounded through the bare and cavernous stadium like a profane Gregorian chant”) and a tour de force of reportage. Although there are no footnotes, Barry appears to have interviewed the majority of the game’s principals in person, and he describes everything from the decrepit appearance of the ticket booth to the multi-colored scribbles in the official scorer’s scorebook with a perfectionist’s eye for detail.

And in what stands as the book’s coda, in which Barry follows the redemptive, post-career story of Dave Koza, the burly Red Sox slugger who drove in the tie-breaking run but never made it to the big leagues, the author shows Koza driving his children to Cooperstown, where the family gazed at a display case in the Baseball Hall of Fame. In it was “the Louisville Slugger bat that was used to drive in the game-winning single; and a large portrait of the hero who swung it: Dave Koza, former ballplayer, truck driver, recovering alcoholic — dad.”

Dave Sheinin is a sportswriter for The Washington Post.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/books/two-books-on-baseball-one-on-its-history-the-other-on-the-longest-game/2011/04/27/AFNu3q2G_story.html

Safron In Switzerland

Smart Mouth: Switzerland’s sweet saffron

By Sylvie Bigar, Published: June 3

Hunched over on the steep slope, I pinch the ruddy crocus stigmas, the tips of the flowers’ pistils, as delicately as possible, trying not to lose my balance and tumble down into the valley. It takes 390 of these stigmas, gathered by hand from 130 crocus sativus flowers, to produce one gram of saffron.

This, however, isn’t Iran or Spain, countries known for their bountiful saffron fields. The Matterhorn rises in the distance. I’m in tiny Mund, Switzerland, a town tucked between Geneva and Zermatt in the Aletsch Glacier range, the birthplace of the Rhone River and the unlikely home of these precious purple flowers.

The region was designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2001 for its stunning Alpine beauty. Although I grew up in Geneva, a mere two hours’ drive from Mund, I’d never seen saffron cultivated in these high altitudes until I stumbled upon a risotto recipe that demanded Swiss saffron. My antennae sprang up.

With a few phone calls to Swiss chefs and the Mund city hall, I soon learned that saffron was harvested in the Mund area as long ago as the 14th century. Then, in the 1950s, as industrialization spread throughout Switzerland, farmers gradually abandoned the crop. But when state authorities decided in 1979 to build a road through what remained of the saffron fields, hundreds of villagers rebelled. Led by the village priest, Erwin Jossen, they rose up to protect the crucial four acres historically under cultivation. More important, their fervor reignited the tradition of saffron farming in the area.

So how did the precious threads get from Asia to Switzerland?

Many civilizations claim to have discovered the red spice, but its origins probably lie in ancient Greece or Anatolia, where it was first cultivated 3,000 years ago. During the Middle Ages, Arabian botanists and cooks brought saffron, already common in Middle Eastern cuisine, to Spain.

Says former Mund mayor Leo Albert, who let me pick the stigmas from the crocuses in his field, “We read in a medieval treatise that mercenaries on their way back to Switzerland brought saffron from Italy through the Simplon Pass, braving the strict customs laws of the times. They hid crocus bulbs in their long hair, risking death if discovered.”

Mund has 529 residents today, and 60 of them own a piece of the saffron fields in parcels ranging from 376 to 2,368 square feet.

“We formed an old-fashioned guild in 1979,” Albert explains. “New bulbs were ordered from Kashmir and Turkey. Plans were drawn. Year after year, the amount of cultivated land grew, and more inhabitants got involved.”

By 2004, the guild had obtained an AOC, or Appellation d’Origine Controlee, the stamp of approval from the Swiss government, and the official Mund saffron was born.

Saffron is created by drying and crushing the three threads that grow inside the crocus flower. Last year’s harvest yielded a grand total of about nine pounds — a small amount, perhaps, but enough to reenergize a village and put it on the international foodie map.

In 2007, Mund joyfully opened a saffron museum in a Lilliputian chalet dating back to 1437. Inside, the scent of wood and hay is intense; pictures, posters and artifacts line the walls and tell the history of saffron in Mund. The method of cultivation includes planting rye just above the treasured bulbs to act as mulch and to mitigate the humidity.

“Throughout the year, you see nothing,” says Albert. “You have to believe in the saffron. And then suddenly the fields explode with purple flowers.”

Today, experts consider Mund saffron superior to any in the world. Neither Spain nor Iran, with their massive outputs (Spain produces 33,000 pounds a year, Iran 190,000), can compete with Mund saffron for flavor.

It’s noon, and the nearby chorus of church bells calls gourmands to the table. “This is a town of gastronomes!” says Restaurant Safran’s elegant owner, Helena Schweitzer. A creamy saffron soup made with fendant, a Swiss white wine, tastes flowery and earthy at the same time. In the spaetzle, small handmade noodles, the spice brings out a sweetness that perfectly complements a loin of boar with chestnuts and red cabbage.

At Cafe Salwald, deer heads and horns adorn the walls. It’s the middle of the afternoon, but the restaurant is full of mountain-lovers stopping on their way down from the higher elevations. With a contented grin, Marie-Claude Pochon says, “I belong to the Gourmettes de Sierre, a ladies-only gourmet club. We come every year. I am fascinated by the crocus and try to buy as much saffron as possible.”

At the next table, a family enjoys a fragrant saffron fondue. In the saffron parfait, the spice, disguised as a dessert flavoring, seems to enjoy its split personality.

The walk down to the village leads through meadows and across bisses, manmade streams that are the centuries-old irrigation system of the region. This is the postcard Switzerland of my childhood: Cowbells tinkle around me, flowers exhale sweet breaths and the sound of running water is omnipresent. Travelers linger at the cheesemonger, then almost miss the tiny grocery store. Inside? Rows of saffron pasta and loaves of sweet saffron bread. I stock up, then ask, “Any saffron?”

The burly shopkeeper’s laugh fills the space. “Today, sold out!” she says. The waiting list for next year’s supply is extensive: villagers who wouldn’t think of cooking without it, the two restaurants, early-bird visitors and some top Swiss chefs, including Philippe Rochat of Michelin three-starred Hotel de Ville in nearby Crissier.

Of the saffron, Rochat says simply, “It’s so perfumed, it’s incomparable. I use it with utter parsimony and sensitivity. Depending on the seasons, we’ve added it to scallops or fish. We also created a Valais pear souffle with Mund saffron. What a success!”

Chef Helmut Schmidt, who once ran Mund’s Restaurant Jaegerheim, adds, “Along the way, I’ve tasted many different kinds of saffron. This one’s special because it’s strong but sweet. No one knows what makes it so good. I let the spice infuse the dish for 10 to 15 minutes, just like tea.”

Outside, the brisk mountain air is redolent of forests and straw. I’ll get back to the lower elevations around Geneva tomorrow. Tonight, I surrender to the spice in my blood and dream of magic carpets carrying mercenaries with saffron bulbs in their hair.

Bigar, a food and travel writer, has left Switzerland for New York. She can be found at www.sbigar.com.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/smart-mouth-switzerlands-sweet-saffron/2011/04/08/AGhDB9HH_story.html

Sociology most Dickensian

By Michael Dirda
Thursday, January 27, 2011; C03

First published in 1850-52 in periodical form and eventually collected in four volumes in 1861-62, Henry Mayhew's "London Labour and the London Poor" takes the fascinated and appalled reader deep into the world of the Victorian underclass. In Mayhew one encounters the real-life equivalents of such Charles Dickens characters as Fagin, the Jewish receiver of stolen goods; Krook, the rag-and-bottle-merchant; Jo, the sickly crossing sweeper; and the Artful Dodger, leader of a band of youthful pickpockets. In the words of its title page, this journalistic classic focuses on "Those That Will Work, Those That Cannot Work, and Those That Will Not Work."

As Robert Douglas-Fairhurst notes in the superb introduction to this volume of selections, "London Labour and the London Poor" was "originally advertised as a 'cyclopaedia' of street life, implying that the finished work would be a compendium of facts for dipping into rather than a book to be read from cover to cover, and it certainly lived up to its billing. In its 2,000-odd cramped pages, totaling close to 2 million words, there is scarcely a paragraph that does not contain an eye-opening or ear-catching piece of information. . . . London Labour and the London Poor was not only the first major work of sociology (a word first coined in the 1840s). It was also the greatest Victorian novel never written."

Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) was himself a Grub Street hack, who cranked out romances and plays, edited short-lived periodicals and helped found the comic magazine Punch. Here, though, he brilliantly combined interviews with lists and statistics, packed on the local color and wrote as vividly about London as any novelist. He once called himself a "traveller in the undiscovered country of the poor" and said his aim was to give "a literal description of [the people's] labour, their earnings, their trials, and their sufferings, in their own 'unvarnished' language."

His usual procedure was first to define a category - for instance, "street sellers" or "street performers, artists and showmen" - and then to zero in on the various professions comprised under that rubric. Whether discussing sewer scavengers or dustmen, beggars or prostitutes, he would begin by carefully noting their physical appearance and often idiosyncratic garb:

"The rat-catcher's dress is usually a velveteen jacket, strong corduroy trousers, and laced boots. Round his shoulder he wears an oil-skin belt, on which are painted the figures of huge rats, with fierce-looking eyes and formidable whiskers. His hat is usually glazed and sometimes painted after the manner of his belt. Occasionally . . . he carries in his hand an iron cage in which are ferrets, while two or three crop-eared rough terriers dog his footsteps. Sometimes a tamed rat runs about his shoulders and arms, or nestles in his bosom or in the large pockets of his coat. When a rat-catcher is thus accompanied, there is generally a strong aromatic odour about him, far from agreeable; this is owing to his clothes being rubbed with oil of thyme and oil of aniseed, mixed together. This composition is said to be so attractive to the sense of the rats . . . that the vermin have left their holes and crawled to the master of the powerful spell."

Mayhew brilliantly describes the tohu bohu of the Covent Garden flower and vegetable market, takes us along Petticoat Lane with its myriad street vendors of secondhand goods, and reveals the multiple uses for a piece of castoff wool clothing. One learns about the "pure" pickers who collect dung, of the "mud-larks" who wade into the Thames ooze searching for salable detritus, of how a performer practices to swallow a live snake and how a pickpocket learns his trade. "A coat is suspended on the wall with a bell attached to it, and the boy attempts to take the handkerchief from the pocket without the bell ringing." Shades of Oliver Twist!

Powerful as his own descriptions are, Mayhew can't compete with the quiet horror of his transcribed testimonies. A legless man hawks nutmeg graters, a blind man lives by selling bootlaces, and an 8-year-old peddles watercresses. "I ain't a child," says the last, "and I shan't be a woman till I'm twenty, but I'm past eight, I am." Yet even among the most desperate, Victorian class awareness remains. " 'We are the haristocracy of the streets,' was said to me by one of the street-folks, who told penny fortunes with a bottle. 'People don't pay us for what we gives 'em, but only to hear us talk. We live like yourself, sir, by the hexercise of our hintellects - we by talking, and you by writing.' "

Listen, then, to the bravura patter of a street-corner salesman:

"I've not come here to get money; not I; I've come here merely for the good of the public, and to let you see how you've been imposed upon by a parcel of pompous shopkeepers, who are not content with less than 100 per cent for rubbish. They got up a petition - which I haven't time to read to you just now - offering me a large sum of money to keep away from here. But no, I had too much friendship for you to consent, and here I am. . . . I've in this cart a cargo of useful and cheap goods; can supply you with anything, from a needle to an anchor. Nobody can sell as cheap as me, seeing that I gets all my goods upon credit, and never means to pay for them. Now then, what shall we begin with? Here's a beautiful guard-chain."

Mayhew talks to anyone - vagrants, swindlers, omnibus drivers, wandering purveyors of joke books, even a provider of artificial eyes. He learns how old horses are killed for dog food and how ashes from coal fires are collected and sifted to be turned into bricks. At times he pauses to compute the cost of this and the amount of that. "The information collected shows that the expenditure in ham-sandwiches, supplied by street-sellers, is 1,820 [pounds sterling] yearly, and a consumption of 436,800 sandwiches."

A rather sullen prostitute once called Mayhew "a very inquisitive old party." No doubt he was -to our benefit. Of manageable length, this "selected edition" of "London Labour and the London Poor" includes contemporary illustrations and notes explaining Victorian terms. It's a book you'll want to keep as well as reread.

Dirda reviews books for The Post every Thursday.

LONDON LABOUR AND THE LONDON POOR

A Selected Edition

By Henry Mayhew

Edited by Robert Douglas-Fairhurst

Oxford. 472 pp. $24.95

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2011/01/26/AR2011012607082.html

Cheesecake In Brooklyn and Monte's

And more on Monte's Venetian Restaurant and cheesecake in Brooklyn. This video is from May/June 2009.

Best Cheesecake

Who makes the best cheesecake in New York? Is it the renowned Brooklyn restaurant Juniors? Or is it Eileen's in SoHo, where the slogan is "Made with Love?"

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Our quest to find the best cheesecake may have started as a clever guise for us to have more sweets in the office, but eventually it turned into a less-than-scientific, but completely valid taste test. George Oliphant crossed three boros to find the best, but we're still not sure what his (or our) favorite is.

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Watch the video to see some of the best cheesecake in the city. Then tell us about your favorite in the comments below.

Monte's Venetian Room

451 Carroll Street / at Nevins Street

Caroll Gardens / Brooklyn / map it

718.624.8984

Cascon Cheesecake

7-04 149th Street / at 7th Avenue

Whitestone / Queens / map it

718.767.5700 / website

Eileen's "Special" Cheeescake

17 Cleveland Place / at Kenmare Street

Soho / New York City / map itÂ

212.966.5585 /

http://lxtv.com/1stlook/video/7721

More Monte's Venetian Restaurant

From the blog Pardon Me For Asking - news from Carroll Gardens, Brooklyn and Beyond...... On the Pardon Me For asking page there are more great photos.

Thursday, May 27, 2010

The Sad End Of Monte's Venetian Room: Marshal Seizes Famous Gowanus Eatery

Long before some envisioned gondolas gliding on the fetid waters of the Gowanus Canal, there was Monte's Venetian Room. First opened in 1906 by the Montemarano Family, the restaurant has been steeped in local lore ever since. Once the playground of Sammy Davis Jr. and other members of the Rat Pack, the place had lost much of its luster in the last few decades. Sure, the red banquets and huge mural of Venice were still the same, but the interior, along with the staff and the food, had grown tired over the years.

Last owned by Toni Monti, the eatery at 451 Carroll Street between Third Avenue and Nevins Street, turned out Chef Luis Chuia's rather unimpressive veal saltimbocca or marsala and chicken parmesan. His Italian cheesecake continued to be famous outside of the neighborhood, though.

And then, just like that, one day the Venetian Room's doors closed in 2008 and never reopened after more than 100 years in business at that location.
It was rumored that the place was going to be renovated, but nothing of the kind ever happened. Dust slowly accumulated on the bar, banquettes and tables.

It now seems that there is one last twist in the restaurant's long and troubled history. A Marshal's Legal Possession notice was posted on the premise's window on May 19th. It is an order to vacate the ground floor commercial space as well as the parking lot next door.

It is indeed a sad end to this Gowanus eatery. I am glad that I ate there at least once about six years ago, though by then, it was clear that its hey days were long over. If I remember right, my friends and I were the only ones in the place on a Saturday evening. Choosing a dish from the extensive menu was frustrating since the kitchen seemed to be out of almost everything. After the rather sorry meal, the elderly waiter with the lovely South Brooklyn accent handed us the dessert menu, but prefaced by saying that the only thing available was the cheesecake.
"It's the best Italian cheesecake in Brooklyn" he told us.
Though it seemed like a waste of money back then, I don't regret having had the chance to soak up the Venetian Rooms 'atmosphere' before it faded away. And I can now honestly say, I will miss the place. Somehow, the neighborhood is a bit poorer without it.

Here is a brief history of Monte's Venetian Room by Lyn Stallworth and Rod Kennedy, Jr. from their wonderful 1991 The Brooklyn Cookbook:

Nick Montemarano's father and mother, Angelo and Filomena, opened their no-frills, home-style Angelo's Tavern in 1906. Nick was born in 1916, in the family apartment upstairs. Nick and his brothers, Rocco, Vincent, Michael, Peter, Angelo, and Joseph, worked in the tavern as they were growing up.
When the boys came back from the service after the war, Angelo's Tavern got a massive facelift and became Monte's Venetian Room, the landmark of South Brooklyn. Despite the name, most of the cooking is solidly Neapoliatan.

Monte's Venetian Restaurant

My wife and I (not married then) took her parents (Sicilian mom) to Monte's Venetian Restaurant in 1987 to announce to them our engagement and wedding plans and to ask for their blessing. Restaurant with a history. People said all sorts of hit men hung out at the bar. Interesting place. Although I never heard of any shootings there, good idea to not sit with your back to the door or the kitchen. The cheese cake was f&%%^&g amazing.






June 1, 2011

Century-old Monte’s is reborn again

By Sarah Zorn

for The Brooklyn Paper

After unexpectedly closing down in 2008, the century-old Monte’s on Carroll Street is finally set to reopen today, in name — and signature ricotta cheesecake — only.

And that’s the good news.

The former speakeasy and Rat Pack playground — which long claimed to be the oldest Italian restaurant in the borough — was beginning to lose luster as customers grew weary of its over-the-top décor and increasingly lackluster Italian-American food.

“We wanted to keep the neighborhood feel of the old Monte’s, but make it a lot more modern and fun,” said new co-owner, Tina Castelvetre.

That means updated interiors that resist kitsch with sage green and exposed brick walls — and the gigantic murals of Venice have been replaced with vintage Brooklyn street maps, wrought iron sconces, and the occasional pizza paddle.

“We kept what we could, like the old bar,” said Castelvetre. “We just gave it a new marble countertop. The tables got a new base. The red booths aren’t original, but we kept the look the same. Everything else needed to be gutted — it was all rotted through.”

The most striking aspect of the renovation is an entirely open kitchen, where patrons can watch pizzaiolo John Censullo shuttle thin crusted pies from a massive wood-burning pizza oven.

And while the 100-year-old recipe for Monte’s famous ricotta cheesecake remains untouched, soggy platters of veal piccata and spaghetti marinara get the boot.

“I didn’t go to one of the best cooking schools in Italy to make chicken parmagiano,” said new chef Christian Sbordi, whose resume also includes stints at The Rainbow Room/Cipriani’s and Le Caprice in Manhattan.

“There’s nothing wrong with shrimp fra diavolo, but I’m a three-star chef. I want to create three-star modern Italian food … that people can still afford.”

The new menu includes a roster of carefully selected meats and cheeses ($9 each, or $18 for five) and starters such as polenta fries ($7). Pastas will range from $14-20, and main courses will top out at $32.

Sbordi is particularly excited about his lamb meatballs with ricotta, sherry onions, cauliflower and sesame cream, grilled octopus with radicchio, chick peas, and green olives, homemade “trenette” pasta with wild boar ragu and parmagiano foam, and pan seared sesame-crusted tuna with caponata and saba, a syrup made by reducing the first grape pressings for wine.

Pretty fancy stuff for a restaurant that once drew visitors more for its exploits than its food — if it drew visitors at all given its isolated location next to the Gowanus Canal.

That once-distant locale, however, is part of a burgeoning scene.

“We respect the history of Monte’s, but it wasn’t serving the neigborhood anymore,” said Castelvetre. “Now we have a place where you can come with your family, or for a dinner date, or a few late night drinks with friends. That’s what the area needs right now.”

Monte’s [451 Carroll St. between Third Avenue and Nevins Street in Gowanus (718) 852-7800].

©2011 Community Newspaper Group

tony from south brooklyn says:

ah memories....i used to carry a card in my wallet with Monte's phone number on it. if i was in trouble i was to ask for Philly Boy.

i wonder if anyone will reopen the old democratic club building on Union Street, just west of 5th, where the true godfather met with us locales (just like in the movie) to squash tickets, avoid the military draft, get a hack license, or in my case - support my candidacy for elected office.

June 1, 11:31 am

http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/34/22/24_montes_2011_6_3_bk.html





March 7, 2011

UPDATE! Monte’s name will remain, but new owner will change food and look of the old joint

By Sarah Zorn

for The Brooklyn Paper

We’ll always have Monte’s!

Though the 102-year-old red sauce Italian restaurant on Carroll Street closed last year, the new owner of the soon-to-open eatery in the same space says the new joint will bear the same historic name.

“It was always the plan to keep the name, ‘Monte’s,’ ” said Dominick Castlevestri, who frightened locals because his renovation permits listed the name of the restaurant as “Dominick’s on Carroll.”

“That’s just the ‘doing business as’ name,” he said. “Monte’s it is.”

But even if the name will remain the same, the approach will change, said Castlevestri, who has run pizzerias for 11 years and lives in the area (though he would not be more specific).

“We’re importing a wood-burning oven from Italy,” he said. “And we’re going to do small Italian dishes. New Italian.”

That’s welcome news to foodies, who long ago realized that Monte’s had become known more for its exploits than its food. Once a Prohibition-era speakeasy and then notorious Rat Pack hangout, Monte’s heaping platters of veal saltimbocca and linguine with clam sauce made few concessions to new palates.

And the look of the place will, unfortunately, change.

“We had no choice but to do a complete makeover because everything was rotted,” he said. “We restored the original bar. We’re going to put in nice new booths and counters, and an open kitchen.”

Frank Perone, who has owned the building for 15 years, said that Monte’s shut down because “business was slow” — but he thinks the space between Third Avenue and Nevins Street is in good hands.

“I wanted to pick the right person, someone who was going to do an extreme makeover,” he said. “I liked the way Dominick conducts himself. He’s going to do well here. The neighborhood has changed, new faces. I know Dominick will be in business for a long time.”

It better be — because, if not, Castlevestri will have to answer to one opinionated neighbor.

“My mother still lives on the block,” he said.

©2011 Community Newspaper Group

http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/34/10/dtg_montes_2011_3_11_bk.html




April 30, 2009

This is one ‘Crazy’ tour of South Brooklyn’s mob past

By Ben Muessig
The Brooklyn Paper

Red Hook is going to the mattresses — and we’re not talking about Ikea.

A biographer who detailed the life and death of the iconic South Brooklyn mobster “Crazy” Joe Gallo will lead a May 9 walking tour that will highlight the gangster’s former haunts and hangouts, and remind attendees that the now twee Columbia Street Waterfront District was once the site of a bloody Mafia war.

“When you walk down President Street today, it’s hard to believe that this is the place where the Gallo Gang waged a revolution against the Mafia,” said Tom Folsom, whose book “The Mad Ones: Crazy Joe Gallo and the Revolution at the Edge of the Underworld,” profiles the racketeer who was known as a cold-blooded killer — and a socialite with a penchant for Camus and Sartre.

“I’m hoping to give people a sense of what this neighborhood was like back in the day,” said Folsom, who co-wrote the 2007 book, “Mr. Untouchable,” with Harlem drug lord LeRoy “Nicky” Barnes, a heroin dealer who befriended Gallo while in prison.

The tour will bring Mobphiles to the block where Gallo — who was immortalized in the Bob Dylan song “Joey” — coined the term “going to the mattresses” when he ordered his ramshackle gang to hole up in his grandmother’s tenement at 51 President St. between Van Brunt and Columbia streets for protection in his underdog fight against the Profaci family between 1961 and 1963.

The building that housed the “Gallo Headquarters” no longer stands, but the walking tour will showcase at least one landmark that has hardly changed since the celebrity mobster was famously gunned down in Umberto’s Clam House in Manhattan in 1972.

The mob excursion will include a visit to the Morgan Room of FG Guido’s Funeral Home at the corner of Clinton and Carroll streets, where Gallo’s sister Carmella allegedly predicted the coming war between the fallen mobster’s soldiers and the Colombo family when she shrieked: “Blood in the streets! The streets are going to run red with blood, Joey!”

Crazy Joe Gallo walking tour will start at Carroll Park (Smith Street between Carroll and President streets in Carroll Gardens), May 9, 1 pm. For reservations, call Freebird Books at (718) 643-8484.

©2009 Community Newspaper Group

http://www.brooklynpaper.com/stories/32/17/32_17_bm_gallo_tour.html

Marvin Lichtner/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images

Joey Gallo and his gang used to hang out at a President Street tenement. Don’t look for it, it’s long gone.

Fracking Worldwide

Fracking in South Africa threatens water resources:

Province’s farmers fear ‘another Mpumalanga’

DA says SA can’t afford to have another province like Mpumalanga, where more than 50% of the available land was being mined or prospected.

SUE BLAINE
Published: 2011/06/17 06:51:42 AM

SA COULD not afford another province like Mpumalanga, where more than 50% of the available land was being mined or prospected, Democratic Alliance water and environmental affairs spokesman Gareth Morgan said this week .

The KwaZulu-Natal Agricultural Union has raised the flag about water quality and food security amid what the union says is a large number of mining applications for the province.

These include the possibility that a mining consortium would apply to use the controversial "fracking" technique for shale gas .

"We are very concerned about the whole prospecting issue generally," the union’s president, Robin Barnsley, said. KwaZulu-Natal was water-rich in comparison with SA’s other provinces, and the union was concerned about mining rights applications in general, and the consequences for water quality and food security, he said.

Planning Minister Trevor Manuel ’s newly released diagnostic report for SA notes that the delay in producing the second edition of SA’s National Water Resource Strategy is "symptomatic" of the way in which water management, or the lack thereof, is affecting economic activity in the country. Mr Morgan said: "We’re making big decisions without a holistic view."

A consortium comprising Sasol , Norway’s Statoil and the US’s Chesapeake Energy had a "technical co-operation permit" to conduct desktop studies on shale gas resources in an 88000km² area.

This is primarily in the Free State but also in areas in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, Sasol spokeswoman Nothemba Noruwana said.

"This is simply a permit to conduct desktop studies in the basin and does not include any surface or drilling activities," she said.

The 12-month permit was awarded last November.

Mineral Resources Minister Susan Shabangu has placed a moratorium on the processing of applications for reconnaissance, technical co-operation, exploration and production rights, from February 1.

Ms Shabangu has also imposed a hold on existing applications, including that of Sasol-Statoil-Chesapeake and another by Royal Dutch Shell to use "fracking" to explore the shale resource viability of a 90000km² section of the unique Karoo biome.

Fracking is the common term for hydraulic fracturing, which involves pumping a pressurised mixture of water, sand and chemicals down drill holes to fracture shale and release natural gas.

Department of Mineral Resources spokesman Bheki Khumalo said the department took water resources seriously, and prospecting did not mean the start of mining development.

"Impacts on water resources and many other environmental, social and economic variables (are considered) before a conclusion is arrived at," Mr Khumalo said.

The government’s New Growth Path aims for 140000 more direct mining jobs by 2020, and it appeared the Department of Water Affairs simply rubber-stamped department of mineral resources decisions, Mr Morgan said.

Department of Water Affairs spokesman Sputnik Ratau said all applications for water licences, whether they were for mining or any other activity, were accepted or refused in terms of the provisions of the law.

blaines@bdfm.co.za

http://www.businessday.co.za/articles/Content.aspx?id=146035

McDonalds Is The World's Biggest Toystore

Yeah - advertising to children is a scam. The between the lines item here is that McDonalds is the world's largest distributor of toys - and they don't sell them. Hmmmm...... what came first... the food or the toy.... Many parents will tell you it is the toy that was the motivator.

Mom sues McDonald’s over Happy Meals

Published: April 29

Okay, see if this seems familiar: You (or your brother or your sister) beg to stop at McDonald’s to get a Happy Meal because of the cool toy. Your mom says no, because she wants you to eat more-healthful food.

But a lawsuit filed by a mom in California says that Happy Meals toys should be made illegal because McDonald’s unfairly uses them to get kids to want to come to their restaurants.

Happy Meals make McDonald’s a lot of money. In fact, McDonald’s is the world’s biggest distributor of toys because of its Happy Meals. But nutritionists, parents and lawmakers are concerned about the growing problem of childhood obesity and a sense that restaurants aren’t doing enough to offer more-healthful choices.

McDonald’s says that the lawsuit, filed by Monet Parham, a mother of two, should be dismissed because advertising didn’t make her buy her children Happy Meals. (Parents can always say no, the company says.)

“In short, advertising to children any product that a child asks for but the parent does not want to buy” would be illegal based on Parham’s suit, the company said.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/mom-sues-mcdonalds-over-happy-meals/2011/04/19/AFlyB9FF_story.html

More Expendables - What Was That You Put On Your Garden?

Roundup Birth Defects: Regulators Knew World's Best-Selling Herbicide Causes Problems, New Report Finds

First Posted: 06/ 7/11 07:48 PM ET Updated: 06/ 9/11 11:05 AM ET

WASHINGTON -- Industry regulators have known for years that Roundup, the world's best-selling herbicide produced by U.S. company Monsanto, causes birth defects, according to a new report released Tuesday.

The report, "Roundup and birth defects: Is the public being kept in the dark?" found regulators knew as long ago as 1980 that glyphosate, the chemical on which Roundup is based, can cause birth defects in laboratory animals.

But despite such warnings, and although the European Commission has known that glyphosate causes malformations since at least 2002, the information was not made public.

Instead regulators misled the public about glyphosate's safety, according to the report, and as recently as last year, the German Federal Office for Consumer Protection and Food Safety, the German government body dealing with the glyphosate review, told the European Commission that there was no evidence glyphosate causes birth defects.

Published by Earth Open Source, an organization that uses open source collaboration to advance sustainable food production, the report comes months after researchers found that genetically-modified crops used in conjunction Roundup contain a pathogen that may cause animal miscarriages. After observing the newly discovered organism back in February, Don Huber, an emeritus professor at Purdue University, wrote an open letter to Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack requesting a moratorium on deregulating crops genetically altered to be immune to Roundup, which are commonly called Roundup Ready crops.

In the letter, Huber also commented on the herbicide itself, saying: "It is well-documented that glyphosate promotes soil pathogens and is already implicated with the increase of more than 40 plant diseases; it dismantles plant defenses by chelating vital nutrients; and it reduces the bioavailability of nutrients in feed, which in turn can cause animal disorders."

Although glyphosate was originally due to be reviewed in 2012, the Commission decided late last year not to bring the review forward, instead delaying it until 2015. The chemical will not be reviewed under more stringent, up-to-date standards until 2030.

"Our examination of the evidence leads us to the conclusion that the current approval of glyphosate and Roundup is deeply flawed and unreliable," wrote the report authors in their conclusion. "What is more, we have learned from experts familiar with pesticide assessments and approvals that the case of glyphosate is not unusual.

"They say that the approvals of numerous pesticides rest on data and risk assessments that are just as scientifically flawed, if not more so," the authors added. "This is all the more reason why the Commission must urgently review glyphosate and other pesticides according to the most rigorous and up-to-date standards."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/06/07/roundup-birth-defects-herbicide-regulators_n_872862.html?

More: Expendable Land, Expendable People

Big risk of living in known natural disaster areas

By Roger K. Lewis, Published: May 20

In the wake of disastrous Mississippi River flooding, you might wonder why presumably reasonable people continue inhabiting a known flood plain. Other devastation unleashed by nature this year suggests that much of the planet seems fated to be violently shaken, engulfed by wildfires, lashed repeatedly by tornadoes or inundated by seasonal downpours. Is land suitable for agriculture, industry or building homes so scarce that we must populate geologically and climatically vulnerable landscapes?

In fact, scarcity of land that is intrinsically safe and appropriate for development is usually not the reason people settle in places at risk. Other motivations explain our persistent defiance of Mother Nature.

Hope fueled by optimism tops the list. Despite predictions based on nature’s documented history, scientific research and calculated probabilities, people tend to think that natural disasters, while possible, will somehow not occur or affect them. This is a form of denial, a common psychological response in the face of potential adversity.

Although generally aware of nature’s threats, many have faith that technology will effectively resist and even control natural forces. Indeed, designing and constructing buildings requires confronting nature to successfully withstand gravity, wind, earthquakes and moisture. Likewise, dams, levees and diversion channels are built to manage the flow of water and control flooding. Yet, our best technical efforts can never completely avert catastrophic outcomes.

Aesthetic benefits — scenic views, beautiful natural surroundings, proximity to desirable recreational amenities, desire for privacy — induce people to inhabit risky sites. This is why expensive homes get built on steep, potentially unstable slopes or escarpments subject to erosion and mudslides; next to shorelines and beachfronts susceptible to destructive hurricane-force winds and storm surges or in arid climates on parcels covered with dense, oil-rich vegetation that can easily catch fire and rapidly burn.

People also willingly discount nature’s threats to property because of expected economic benefits. Such property might be relatively inexpensive but usable. It might encompass exploitable natural resources and have access to nearby commercial markets. Why else would one develop and cultivate land downstream from a designated spillway in Louisiana, land slated to be purposely inundated in the event of a 100-year Mississippi River flood?

Strong sentiment and a profound sense of rootedness might be the most powerful motivations for people’s willingness to place themselves in harm’s way. Affection for a familiar place and emotional ties to the land, to its culture and traditions, can trump concerns about nature’s possible threats.

Ever since learning to read, I recall seeing yearly springtime news reports about the Mississippi River overflowing its banks and wreaking havoc on levees, farmland, homes and towns. The same tragic reports and photos appeared year after year. And, evidently afflicted every year by the Mississippi’s inevitable rise, flood victims with insurance file claims to cover rebuilding, often in the very same flood plain. Regrettably, these properties, settled decades ago, remain chronically at risk. Neither property owners nor governments can afford the expense of relocation.

Fortunately, in recent decades, adoption of rational land-use policies have curtailed building in some high-risk, environmentally fragile locations. Federal, state and local regulations generally prohibit development within designated flood plains and wetlands. There are constraints on use of property abutting streams, rivers and coastal shorelines; on sensitive wildlife areas; and on sites with contaminated or unstable soils. Many municipalities limit removal of mature trees, clear-cutting of forested areas and construction on steep ground. Sensitivity to preservation and sustainability concerns is higher than ever.

Building codes also have evolved to mitigate threats imposed by nature. Today, structures must be engineered to withstand probable forces generated by earthquakes and hurricane-force winds. But being designed for “probable” forces does not mean a structure will resist all forces. An improbable yet possible seismic jolt or cyclonic blast can generate stresses far exceeding a building’s maximum structural capacity, tearing it apart. And making a building strong enough to resist any and all forces would be prohibitively expensive.

Unforeseen structural stresses were generated last month when hundreds of tornadoes swept across dozens of southeastern states, decimating buildings never designed to withstand tornadic wind velocities. The March earthquake in Japan created a tsunami far exceeding the size of the “probable” tsunami for which the coast’s seawalls were built. With seawalls breached, thousands of structures along the coast received a double whammy, damaged first by earthquake forces and then destroyed by powerful torrents of water.

Sometimes faulty judgment or execution, rather than extraordinary natural forces or sub-optimal construction, can lead to devastation. Such was the case last month when management at Washington Harbour in Georgetown did not have flood walls elevated when the Potomac River flowed over its banks.

We live on this planet facing lots of risks ranging from probable to highly improbable — wet basements, ants in kitchens, roofs leaking, inattentive motorists, falling meteors. Try as we might, we can never live risk-free. All we can do is assess risks and take prudent steps to avoid or minimize them. And, clearly, one such step is not to inhabit flood plains.

Roger K. Lewis is a practicing architect and a professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Maryland.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/realestate/big-risk-of-living-in-known-natural-disaster-areas/2011/05/16/AFj1vq7G_story.html

Food Future

Prince Charles attends Future of Food conference at Georgetown

By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Published: May 4

Prince William’s dad — also known as Charles, the future king of England — knows a bit about taking verbal punches.

Promoting sustainable farming and green living has been one of his life’s missions. But because he’s a royal with easy access to carbon-hogging jets, a handful of estates, flotillas of attendants and all sorts of resource-gobbling goodies, his oft-praised crusade tends to get lampooned with some frequency.

“I have been venturing into extremely dangerous territory by speaking about the future of food,” the Prince of Wales told an audience Wednesday at Georgetown University, evoking an image that could just as easily apply to his efforts to promote reducing dependence on fossil fuels. “I have the scars to prove it!”

But, for all the grief he gets, Charles clearly loves the subject, and he held forth for more than 40 minutes, delivering a dry, sobering and substantive message of impending worldwide crisis. And his remarks, once known for being radical, were delivered to a Washington audience on the day when Republicans and Democrats agreed that agri-business subsidies should be cut. Indeed, just five days after his son’s international blockbuster of a wedding to Kate Middleton, Charles seemed relieved to return to deriding agriculture’s “umbilical dependency on oil” and warning that humans “are pushing nature’s life-support system too far.”

“It certainly makes a change from making embarrassing speeches about my eldest son during wedding receptions,” he told the audience at the Future of Food conference, organized by Washington Post Live, a unit of this newspaper that holds conferences and events.

Charles’s keynote address was delivered on the second day of a three-day trip to Washington that included a stop Tuesday at Common Good City Farm, an urban farm and educational center in LeDroit Park, as well as a planned sit-down Wednesday afternoon with President Obama and a visit with Supreme Court Justice Stephen G. Breyer, whose wife, Joanna Freda Hare, is the daughter of a British noble, the late John Hare, 1st Viscount Blakenham. As Charles arrived at Georgetown’s Healy Hall, a British reporter called out a question about what the prince would discuss with the president. “Ah!” Charles said cryptically, smiling and pointing a finger in the air before moving on.

Charles was greeted by dozens of students who braved cool weather and rain to catch a glimpse of him as he rolled up to the ancient hall in a seven-car motorcade. Charles chatted briefly with some of them before entering the hall, complimenting Dominick Fiorentino, a 19-year-old business major from New York, on the British flags he was waving. “I think he’s using his position to spread a message about sustainable food,” Kevin Rafferty, a 19-year-old business major from Newtown Square, Pa., said after exchanging a few words with the prince. “I respect that.”

In parts of the blogosphere, Charles’s reception has been much frostier. Phelim McAleer, an Irish journalist and filmmaker, was getting prominent play on right-leaning blogs and YouTube with his 2-minute-14-second film “Prince Charles – Hypocrite.” It starts with a clip of Charles saying, “We are making it cool to use less stuff.” That’s followed by a rollout of images — accompanied by a Bach minuet — of vast estates. (There’s no Airbus this time. Charles flew to Washington in a private jet owned by Texas billionaire Joe Allbritton.) “Sustainability is an awful concept,” McAleer said in an interview from his Los Angeles home. “It’s rich, white people telling mostly brown and black people that they need to stay poor.”

One of the main themes of the Georgetown conference was finding ways to feed the poor that uses sustainable agriculture. The prince sought to promote methods that would not deplete soils, overtax water supplies or rely on the nitrogen fertilizers so often blamed for environmental degradation.

“For every pound of beef produced in the industrial system, it takes 2,000 gallons of water,” he told a near-capacity audience inside the ornate Gaston Hall auditorium, which is on an upper floor of Healy Hall. “That is a lot of water, and there is plenty of evidence that the Earth cannot keep up with the demand.”

Charles cited his efforts to farm “as sustainably as possible” in England. He said there is “plenty of current evidence that adopting an approach which mirrors the miraculous ingenuity of nature can produce surprisingly high yields of a wide range of vegetables, arable crops, beef, lamb and milk.”

“And yet we are told ceaselessly — ceaselessly! — that sustainable or organic agriculture cannot feed the world.” The prince argued that we need a “more honest form of accounting” that takes into account the health problems associated with fertilizers and other products used to boost production.

He called for a new kind of “Washington consensus” about sustainable food production, invoking a term used for the controversial neo-liberal, market-friendly policies frequently associated with international aid and lending organizations. Charles’s Washington consensus would seek to balance the needs for markets and a private sector but “recognize the real opportunities and trade-offs needed to build a food system that enhances and ensures the maintenance of social, economic and environmental capital.”

He ended his remarks by laying a heavy measure of responsibility for the future of food on the United States. He quoted George Washington, saying, “Raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.” Then, he added a coda: “And, indeed, as so often in the past, in the hands of your great country, the United States of America.”

Back home, Charles is famous for operating his Aston Martin on a clean-running biofuel made from surplus wine. Citing “security-related” issues, a British Embassy spokesman declined to say whether any of the vehicles in Charles’s motorcade — which included a Chevrolet Suburban, a Mercedes-Benz sport-utility vehicle, a Jaguar, a Chrysler 300 and a Cadillac — run on electricity or are hybrids. Some of the vehicles are operated by the U.S. State Department, the spokesman said.

As Charles visited with dignitaries inside Healy Hall, the motorcade and its drivers waited at the front door. An SUV with diplomatic plates was making a bit of noise. Its motor was running.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/prince-charles-attends-future-of-food-conference-at-georgetown/2011/05/04/AF5m1UqF_story.html

What Makes You Think You Aren't Expendable Too?

I call this murder for corporate profit.

Report calls W.Va. mine disaster ‘man-made’

By Kimberly Kindy, Published: May 19

An investigative report that details the findings of a year-long probe into the Upper Big Branch mine explosion paints a picture of a rogue coal operation in which basic safety measures were routinely flouted and federal regulators did little more than issue citations and walk away.

The 122-page report to West Virginia Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin (D), written by a panel of independent safety experts, includes interviews with dozens of miners, an examination of the disaster site and a review of thousands of pages of internal and public documents.

The panel concluded that the April 2010 disaster that killed 29 miners in West Virginia was “man-made” and could have been prevented.

The investigation was led by J. Davitt McAteer, director of the federal Mine Safety and Health Administration under President Bill Clinton, and recommended 52 safety changes. Many of them call for an increased and mandated use of technology to measure, gauge and record safety conditions to reduce human error and short-circuit fraudulent behavior.

“We are long past the time where we can accept the loss of 29 miners,’’ McAteer said at a Thursday news briefing. “If we are going to have a mining industry, we have to reform ourselves.”

McAteer and his team placed much of the blame for the worst U.S. mining disaster in 40 years on his former agency.

“Despite MSHA’s considerable authority and resources, its collective knowledge and experience, the disaster at the Upper Big Branch mine is proof positive that the agency failed its duty as the watchdog for coal miners,” the report said.

One unidentified longtime MSHA official told McAteer’s group that managers for Massey Energy, the mine’s owner, fought safety citations so vociferously that it began to shape how federal inspectors viewed the mines and softened their enforcement approach. “Massey trains our inspectors better than we do,” the MSHA official is quoted as telling the investigators.

In response to the findings, MSHA Director Joseph A. Main emphasized that his agency has stepped up enforcement since the disaster but agreed with most of the conclusions. He asked Congress to help with some of the recommended changes that would require new legislation.

“We are playing a significant role in making mines safer. Yet there are mine operators that don’t get it,” Main said. “They operate differently when MSHA is not there, and they know MSHA cannot be there all the time. That’s why we have called on Congress to provide us with more tools to protect miners. We need to make sure that recalcitrant operators do get it.”

The agency’s own investigation into the disaster is ongoing.

In a prepared statement, Massey general counsel Shane Harvey disagreed with the report’s assertion that the methane monitors, which measure the concentration of the combustible gas in a mine, were not functioning at Upper Big Branch. Harvey also disagreed with the report’s conclusion that the explosion was fueled by highly combustible coal dust.

“We disagree with Davitt’s conclusion that this was an explosion fueled by coal dust,” the statement said. “Again, we believe that the explosion was caused by a massive inundation of methane-rich natural gas. Our experts feel confident that coal dust did not play an important role.”

Nine months after the disaster, Massey agreed in January to sell its mines and other assets to Maryland-based Alpha Natural Resources. The sales agreement is subject to a shareholder-approval vote, which is expected to take place next month.

Although the report was critical of the MSHA, the harshest criticism was directed at Massey Energy. The safety experts said the company has created a work culture that encourages “deviant” behavior that includes falsifying safety reports.

“The April 5, 2010 explosion was not something that happened out of the blue, an event that could not have been anticipated or prevented,” the report said in its conclusion. “It was, to the contrary, a completely predictable result for a company that ignored basic safety standards and put too much faith in its own mythology.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/report-faults-massey-energy-for-wva-mine-explosion/2011/05/19/AFr7fA7G_story.html

Corporate Food Makers Depend On Targeting Kids

By their resistance, corporate food manufacturers show their dependence on selling unhealthy products to kids. Some of the same manufacturers tell us that advertising does not make people buy unhealthy foods - yet they are attached to the advertising!!!

Food makers resist lawmakers’ proposal for guidelines in marketing to children

By Lyndsey Layton, Published: May 24

The food and advertising industries are pushing back against an Obama administration proposal that calls for food makers to voluntarily limit the way they market sugary cereals, salty snacks and other foods to children and teens.

From yogurt makers to candy manufacturers, they lined up Tuesday to tell regulators that the first-ever proposed guidelines for marketing to children would not stop the childhood obesity problem but would certainly hurt their businesses and abridge their right to free speech.

The guidelines, ordered by Congress and written by a team from the Federal Trade Commission, the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Agriculture Department, ignited a debate about the role of marketing in soaring obesity rates among children.

“I can’t imagine any mom in America who thinks stripping tigers and toucans off cereal boxes will do anything to reduce obesity,” said Scott Faber, a vice president at the Grocery Manufacturers Association, which represents food makers and retailers.

But public interest groups and health experts say tighter controls on advertising will make a difference. “It’s clear that food marketing to children is a big factor,” said Daniel Levy of the American Academy of Pediatrics.

“Children and teens are being hit by food ads wherever they turn,” said Levy, adding that teenagers can now receive promotional messages about marketing deals on their cell phones as they pass fast-food restaurants.

The regulators held Tuesday’s meeting to gather input from the public. They are accepting written comments until July 14 before finalizing the recommendations and submitting them in a report to Congress.

The far-reaching guidelines would cover a wide array of marketing, from traditional media such as television, print and radio to pop-up ads on Internet sites. They would apply to social media, toys in fast-food meals, ads shown in movie theaters , sponsorship of athletic teams and philanthropic activities, as well as product placement in movies and video games.

“Marketing campaigns are highly integrated, very sophisticated with the result that marketing messages are ubiquitous,” said Michelle Rusk, an attorney at the Federal Trade Commission. “TV and traditional media are only about half of the marketing to children, maybe even less.”

The guidelines would be voluntary and implemented over a decade. But food companies and advertising firms say they would feel great pressure to follow guidelines, making them de facto regulations.

“This is a classic case of backdoor regulation,” said Dan Jaffe of the Association of National Advertisers.

Advertising aimed at children is a big business; food companies spend about $2 billion a year to advertise to children.

Regulators say they hope the guidelines will nudge manufacturers to improve the nutritional content of processed foods aimed at children and teens.

“We don’t want them to just quit marketing to children but to lower the sugar content or include more whole grains and then market these better options to children,” Rusk said.

Food makers repeatedly said yesterday that they were already policing themselves and no additional measures were necessary. Since 2006, 17 food and beverage companies have participated in an industry program to restrict some marketing aimed at children. But that program lacks uniform standards, allowing each participating company to set its own criteria.

“Self-regulation shows hints of progress, but it’s not working well enough to protect our children,” said Margo Wootan of the Center for Science in the Public Interest, which supports the proposed federal guidelines along with several major public health organizations.

The guidelines say foods that are advertised to children cannot exceed limited amounts of added sugars, saturated fat, sodium or trans fat. And they must include healthy ingredients, such as fruit and vegetables, low-fat dairy products or whole grains.

The sugar limits would pose a problem for many foods currently marketed to children. Under the guidelines, one serving of a food aimed at children could not exceed 8 grams of sugar. A single serving of Count Chocula cereal currently contains 12 grams of sugar; a serving of Frosted Flakes contains 11 grams.

The guidelines would apply to both young children and teenagers. Food makers and advertisers argue the guidelines be more narrowly tailored when applied to teenagers because much of the programming and media consumed by teenagers are also seen by adults. Federal regulators say they will take that notion into consideration in the final recommendations.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/food-makers-resist-lawmakers-proposal-for-guidelines-in-marketing-to-children/2011/05/24/AFKf3mAH_story.html

Anxiety Is Powerful

Researchers say math anxiety starts young

By SARAH D. SPARKS and — Education Week, Published: May 30

Math problems make more than a few students — and even teachers — sweat, but new brain research is providing insights into the earliest causes of the anxiety so often associated with mathematics.

Mathematics anxiety is more than just disliking math, experts say; someone with math anxiety feels negative emotions when engaging in an activity that requires numerical or math skills. In one forthcoming study, simply suggesting to college students that they would be asked to take a math test triggered a stress response in the hypothalamus of students with high math anxiety.

Anxiety can literally cut off the working memory needed to learn and to solve problems, according to Judy Willis, a Santa Barbara, Calif.-based neurologist, former middle school teacher and author of “Learning to Love Math.”

Stress in the brain

When first taking in a problem, a student processes information through the amygdala, the brain’s emotional center, which then prioritizes information going to the prefrontal cortex, the part responsible for the brain’s working memory and critical thinking. During stress, there is more activity in the amygdala than the prefrontal cortex; even as minor a stressor as seeing a frowning face before answering a question can decrease a student’s ability to respond.

“When engaged in mathematical problem-solving, highly math-anxious individuals suffer from intrusive thoughts and ruminations,” said Daniel Ansari, the principal investigator for the Numerical Cognition Laboratory at Canada’s University of Western Ontario. “This takes up some of their processing and working memory. It’s very much as though individuals with math anxiety use up the brainpower they need for the problem” on worrying.

Moreover, a series of experiments at the Mangels Lab of Cognitive Neuroscience of Memory and Attention at Baruch College at the City University of New York suggests this stress reaction may hit hardest the students who might otherwise be the most enthusiastic about math.

Jennifer A. Mangels, the lab’s director, said she tested college students on math in either neutral situations or in ways designed to invoke anxiety, such as mentioning sex stereotypes about math ability to women who were being tested, or telling students that their scores would be used to compare their math ability with others’.

Mangels found not only that students in stressful situations performed worse, but also that stress hit otherwise-promising students the hardest.

In non-stressful tests, the students who sought out more opportunities to learn within the math program had the highest performance. While under stress, those same students performed worse than those who didn’t identify with the subject.

“We’re reducing the diagnostic ability of these tests by having students take them in a stressful situation,” agreed Sian Beilock, a University of Chicago psychology professor.

Dyscalculia and bias

Two problems in a child’s earliest school experiences — one biological, the other social — can build into big math fears later on, experts say.

In a series of studies, Ansari and his Western Ontario colleagues have found that adults with high math anxiety are more likely to have lower-than-typical ability to quickly recognize differences in numerical magnitude, or the number of items in a set, which is considered a form of dyscalculia.

As part of normal development, children become adept at identifying which of two numbers of items is bigger, but Ansari found that those with high math anxiety were slower and less accurate at that task, and brain scans showed activity different from that of people with low math stress doing the same tasks.

Because understanding numerical magnitude is a foundation for other calculations, Ansari suggests that small, early deficiencies in that area can lead to frustration and negative reactions to math problems over time.

Moreover, math anxiety can become a generational problem, with adults uncomfortable with math passing negative feelings on to their children or students.

Beilock found that female teachers with high anxiety about math affected their students’ math performance and their beliefs about math ability. In a study of a dozen first-grade and five second-grade teachers and their students, researchers found no difference in the performance of boys and girls in math at the beginning of the year. By the end of the school year, however, girls taught by a teacher with high math anxiety started to score lower than boys in math.

That study, and similar ones, highlight a need for more training for parents and teachers on how to conquer their own math fears and avoid passing them to children, Beilock and Ansari said.

“Teacher math anxiety is really an epidemic,” Ansari said. “I think a lot of people go into elementary teaching because they don’t want to teach high school math or science.”

Eugene A. Geist, an associate professor at Ohio University and the author of “Children Are Born Mathematicians,” works with math teachers to create “anxiety-free classrooms” for students. He advises teachers to have students focus on learning mathematics processes, rather than relying on the answer keys in a textbook, which can undermine both their own and the teacher’s confidence in their math skills.

“If I give the answer, you immediately forget about the question. If I don’t give you the answer, you will still have questions and you will be thinking about the problem long after,” he said.

By contrast, constantly referring to an answer key can undermine both students’ and teachers’ confidence in their own math skills, and encourage students to focus on being right over learning.

Likewise, Willis, the California neurologist, said that teachers can help students reduce their fear of participating during math discussions by asking all students to answer every question, using scratch paper or electronic clickers to “bet” on answers, and talking about the problem as a group.

“It helps with wait time [between question and answer], increases participation and decreases mistake fear,” Willis said.

— Education Week

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/researchers-say-math-anxiety-starts-young/2011/05/16/AG3YqxEH_story.html