Looking At One's Past

  Considering one's past........

October 12, 2013

Behind Flurry of Killing, Potency of Hate

By KATRIN BENNHOLD

LONDON — From a comfortable couch in his London living room, Sean O’Callaghan had been watching the shaky televised images of terrified people running from militants in an upscale mall in Kenya. Some of those inside had been asked their religion. Muslims were spared, non-Muslims executed.

“God, this is one tough lot of jihadis,” said a friend, a fellow Irishman, shaking his head.

“But we used to do the same thing,” Mr. O’Callaghan replied.

There was the 1976 Kingsmill massacre. Catholic gunmen stopped a van with 12 workmen in County Armagh, Northern Ireland, freed the one Catholic among them and lined up the 11 Protestants and shot them one by one.

Mr. O’Callaghan, a former paramilitary with the Irish Republican Army, has particular insight into such coldblooded killing.

On a sunny August day in 1974, he walked into a bar in Omagh, Northern Ireland, drew a short-barreled pistol and shot a man bent over the racing pages at the end of the counter, a man he had been told was a notorious traitor to the Irish Catholic cause.

Historical parallels are inevitably flawed. But a recent flurry of horrific bloodletting — the attack in Nairobi that left 60 dead, the execution by Syrian jihadis of bound and blindfolded prisoners, an Egyptian soldier peering through his rifle sight and firing on the teenage daughter of a Muslim Brotherhood leader — raises a question as old as Cain and Abel: Do we all have it in us?

Many experts think we do. For Mr. O’Callaghan, it was a matter of focus.

“What you’re seeing in that moment,” he said in an interview last week, “is not a human being.”

It is dangerous to assume that it takes a monster to commit a monstrosity, said Herbert Kelman, professor emeritus of social ethics at Harvard.

“We are all capable of such things,” said Mr. Kelman, 86, whose family fled Vienna under the Nazis in 1939. “It doesn’t excuse anything, it doesn’t justify anything and it is by no means a full explanation. But it’s something that is worth remembering: We are dealing in a sense with human behavior responding to certain circumstances.”

Overcoming a deep-seated proscription against killing is not easy. In his book “Ordinary Men,” Christopher R. Browning described how a German police battalion staffed with fathers, businessmen and plumbers struggled as they executed thousands of Jews in Poland. How many among them missed at point-blank range. How they vomited and cried in the forest after massacring mothers and their children. How hard they had to work at becoming killers.

A culture of authority and obedience that supplants individual moral responsibility with loyalty to a larger mission helps loosen the moral inhibition against murder, social psychologists say. So does a routinization of violence, as well as injustice or economic hardship that allows the killer to see himself as the true victim.

But perhaps the most important ingredient is the dehumanization of the victims, said David Livingstone Smith, professor of philosophy at the University of New England and author of “Less Than Human: Why We Demean, Enslave, and Exterminate Others.”

“Thinking about your enemies in subhuman categories is a way of creating a mental distance, of excluding them from the human family,” he said. “It makes murder not just permissive but obligatory. We should kill vermin or predators.”

The Hutus in Rwanda called the Tutsis cockroaches, the Nazis depicted the Jews as rats. Japanese invaders used the contemptuous term “chankuro” to refer to their Chinese victims during the Nanjing massacre. American soldiers fought barbarian “Huns” in World War I and godless “gooks” in Vietnam.

In Northern Ireland, “taig” was a popular slur for Catholics. Where Mr. O’Callaghan grew up in Tralee, County Kerry, they called Protestants “sassanagh,” Gaelic for “foreigner.”

Later, after The Troubles had started in 1968 and images of Catholics being bombed out of their houses in Belfast flooded the news, creating an army of angry young Catholic men, Protestants, too, became “Huns.”

Such labels help, said John Horgan, director of the Center for Terrorism and Security Studies at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, and author of “Walking Away From Terrorism,” a book on experiences of former militants. Still, he said, “They wrestle with their conscience. They don’t sleep well at night.” It is no coincidence, he said, that terrorist executions often involve hooding the victim or slitting the throat from behind. “Watching the face when you kill someone is a very difficult thing to do,” he said.

Mr. O’Callaghan never dared look into the face of the man he killed that day in 1974. When he closes his eyes and searches for it, all that comes back is a grainy photograph from the next day’s newspaper.

He had joined the Irish Republican Army at 15. A country boy seething at the injustice he saw in the Belfast refugees streaming into his southern Ireland county, he became an explosives and firearms instructor, training young men in mountain camps near his home. “We felt that we were part of something,” he said.

The older men taught the younger ones about the 1916 uprising, an event elevated to a near-mystical status because it fell on Easter Monday. He fell hard for the Irish republicans’ emotional blend of Catholic religion and Irish nationalism.

A six-month jail term after he was caught with explosives only made him angrier. In May 1974, he was sent to Northern Ireland and took part in bombings and robberies. One night he got a call from Harry White, a Welshman who worked for the I.R.A., with a tip that Peter Flanagan, legendary in the I.R.A. as a Catholic turncoat and “torture chief” for the Royal Ulster Constabulary, often ate lunch at the Broderick bar. “He drives a blue Volkswagen,” Mr. White told Mr. O’Callaghan, and said to look for the car outside the bar.

Mr. O’Callaghan was 19. He found his quarry, and trained his eyes and his gun on a faceless torso in a blue shirt. The newspaper dropped to the floor. The torso followed, a blue mass rolling off the bar stool in slow motion. A voice pleaded, “Don’t.”

He recalled what his grandmother had told him when he was only 9: “When you shoot a British policeman, dig him up and shoot him again because you can never trust them.”

He fired eight times. It took perhaps 10 or 15 seconds.

Years later he learned that Peter Flanagan was not the monster that the I.R.A. had made him out to be. Mr. Flanagan had been unarmed, had testified against British police officers at the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, and had probably never tortured a soul.

Mr. O’Callaghan eventually became an informer for the Irish police and later turned himself in, pleading guilty to 42 crimes including this one, a journey he partly chronicled in a memoir called “The Informer.” He was sentenced to 539 years in prison. After eight years he was pardoned, and in 1996 he walked free. He turned down an offer for witness protection — to take responsibility and to make peace. “But of course you never really do,” he said.

He had killed many times, ambushing shadows in the dark on army barracks, firing a mortar, but never like this, up close. The torso still comes back to him, in dreams and sometimes in the middle of the day.

But what haunts him most was a comment his driver made that day. She was a Belfast woman with a worn face who went by the nom de guerre Lulu. On the way to the bar, she had been so nervous she drove the wrong way up a one-way street and had gotten them lost.

Later, after they sped off, dumped the stolen car, and made it to a safe house, Lulu finally caught her breath.

“I feel sorry for his mother,” she said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: October 31, 2013
An article on Oct. 13 about the potency of hate and other factors that have characterized many mass killings throughout history misspelled the contemptuous term used by Japanese invaders to refer to their Chinese victims during the Nanjing massacre. It is chankuro, not chancorro.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/13/world/europe/behind-flurry-of-killing-potency-of-hate.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Uruguay On The Front line

 Tipping point is coming.

Growers celebrate as Uruguay prepares to legalize marijuana cultivation, distribution

By Juan Forero, Published: October 23

FLORIDA, Uruguay — Pot connoisseurs of the world take note: Uruguay is about to go where no country has gone before by legalizing the cultivation and distribution of marijuana, with the left-of-center government regulating all facets of the trade.
The initiative runs sharply counter to the Obama administration’s anti-drug policies, which criminalize the use of marijuana, heroin and cocaine and rely on tough interdiction tactics to stop the flow of drugs from Latin America.
But Julio Rey is eagerly preparing for the day when he and his friends can form a cannabis club to grow marijuana in the lot next to his home in this sleepy farming town 60 miles north of the capital, Montevideo.
“To be a grower, once this is up and running, will be something like being a sommelier,” said Rey, 38, who already has eight budding plants he lovingly tends in two specially lighted cabinets.
Under a bill approved by the lower house of the General Assembly and facing a Senate vote in weeks, Uruguayans will be able to grow up to six plants in their homes. Cooperatives of up to 45 members will be able to cultivate up to 99 plants for their own use.
Growers in places such as this rural town would also likely produce for the larger market, selling their harvest to the government. The drug would be supplied to pharmacies, the only retail outlets allowed to sell to individual buyers. Users will have to sign up in a federal registry, and it will be illegal to sell pot to children or foreigners.
“This proposal is in line with Uruguayan culture and the role the state has historically had in regulating social vice,” said Sebastián Sabini, a lawmaker who led the campaign for the bill. “We’re going to set prices, limit what is produced, prohibit advertising. It’s planned and controlled and regulated by the state, where there are private players but the state sets the rules.”
What the government of President José “Pepe” Mujica is advocating — which will surely become law because of his movement’s comfortable majority in the Senate — will make this country of just 3.4 million people a trailblazer. Under Mujica, a 78-year-old former guerrilla, Uruguay has adopted a raft of liberal policies on issues from same-sex marriage to abortion.
The Uruguay proposal is similar to the law in one U.S. state, Colorado, where users will soon be able to buy marijuana at licensed stores and grow a small amount at home. And the Netherlands long ago legalized consumption, with smokers enjoying joints in special cafes. But cultivation there is banned, and no other country has moved to make the production and mass distribution of marijuana legal.
Julio Calzada, director of the government’s National Drug Board, said the objective is to dismantle a black market that has been supplying Uruguay’s 25,000 habitual users with cheap marijuana smuggled in from Paraguay. Although this country is among the safest in the region, it has seen a slight spike in homicides and robberies that has generated a perception of insecurity among Uruguayans.
Calzada said the new system would shrink the illegal market for marijuana, valued at $20 million to $30 million, and the amount of crime associated with it. “People traffic drugs to make money, and we are taking that away,” he said. “We’re not saying that we’re going to end the black market. We’re saying we’re going to seriously upset it.”
Challenge to U.S. policy
Uruguay’s new drug strategy is a challenge to the U.S. counter-narcotics strategy. President Obama has said that legalization of drugs is not a workable recourse, even as some leaders in Latin America have called for a new policy in the face of soaring numbers of dead in the drug war in Mexico and Central America.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Pooja Jhunjhunwala said that while Uruguayans can decide which drug policies are most appropriate, the Uruguayan government “has the obligation to comply with its international treaty commitments.” She was referring to the 1961 U.N. convention on drug control, which prohibits the distribution, possession and use of marijuana and other drugs.
But Kevin A. Sabet, a former drug policy adviser in the Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations, said Uruguay was taking a huge risk.
“I think they should understand that they’re on the brink of creating a public-health crisis,” said Sabet. He is co-founder of an advocacy group, Smart Approaches to Marijuana, that proposes education and treatment for users but not jail sentences or legalization of drugs.
He said the Uruguayan bill’s ban on selling marijuana to young people and foreigners will ensure that the black market will continue to operate.
“You’ll have generations of Uruguayans growing up seeing marijuana as a rite of passage to adulthood,” Sabet said.
Here in Uruguay, Verónica Alonso, an opposition lawmaker, said she felt the government had not adequately analyzed the implications of the bill. She said she has doubts that the measure will cut crime.
“We’re a laboratory where we don’t know the consequences,” she said. “There’s no scientific evidence that says the narcotraffickers will say, okay, we can’t operate in Uruguay, we’ll go somewhere else.”
What is clear is that legalizing the marijuana trade will bring people who grow marijuana into the open. Marijuana use has been decriminalized here since the 1970s.
Among the most dedicated advocates of legalizing marijuana is Juan Vaz of the Uruguayan Association of Cannabis Studies, a group that examines everything from the tricks of growing the perfect plant to the ways in which the illegal trade works. Vaz, 46, calls himself a “guerrilla planter,” cultivating in secrecy to stay a step ahead of the authorities. He’s paid the price, having been arrested for his hobby.
With legalization, he said, cultivators here will be able to breed what he calls a “marvelous plant” that will offer a better smell and taste and a more potent high than the Paraguayan product, which he says is cultivated with little attention to detail and then pressed into bales that damage the quality.
“If done right, this product will be so good that customers will pay two times or three times what they paid on the black market,” said Vaz, speaking in an apartment withall manner of supplies to grow marijuana, from special fertilizers to peat moss.
The government is hoping that marijuana produced through a regulated system, though, won’t be so expensive.
Indeed, Calzada told the Montevideo newspaper El País that the price set by the government would be the same as that offered by Paraguayan dealers: $1 a gram, the equivalent of what he called a thick joint. Under the law, individuals can buy up to 40 grams a month, or 1.4 ounces.
Here in the town of Florida, Rey said recently he is giddily awaiting the go-ahead to plant next to his house.
Rey walked in the overgrown lot next to his home and spoke enthusiastically about the freedom he will feel growing six-foot-high plants of cannabis sativa and its cousin, cannabis indica. He said he and his friends would hold barbecues to deal with the inevitable munchies that come with smoking.
“As you know, that’s one of the inconveniences,” Rey said with a laugh. “You want to eat everything you can get your hands on.”

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/pot-growers-celebrate-as-uruguay-legalizes-cultivation-and-consumption-of-marijuana/2013/10/23/f8044fc6-3bfe-11e3-b0e7-716179a2c2c7_story.html

Allan Block - NYC Folk Music Original

From The New Tork Times -

November 2, 2013

Allan Block, Whose Sandal Shop Was Folk Music Hub, Dies at 90

By BRUCE WEBER

Allan Block, a leather craftsman and fiddler who made sandals and music in his Greenwich Village shop — which became a bubbling hub of folk music during the 1950s and ’60s; a showcase for talented pickers and singers like Ramblin’ Jack Elliott, Doc Watson and Maria Muldaur; and a destination for aspiring musicians like John Sebastian and Bob Dylan — died on Oct. 23 at his home in Francestown, N.H. He was 90.

The death was confirmed by his family.

Mr. Block, who studied classical violin growing up in Oshkosh, Wis., was a self-taught sandal maker who helped popularize open-toed footwear. But he was prone to setting aside his leather samples and his awl to pick up a fiddle and jam with the folkies, mountain music makers and acoustic blues players who were wont to drop in with their banjos, guitars, mandolins and other instruments.

The store, the Allan Block Sandal Shop at 171 West Fourth Street, was just a few minutes’ walk from Washington Square Park and from the Folklore Center on Macdougal Street, where perpetual musical performances, both impromptu and planned, made Greenwich Village the red-hot center of the so-called folk revival.

Many evenings and weekend afternoons, the jams migrated to Mr. Block’s store, where the crowds often spilled out the door and onto the sidewalk. According to Mr. Block’s daughter Rory, a blues singer who worked with her father and ran the store after he decamped for New Hampshire in the late 1960s, Bob Dylan dropped by more than once just to chat with her father.

“He’d be sitting in a chair and my dad would be working and they’d be talking,” Ms. Block said about Mr. Dylan in an interview. “And my dad said to me: ‘You see that young man? He’s a poet first and foremost. He values his art above all else. He’s been signed by a label, but he really doesn’t care about the business side of things.’ ”

Mr. Sebastian recalled in an interview on Wednesday that in 1960, when he was 16 and living with his parents on the perimeter of Washington Square Park, soaking up what he called “the folk scene, the doo-wop scene, the beatnik scene, the blues scene,” that he often found himself at the sandal shop.

“This was a place that was an energy power point for the folk music movement,” he said, adding that many of those who played there were his heroes, old-time musicians who were featured on the influential 1952 set of recordings known as the “Anthology of American Folk Music.”

“That particular album was very important for folk singers and people learning guitar in that era,” Mr. Sebastian recalled. “And here were living examples, the people who had been on that anthology, and you could sit in a small wooden kind of room and be with them. It was unbelievable. I saw Son House, Bukka White, John Hurt, and those were just the guys in my part of the bag. I saw Doc Watson. Every guitar player should be discouraged after seeing Doc Watson.”

Allan Forrest Block was born in Oshkosh on Oct. 6, 1923. His father, Isadore, ran a scrap metal business that later expanded into building supplies. After high school, he studied journalism at the University of Wisconsin but never graduated, leaving during World War II to join the American Field Service, which he served as an ambulance driver in India. Afterward, he moved to New York City — where, his brother Daniel said, he first became interested in folk music — and then, for a while, to the woods of New Jersey, near Princeton, where, his brother said, he began making sandals.

Back in New York, his first shop was a tiny hole in the wall on Macdougal Street. According to “Positively Fourth Street: The Lives and Times of Joan Baez, Bob Dylan, Mimi Baez Fariña and Richard Fariña,” by David Hajdu, the West Fourth Street store opened in 1950.

There, Mr. Block’s daughter Mona Young said, he perfected his method of making custom-tailored sandals, complete with arch supports. Customers would choose a style from one of 20 drawings posted on the wall, stand on a piece of cardboard to have their feet traced and then return two or three weeks later for a fitting.

“Whatever weird shape the person’s foot was, that’s the shape the sandal would be,” she said.

Mr. Block’s sandals, famous in their day — the actress Faye Dunaway and musicians including Ms. Baez, Ms. Fariña and members of the band Sha Na Na bought them, Mr. Block’s daughters said, and Suze Rotolo, Mr. Dylan’s onetime girlfriend, lionized them in her memoir of the era, “A Freewheelin’ Time” — were groundbreaking footwear, fashionwise.

“In the beginning, most people saw sandals as something very European or feminine,” Mr. Block told Mr. Hajdu. “White men wouldn’t buy them at all — only black men. Then, I think, people started relating the idea of exposed feet and natural leather and something handmade with folk music and crafts.”

In New Hampshire, Mr. Block continued his leather work; in addition to sandals, he made belts, handbags, guitar straps and other items. He also performed on the fiddle at folk festivals and dances.

In addition to his daughters, Mr. Block, who was married several times, is survived by a son, Paul; a brother, Daniel; three grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren.

By some measures, from the mid-1950s through the early ’60s, the frenzy of the folk music revival, an important factor in the emergence of a fervid counterculture, was symbolized by the Allan Block Sandal Shop, where music often trumped capitalism. Sometimes on Saturday afternoons, the store was so crowded with musicians and listeners that business was impossible.

“God help you,” the singer Dave Van Ronk told Mr. Hajdu, “if you wanted to buy a pair of sandals.”

 



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/03/nyregion/allan-block-whose-sandal-shop-was-folk-music-hub-dies-at-90.html?_r=0

The Typewriter Kept Alive Up Til Now

Birthing the digital age -

September 8, 2013

Manson Whitlock, Typewriter Repairman, Dies at 96

By MARGALIT FOX

David LaBianca

Manson Whitlock, at his shop in New Haven in 1990.

 

For eight decades, Manson Whitlock kept the 20th century’s ambient music going: the ffft of the roller, the ding of the bell, the decisive zhoop ... bang of the carriage return, the companionable clack of the keys.

From the early 1930s until shortly before his death last month at 96, Mr. Whitlock, at his shop in New Haven, cared for the instruments, acoustic and electric, on which that music was played.

Mr. Whitlock was often described as America’s oldest typewriter repairman. He was inarguably one of the country’s longest-serving.

Over time he fixed more than 300,000 machines, tending manuals lovingly, electrics grudgingly and computers never.

“I don’t even know what a computer is,” Mr. Whitlock told The Yale Daily News, the student paper, in 2010. “I’ve heard about them a lot, but I don’t own one, and I don’t want one to own me.”

Whitlock’s Typewriter Shop once supported six technicians, who ministered to patients with familiar names like Royal, Underwood, Smith and Corona, and curious ones like Hammonia and Blickensderfer.

The shop, near the Yale campus, attracted a tide of students and faculty members; the Pulitzer Prize-winning writers Robert Penn Warren, Archibald MacLeish and John Hersey; the Yale classicist Erich Segal, who wrote the best-selling novel “Love Story” on a Royal he bought there; and, on at least one occasion, President Gerald R. Ford.

In recent years, however, until he closed the shop in June, Mr. Whitlock was its entire staff, working with only a bust of Mark Twain for company. He reported each day in a suit and tie, as he had from the beginning. On Sundays he sometimes cheated and dispensed with the tie.

Mr. Whitlock was older than most of his charges, though by no means all of them. (Among the shop’s resident machines was a 1910 Oliver, with its type bars arrayed vertically, like harp strings.) He owed his longevity, he told The New Haven Register last year, to “cheap Scotch and strong tobacco.”

Manson Hale Whitlock was born on Feb. 21, 1917, and reared on his family’s dairy farm in Bethany, Conn. In 1899, his father, Clifford Edward Everett Hale Whitlock, opened a bookstore in New Haven.

The store had a typewriter department, and Manson, the kind of boy who took clocks apart to see what made them tick, began working there as a teenager. By the 1940s, he had his own shop nearby.

There, except for Army service in World War II, Mr. Whitlock remained, a bulwark against the emoticon age.

Lately, he tended to only a small number of customers, including holdouts — who, like him, were married to the music of roller and carriage and ribbon and bell — and hipsters, who bought old typewriters on eBay only to discover that they had no idea how to make them go.

Mr. Whitlock’s death, on Aug. 28 at his home in Bethany, was reported in The Register and elsewhere. Survivors include a son, William, as well as grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

A man of sober reserve, Mr. Whitlock could wax uncharacteristically philosophical about his long, symbiotic relationship with his charges.

“Has the typewriter remained in use because of me,” he wondered aloud in an interview with the Yale alumni magazine this year, “or am I still around because of the typewriter?”
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/nyregion/manson-whitlock-typewriter-repairman-dies-at-96.html

Murray Gershenz - Walking Musical History

September 7, 2013

Murray Gershenz, Record Store Owner and Character Actor, Dies at 91

By WILLIAM YARDLEY

Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press

Murray Gershenz in 2009, with a rare “Butcher” version of the Beatles’ “Yesterday and Today.”

 

Call Murray. Call him from Germany. Call him from South America. Surely he will have what you are looking for: Bjorling, Brazilian jazz, early Beach Boys.

For more than 50 years, Murray Gershenz ran a used record store in Los Angeles that was much more than a store. It was an international archive of more than 300,000 records that he loved, or that he hoped one day to hear and was convinced that someone else out there did, too.

“He told me, ‘If I could listen to every one of these records I would,’ ” his son Irving said.

But some people in Los Angeles take day jobs to finance secret dreams, and Music Man Murray, as both he and his store were called, was one of them. In 1938, when he was 16 and living in New York, he helped form the Bronx Playgrounds Operetta Club. They sang at the 1939 World’s Fair. When he was nearly 80, he started taking comedy classes in Los Angeles.

His much younger classmates wondered how he made it all look so easy. The dry delivery. The exasperated face. One evening a casting director spotted him, and soon enough there he was on “Will & Grace,” playing a character named Uncle Funny.

Mr. Gershenz (accent on the second syllable), who was 91 when he died on Aug. 28 in Hollywood, went on to become a familiar and much-loved face in films and on television. Need a cute or cranky grandfather? Call Murray. He appeared in “The Hangover,” “I Love You, Man” and other movies, and had recurring TV roles on “Parks and Recreation,” “The Sarah Silverman Program” and “The Tonight Show.”

Ms. Silverman, in a statement, described him as “natural and effortless.” His genius, many people thought, was that he rarely seemed to be acting.

“He was just saying the lines as if it was him,” said his manager, Corey Allen Kotler. “Murray was the character. He didn’t have to act.”’

Mr. Gershenz achieved “offer only” status as an actor, meaning he entertained offers instead of having to audition. He used some of his rising income to keep the record store afloat; even with the recent vinyl revival, business had not been the same since the compact disc arrived in the 1980s. He started thinking about selling the collection in its entirety. He had valued it once at $3 million but was willing to sell it for half that much. Then he said he would take $500,000, then half of that. Money was one issue, but he also had other things to do.

“I still try to take care of this place,” he said, surrounded by shelves of albums, in a 2011 documentary short by Richard Parks, also called “Music Man Murray,” “but my head is, ‘What’s my next gig?’ ”

Morris Gershenzwit was born in the Bronx on May 12, 1922. His father, Irving, drove a cab, and his mother, Eileen, made hats.

Morris fell in love with music early and started collecting 78s when he was a teenager. Classical vocals were his favorite. While still in his teens, he began singing with the operetta club. He used his given name at first but later took a stage name, Marshall Grayson. By his 20s, he was going by Murray Gershenz.

After a brief marriage ended in the mid-1940s, he traveled to Los Angeles and ended up staying. He drove a cab, helped manage a bakery and enrolled at Hebrew Union College. He also continued to sing, working as a cantor at synagogues in the city and the suburbs.

And he kept collecting records. Prodded by his second wife, the former Bobette Cohen, he opened his store in 1962 on Santa Monica Boulevard. Bobette worked the front desk. He roamed the growing stacks of records. Early on they mostly sold 78s.

“People looked at him, like, ‘Used vinyl?’ ” Irving Gershenz said. “It was unheard of.”

Yet for a long time it worked, and the store grew. They bought warehouse space, then more warehouse space. They moved to another location. The store survived the compact disc. It survived the iPod and MP3s. But eventually Mr. Gershenz decided it was time.

“Every month or so there is somebody who’s interested,” he told The Los Angeles Times last year. “But there’s never anybody who’s really interested. People are biting. But nobody seems to have the money, the place to put them, or knows what in the hell to do with over a quarter-million records.”

Besides his son Irving, Mr. Gershenz’s survivors include another son, Norman; a daughter, Nada Pedraza; two grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren. His wife of more than 40 years died in 1999.

In June, Mr. Gershenz sat at his old desk at the store for the last time. He had finally found a buyer. That month, four tractor-trailer trucks pulled away with the records, heading for New York. Irving Gershenz has not disclosed the buyer or the purchase price but said he expected the collection to stay together.

“A man came in with money, enough money,” he said. “And it seemed like he was going to give it a good home.”

 



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/08/arts/music/murray-gershenz-record-store-owner-and-character-actor-dies-at-91.html

Dalai Lama Meditation

An excerpt from The Dalai Lama's book How To Expand Love: Widening The circles Of Loving Relationships


SOLVING PROBLEMS

In big cities, on farms, in remote places, throughout the countryside, people are moving busily Why? We are all motivated by desire to make ourselves happy. To do so is right. However, we must keep in mind that too much involvement in the superficial aspects of life will not solve our larger problem of discontentment. Love, compassion, and concern for others are real sources of happiness. With these in abundance, you will not be disturbed by even the most uncomfortable circumstances. If you nurse hatred, however, you will not be happy even in the lap of luxury Thus, if we really want happiness, we must widen the sphere of love. This is both religious thinking and basic common sense.

Anger cannot be overcome by anger. If a person shows anger to you, and you show anger in return, the result is a disaster. In contrast, if you control your anger and show its opposite-love, compassion, tolerance, and patience-then not only will you remain in peace, but the anger of others also will gradually diminish. No one can argue with the fact that in the presence of anger, peace is impossible. Only through kindness and love can peace of mind be achieved.

Only human beings can judge and reason; we understand consequences and think in the long term. It is also true that human beings can develop infinite love, whereas to the best of our knowledge animals can have only limited forms of affection and love. However, when humans become angry all of this potential is lost. No enemy armed with mere weapons can undo these qualities, but anger can. It is the destroyer.

If you look deeply into such things, the blueprint for our actions can be found within the mind. Self-defeating attitudes arise not of their own accord but out of ignorance. Success, too, is found within ourselves. Out of self-discipline, self-awareness, and clear realization of the defects of anger and the positive effects of kindness will come peace. For instance, at present you may be a person who gets easily irritated. However, with clear understanding and awareness, your irritability can first be undermined, and then replaced. The purpose of this book is to prepare the ground for that understanding from which true love can grow. We need to cultivate the mind.

All religions teach a message of love, compassion, sincerity, and honesty Each system seeks its own way to improve life for us all. Yet if we put too much emphasis on our own philosophy, religion, or theory becoming too attached to it, and try to impose it on other people, the result will be trouble. Basically all the great teachers, including Gautama Buddha, Jesus Christ, Muhammad, and Moses, were motivated by a desire to help their fellow beings. They did not seek to gain anything for themselves, nor to create more trouble in the world.

Religion may have become synonymous with deep philosophical issues, but it is love and compassion that lie at the heart of religion. Therefore, in this book I will describe the practice of love that I also do. In experience the practice of love brings peace of mind to myself and helps others. Foolish selfish people are always thinking of themselves, and the result is always negative. Wise persons think of others, helping them as much as they can, and the result is happiness. Love and compassion are beneficial both for you and for others. Through your kindness toward others, your mind and heart will open to peace.

Expanding this inner environment to the larger community around you will bring unity, harmony, and cooperation; expanding peace further still to nations and then to the world will bring mutual trust, mutual respect, sincere communication, and finally successful joint efforts to solve the world's problems. All this is possible. But first we must change ourselves.

Each one of us is responsible for all of humankind. We need to think of each other as true brothers and sisters, and to be concerned with each other's welfare. We must seek to lessen the suffering of others. Rather than working solely to acquire wealth, we need to do something meaningful, something seriously directed toward the welfare of humanity as a whole.

Being motivated by compassion and love, respecting the rights of others-this is real religion. To wear robes and speak about God but think selfishly is not a religious act. On the other hand, a politician or a lawyer with real concern for humankind who takes actions that benefit others is truly practicing religion. The goal must be to serve others, not dominate them. Those who are wise practice love. As the Indian scholar and yogi Nagarjuna says in his Precious Garland of Advice:


Having analyzed well

All deeds of body, speech, and mind,
Those who realize what benefit self and others And always do these are wise.


A religious act is performed out of good motivation with sincere thought for the benefit of others. Religion is here and now in our daily lives. If we lead that life for the benefit of the world, this is the hallmark of a religious life.

This is my simple religion. No need for temples. No need for complicated philosophy. Your own mind, your own heart, is the temple; your philosophy is simple kindness.

Excerpted from HOW TO EXPAND LOVE: Widening the Circle of Loving Relationships, by His Holiness the Dalai Lama / Atria Books

Travelling On One's Stomach....... In Spain

  I could handle this.......

Bar-hopping through north-central Spain

By Jason Wilson,

It’s 3 a.m. on a Friday night in Toro, Spain, and somehow, I’ve been pulled behind the bar at Discoteca Q to mix cocktails for the group of regulars, who are still going strong. My rum Manhattans are a particular hit, as are my caipirinhas.
They’re such a hit that someone is now taking a photo of me with the owner, and I am told that this will appear in the local newspaper. Perhaps, someone suggests, I should move to Toro and join the staff, writing about cocktails in Spanish. I am seriously considering it.
My new friend Nicola tells me that Toro — which gives its name to the wine region in Castilla y Leon — boasts 100 bars for a tiny population of 10,000. If you are doing the math, that is one bar for every 100 people (including children). Back in the States, I live in a town with roughly the same population, and this is the number of bars we have: zero.
My job as a spirits writer often takes me out into the bright night life of big cities and into the many fancy bars and cocktail palaces that such metropolises offer. That is all fine and dandy, but at heart, I’m not such a big-city person. I’m more than happy to spend my time in some third- or fourth-tier, modestly populated provincial city. Or an even smaller and less consequential town or hamlet. I have only one stipulation: It must have a handful of good bars.
Yes, bars. There’s no other way to put it: I love bars. I judge villages, nations and continents by the quality of their bars. And there can’t be just one. A good bar town has a critical mass, offering a choice of drinking options depending on what mood one might be in on a particular afternoon or evening — or morning, as the case may be. There’s nothing better while traveling than the first drink of the day, taken at a cool bar on a hot afternoon. Place that bar in some provincial city where little English is spoken and give me a barman who takes his job seriously (but not too seriously), and I might be close to true happiness.
That is why I love Spain. It supposedly has the highest number of bars per capita in the world. Cities like Madrid and Barcelona and San Sebastian and Seville all boast amazing bar scenes and are rightfully praised for their tapas and pintxos. But it’s the per capita part of Spain’s bar culture that intrigues me most. You can literally find a great bar anywhere, not just in the tourist spots.
On my most recent trip, I was visiting several wine regions in Castilla y Leon, so I decided to drive north and stop in some of the less well-known provincial cities along the way: Valladolid (pop. 316,000), Leon (135,000) and up north into the Asturias region, to the coastal town of Gijon (264,000), before heading to Toro (10,000).
Since Valladolid is located within three winemaking regions — Rueda, Cigales and Ribera del Duero — it seemed the perfect spot in which to kick off my imbibing tour, and I appropriately arrived in town following an afternoon of tasting big red wines in Ribera del Duero. Because it’s also a university town, the bars are buzzing with people until late into the night. But the main reason I put Valladolid on the itinerary is because it’s the home of Los Zagales, which often wins the award at Madrid Fusion, the international chefs’ congress, for best tapas in Spain.
Long ago, Valladolid was a major city. In the late 15th and early 16th centuries, when Spain ruled the world, the monarchs made it the seat of imperial power on the Iberian peninsula. Christopher Columbus, who frequented the court looking for cash to fund his explorations, died here in 1506.
By the end of the 16th century, however, Philip II had moved the capital down to Madrid, and Valladolid drifted into simply being a pleasant provincial capital. It took only four centuries for it to re-emerge, in large part due to the cheap Ryanair flights that connect it to London, Milan and Brussels.
After napping from my wine-soaked afternoon, I joined my friend Marion at about 10 p.m. for the evening bar crawl. On a weeknight at home, this would be unthinkable, but Spain being Spain (where people sit down to dinner at 11), fellow bar crawlers were just beginning to filter into the bars. It’s a personal rule to begin every night in Spain with rose wine — something I rarely do at home — so we ordered Cigales and jamon iberico at a tavern near the Plaza de Marti y Manso called Vinotinto.
From there, I continued to El Corcho and Bar Zamora, which by 11 p.m. were packed with young people, and then toward the brightly lit Plaza Mayor and Calle de Pasion. There, I sucked down mussels from La Mejillonera and washed them down with beer served in small glasses. Beer poured into small glasses is another nice touch that I love about Spanish bars. Unlike the case when it’s served in heavy pint glasses, beer served in a small glass never gets warm. And it costs about a euro, or roughly $1.50. Why don’t more bars at home try this? Don’t worry, you can still drink as much as you want. The attentive bartender is always glad to pour you a second, and a third, and a fourth. . . .
Finally, continuing down Calle de Pasion, I finished up at Los Zagales, where the tapas certainly lived up to their billing. I figured I’d end the day the way I started, with Ribera wine. I ordered skewers of tomatillo-wrapped shrimp and bacon accompanied by lemon juice charged with liquid nitrogen, which fogged aromatically in that special molecular-gastronomical way.
The most delicious tapa of the evening was the last: black potatoes, fried and covered in squid ink, sitting atop a poached egg, cream of mushroom sauce and truffled pastry crust, served in a bright white clay pot. However, the name of this dish on the menu, “Obama in Casa Blanca,” was a little. . . I mean, seriously?
The following day, after another morning of Ribera del Duero, I drove farther north, to Leon. Just so that I wouldn’t feel like a complete lush, I toured the city’s 13th-century cathedral, one of Spain’s finest and considered a Gothic masterpiece, gorgeously illuminated in the evening.
After a half-hour or so of religious art and flying buttresses, it was time to visit Leon’s other major attraction, Barrio Humedo, or the “wet neighborhood” — a quarter of narrow streets and tiny plazas famous for the ridiculous number of bars in it. Locals claim that Leon has the highest number of bars per capita in Spain. Who knows whether it’s true, but I can say that I’ve never seen a square mile with as many bars as the Barrio Humedo.
Beyond the sheer number, what’s particularly noteworthy about the bars in Barrio Humedo is that, unlike the case in many cities, the tapas are free. You order a drink, you get a little plate of the house specialty. At La Parrilla del Humedo, I started with a glass of the local Prieto Picudo rose and a free plate of morcilla de Leon (the local blood sausage). At El Llar, I drank a fresh young red with garlicky potatoes and aioli. At Rebote, a great down-and-dirty pub where you just toss your napkins on the floor, I had great croquetas, which the bartender served atop each glass of beer.
Like Valladolid, Leon is full of students, some of whom invited me into a party at an Irish pub called Molly Malone’s, where we drank gin and tonics.
Now please understand, these were not just any gin and tonics. In Spain, they do not just shoot tonic water from a soda gun into a glass with bottom-shelf gin and toss in a pathetic lime wedge. In a town like Leon, most bars have at least a dozen or more excellent gins behind the bar, all to be matched with different brands of tonics, freshly poured from the bottle and served with large chunks of ice. Sometimes they’re garnished with lime, but often they’re garnished with other muddled citrus, or grapes or berries, and they’re often spritzed with an essence of spices or herbs.
The gin and tonic may have been invented by the British, and certainly it has gained wide popularity among Americans. But the Spanish have elevated the drink to almost an art form.
The next day — after an unsurprisingly late start — I drove a couple more hours north, into Asturias, to Gijon. As I ascended into the mountains, cruising through long tunnels, the whole landscape and climate changed. Where Castilla y Leon had been arid, hot and sunny, Asturias was verdant, cool and overcast. It was not surprising to learn that Asturias has a Celtic heritage that predates the Romans.
Gijon is a working port city, and the ancient Cimadevilla neighborhood, at the port’s headland, is wonderfully picturesque and full of atmosphere, especially at night when the sidrerias (cider houses) like La Galana or Casa Zabala begin to fill up.
Asturias is all about cider — or “sidra” in Spanish. Asturians drink about 100 liters (roughly 26 gallons) of their beloved sidra per person annually. “You will never see a region anywhere else where people drink so much cider,” said Jose Luis Roza, the commercial director at Trabanco, the cider producer I visited near Gijon. “The Spanish economy is terrible, but the cider houses in Asturias are full.”
In Asturias, you order sidra by the liter bottle. “You cannot order a glass of cider,” said Jose Luis. With tremendous dexterity, bartenders or waiters will pour out the cider in a long stream, holding the bottle high over their heads and splashing a little bit down into a glass held at waist level; this is to release the carbonic gas. You are served a couple of fingers of the agitated, cloudy cider, which you are then expected to drink in one gulp.
Sidra drinking is serious session drinking, and I was simply blown away by the staggering amount of cider that people in Gijon consume. For instance, at Sidreria Principado — where I paired my cider with amazing sardines drizzled with balsamic vinegar — I stood next to a middle-aged couple who casually tossed back three liter-size bottles in about a half-hour.
“Asturians are Celtic, similar to the Irish,” Jose Luis said. “But when it comes to drinking, we consider the Irish juniors.”
A few days — and several late nights — later, I’ve traveled back down south from Asturias to Toro. I’m finishing up my bartending shift and it’s nearing sunrise.
“Wow,” I say to Nicola, as the party begins to break up. “This is a pretty good bar town.”
“It’s Spain,” she says with a shrug. “Every town is a good bar town.”
Wilson, the spirits columnist for The Post’s Food section, is the author of “Boozehound: On the Trail of the Rare, the Obscure, and the Overrated in Spirits” (Ten Speed, 2010). Follow him on Twitter: twitter.com/booze
columnist.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/travel/bar-hopping-through-north-central-spain/2011/06/20/AGDcMziH_story.html

Corn: Diminishing Returns

Lots of good points in this piece -

May 25, 2013

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food

By JO ROBINSON

WE like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won’t need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

This health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling.

Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a “superfood.” A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets.

Were the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections.

Each fruit and vegetable in our stores has a unique history of nutrient loss, I’ve discovered, but there are two common themes. Throughout the ages, our farming ancestors have chosen the least bitter plants to grow in their gardens. It is now known that many of the most beneficial phytonutrients have a bitter, sour or astringent taste. Second, early farmers favored plants that were relatively low in fiber and high in sugar, starch and oil. These energy-dense plants were pleasurable to eat and provided the calories needed to fuel a strenuous lifestyle. The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health.

The sweet corn that we serve at summer dinners illustrates both of these trends. The wild ancestor of our present-day corn is a grassy plant called teosinte. It is hard to see the family resemblance. Teosinte is a bushy plant with short spikes of grain instead of ears, and each spike has only 5 to 12 kernels. The kernels are encased in shells so dense you’d need a hammer to crack them open. Once you extract the kernels, you wonder why you bothered. The dry tidbit of food is a lot of starch and little sugar. Teosinte has 10 times more protein than the corn we eat today, but it was not soft or sweet enough to tempt our ancestors.

Over several thousand years, teosinte underwent several spontaneous mutations. Nature’s rewriting of the genome freed the kernels of their cases and turned a spike of grain into a cob with kernels of many colors. Our ancestors decided that this transformed corn was tasty enough to plant in their gardens. By the 1400s, corn was central to the diet of people living throughout Mexico and the Americas.

When European colonists first arrived in North America, they came upon what they called “Indian corn.” John Winthrop Jr., governor of the colony of Connecticut in the mid-1600s, observed that American Indians grew “corne with great variety of colours,” citing “red, yellow, blew, olive colour, and greenish, and some very black and some of intermediate degrees.” A few centuries later, we would learn that black, red and blue corn is rich in anthocyanins. Anthocyanins have the potential to fight cancer, calm inflammation, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, protect the aging brain, and reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

EUROPEAN settlers were content with this colorful corn until the summer of 1779 when they found something more delectable — a yellow variety with sweeter and more tender kernels. This unusual variety came to light that year after George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against Iroquois tribes. While the militia was destroying the food caches of the Iroquois and burning their crops, soldiers came across a field of extra-sweet yellow corn. According to one account, a lieutenant named Richard Bagnal took home some seeds to share with others. Our old-fashioned sweet corn is a direct descendant of these spoils of war.

Up until this time, nature had been the primary change agent in remaking corn. Farmers began to play a more active role in the 19th century. In 1836, Noyes Darling, a onetime mayor of New Haven, and a gentleman farmer, was the first to use scientific methods to breed a new variety of corn. His goal was to create a sweet, all-white variety that was “fit for boiling” by mid-July.

He succeeded, noting with pride that he had rid sweet corn of “the disadvantage of being yellow.”

The disadvantage of being yellow, we now know, had been an advantage to human health. Corn with deep yellow kernels, including the yellow corn available in our grocery stores, has nearly 60 times more beta-carotene than white corn, valuable because it turns to Vitamin A in the body, which helps vision and the immune system.

SUPERSWEET corn, which now outsells all other kinds of corn, was derived from spontaneous mutations that were selected for their high sugar content. In 1959, a geneticist named John Laughnan was studying a handful of mutant kernels and popped a few into his mouth. He was startled by their intense sweetness. Lab tests showed that they were up to 10 times sweeter than ordinary sweet corn. 

Mr. Laughnan was not a plant breeder, but he realized at once that this mutant corn would revolutionize the sweet corn industry. He became an entrepreneur overnight and spent years developing commercial varieties of supersweet corn. His first hybrids began to be sold in 1961.

Within one generation, the new extra sugary varieties eclipsed old-fashioned sweet corn in the marketplace. Build a sweeter fruit or vegetable — by any means — and we will come. Today, most of the fresh corn in our supermarkets is extra-sweet. The kernels are either white, pale yellow, or a combination of the two. The sweetest varieties approach 40 percent sugar, bringing new meaning to the words “candy corn.” Only a handful of farmers in the United States specialize in multicolored Indian corn, and it is generally sold for seasonal decorations, not food.

We’ve reduced the nutrients and increased the sugar and starch content of hundreds of other fruits and vegetables. How can we begin to recoup the losses?

Here are some suggestions to get you started. Select corn with deep yellow kernels. To recapture the lost anthocyanins and beta-carotene, cook with blue, red or purple cornmeal, which is available in some supermarkets and on the Internet. Make a stack of blue cornmeal pancakes for Sunday breakfast and top with maple syrup.

In the lettuce section, look for arugula. Arugula, also called salad rocket, is very similar to its wild ancestor. Some varieties were domesticated as recently as the 1970s, thousands of years after most fruits and vegetables had come under our sway. The greens are rich in cancer-fighting compounds called glucosinolates and higher in antioxidant activity than many green lettuces.

Scallions, or green onions, are jewels of nutrition hiding in plain sight. They resemble wild onions and are just as good for you. Remarkably, they have more than five times more phytonutrients than many common onions do. The green portions of scallions are more nutritious than the white bulbs, so use the entire plant. Herbs are wild plants incognito. We’ve long valued them for their intense flavors and aroma, which is why they’ve not been given a flavor makeover. Because we’ve left them well enough alone, their phytonutrient content has remained intact.

Experiment with using large quantities of mild-tasting fresh herbs. Add one cup of mixed chopped Italian parsley and basil to a pound of ground grass-fed beef or poultry to make “herb-burgers.” Herbs bring back missing phytonutrients and a touch of wild flavor as well.

The United States Department of Agriculture exerts far more effort developing disease-resistant fruits and vegetables than creating new varieties to enhance the disease resistance of consumers. In fact, I’ve interviewed U.S.D.A. plant breeders who have spent a decade or more developing a new variety of pear or carrot without once measuring its nutritional content.

We can’t increase the health benefits of our produce if we don’t know which nutrients it contains. Ultimately, we need more than an admonition to eat a greater quantity of fruits and vegetables: we need more fruits and vegetables that have the nutrients we require for optimum health.

Jo Robinson is the author of the forthcoming book “Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: June 2, 2013



http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/26/opinion/sunday/breeding-the-nutrition-out-of-our-food.html?adxnnl=1&pagewanted=all&adxnnlx=1383498192-qM7i4Kgt6ylsZKw2dExBpA

Birdseye - The Man Who Created The Brand

How we got to where we are - more details.....

Book review: ‘Birdseye: The Adventures of a Curious Man’ by Mark Kurlansky

By Marie Arana, Published: June 8, 2012

Sometimes a groundbreaking idea is not enough. Sometimes a brilliant notion slouches along until an innovator with a nose for the entrepreneurial realizes its potential, perfects its contours and gives it mass appeal. For cars, it was Henry Ford. For electric light, it was Thomas Edison. For computers, it was Steve Jobs. And for the global food market, it was Clarence Birdseye.
Birdseye, whose name is synonymous with frozen food, revolutionized the way we eat. Generations of Americans have become familiar with the tidy little packages that bear his name in supermarket refrigerators. By perfecting a flash-freeze method — a technique he learned from Inuit of the North Sea — Birdseye single-handedly transformed the American diet and took the food industry from local to global in the course of a decade.
It’s because of Birdseye that Americans expect peach pie in winter, fish fillets in Kansas and TV dinners in a hurry. And it is because of him that whole communities in America left farmlands for urban life.
Birdseye was no scientist or laboratory intellectual. Like Ford, Edison and Jobs, he had no college degree; like them, he depended largely on native intelligence and an irrepressible spirit of can-do. In “Birdseye,” Mark Kurlansky’s brisk account of the man’s galvanic trajectory, we are reminded that American ingenuity has often relied less on a classroom than on insatiable curiosity and a well-lit garage.
Kurlansky is best known for epic portraits of small-scale subjects, among them “Salt,” “Cod” and “The Basque History of the World.” He brings a nimble, no-frills journalism to these tasks, and the result is a series of eye-opening books on worlds we might otherwise never see. “Salt” becomes a history of humankind, complete with explorers and revolutionaries. “Cod” is a rollicking tale of adventure, with a fish as its celebrated star. “The Basque History” ends up being a paean to a highly inventive people: Europe’s earliest explorers, Spain’s first bankers, a race defined by curiosity, ingenuity and grit.
Likewise, “Birdseye” turns out to be less a biography than a glimpse into an exuberantly inventive time in America. Little is known about Birdseye’s personal life, and Kurlansky is quick to admit it. But the impact of the man’s inventions is on full view here: the whaling harpoon, the dipping of livestock to control ticks, the science of crystallization and cryonics, innovations in food packaging, advances in refrigeration, the birth of the sunlamp, the production of dried edibles, the papermaking revolution. We see a tireless tinkerer, a restless mind, a quintessentially American inventor, driven by two questions about the world around him: Why? and Why not?
He was born in the age of the steamboat and died in the age of the satellite. In Kurlansky’s hands, the arc of Birdseye’s life, which spanned from 1886 to 1956, is a history of the American imagination. Birdseye came into the world alongside the telephone, the phonograph and the light bulb, and then rode to manhood on a wave of ingenuity. By the time he was 10, Americans had invented fountain pens, cash registers, Coca-Cola, washing machines, escalators, contact lenses and automobiles. By the time he was 20, factories were churning out a whole host of American products and reaping the riches of the industrial age.
Birdseye was a small, bald, highly energetic man whose enthusiasms were so manifest that he attracted children in every neighborhood he inhabited. He welcomed them into his basement or garage; encouraged them to bring him frogs, insects and rodents; and led them to consider the very questions he was pondering.
I was one of those children. When, at the end of his life, he settled on a sugar plantation in Peru to develop a more efficient way to manufacture paper, his house was a few doors from mine. The Birdseye household was nothing less than an eccentric’s paradise, alive with parrots, deer, guinea pigs and a penguin called Billy. My brother and I brought the great man seeds, flowers and bugs, and every specimen we dropped on his worktable became a ticket to a scintillating lesson, complete with a tour of his marvels and contraptions.
He had been making contraptions since his boyhood in Brooklyn. At 11, he set up a taxidermy practice. He went on to devise clever ways to trap animals, ice their carcasses and convey them to furriers and scientists. At Amherst, he studied biology but dropped out when his family hit hard times. Even as his father was shuttled off to the Pittsburgh penitentiary for massive insurance fraud, Birdseye threw himself into a series of jobs that would lead him to his most prized innovations: A stint at the Department of Agriculture had him gathering data on wildlife; another with the U.S. Biological Survey in Montana led him to document a plague of ticks; a few months on a medical missionary’s ship near Labrador had him pondering the way we eat. In those frigid and desolate waters, where fresh vegetables and fruits were nonexistent, his natural interest in food preservation was piqued to obsession. It was there that he saw the Inuit flash-freeze their catch by holding it up to the Arctic winds.
The rest was history. By tinkering with the process, Birdseye devised a system that froze fish instantly, one by one, thereby preserving freshness. Peas frozen as quickly retained their essential green. In 1926, Birdseye established the General Seafoods Corp. in Gloucester, Mass. He began mass-freezing fish and vegetables, prompting the invention of better systems of refrigeration. He persuaded DuPont to make waterproof cellophane in which to package his wares.
In 1929, Marjorie Merriweather Post, doyenne of the Post food empire, bought Birdseye’s company for $23.5 million — $3.5 million for the operating facilities and $20 million for the patents. Birdseye had transformed American eating habits forever and, in the process, had become a very rich man. He was 43.
Even so, he continued to press on to refine the process. Eventually, in his fully outfitted stainless-steel basement in Gloucester, he devised a system to quick-dry foods: carrots, potatoes, milk, meats and, in time, entire dinners for U.S. soldiers at war in Europe.
“Birdseye always believed in the central concept of agribusiness,” Kurlansky writes. He was convinced that technology could vanquish hunger. He followed new industrial food ideas with high passion. He believed that microwaves were the way of the future. He placed great stock in hydroponic farming.
One wonders what he would have thought of the current campaign to shrink back the global market he created, to urge people to buy only fresh, local food.
Then again, Birdseye could always be counted on to anticipate the next thing in American appetites. He believed fervidly in change and was convinced that we should constantly update and improve our ideas. “Just because something has always been done in a certain way is never a sufficient reason for continuing to do it in that way,” he once wrote. “Change is the very essence of American life.”
Amen to that. May there be many more Birdseyes to keep us changing. There is little as sweet as an American original.

Marie Arana is a former editor of The Washington Post’s Book World. She wrote about meeting Clarence Birdseye in her memoir of her childhood in Peru, “American Chica.”

BIRDSEYE The Adventures of a Curious Man By Mark Kurlansky Doubleday. 251 pp. $25.95

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/book-review-birdseye-the-adventures-of-a-curious-man-by-mark-kurlansky/2012/06/08/gJQAbf3DOV_story.html

Medical Marijuana Does Not Create Problems In California

From The New York Times - encouraging report that medical marijuana in California, although a far less than perfect system from many points of view, has not resulted in the negative results predicted by the fear mongers.

October 26, 2013

Few Problems With Cannabis for California

By ADAM NAGOURNEY and RICK LYMAN

LOS ANGELES — In the heart of Northern California’s marijuana growing region, the sheriff’s office is inundated each fall with complaints about the stench of marijuana plots or the latest expropriation of public land by growers. Its tranquil communities have been altered by the emergence of a wealthy class of marijuana entrepreneurs, while nearly 500 miles away in Los Angeles, officials have struggled to regulate an explosion of medical marijuana shops.

But at a time when polls show widening public support for legalization — recreational marijuana is about to become legal in Colorado and Washington, and voter initiatives are in the pipeline in at least three other states — California’s 17-year experience as the first state to legalize medical marijuana offers surprising lessons, experts say.

Warnings voiced against partial legalization — of civic disorder, increased lawlessness and a drastic rise in other drug use — have proved unfounded.

Instead, research suggests both that marijuana has become an alcohol substitute for younger people here and in other states that have legalized medical marijuana, and that while driving under the influence of any intoxicant is dangerous, driving after smoking marijuana is less dangerous than after drinking alcohol.

Although marijuana is legal here only for medical use, it is widely available. There is no evidence that its use by teenagers has risen since the 1996 legalization, though it is an open question whether outright legalization would make the drug that much easier for young people to get, and thus contribute to increased use.

And though Los Angeles has struggled to regulate marijuana dispensaries, with neighborhoods upset at their sheer number, the threat of unsavory street traffic and the stigma of marijuana shops on the corner, communities that imposed early and strict regulations on their operations have not experienced such disruption.

Imposing a local tax on medical marijuana, as Oakland, San Jose and other communities have done, has not pushed consumers to drug dealers as some analysts expected. Presumably that is because it is so easy to get reliable and high-quality marijuana legally.

Finally, for consumers, the era of legalized medical marijuana has meant an expanded market and often cheaper prices. Buyers here gaze over showcases offering a rich assortment of marijuana, promising different potencies and different kinds of highs. Cannabis sativa produces a pronounced psychological high, a “head buzz,” while cannabis indica delivers a more relaxed, lethargic effect, a “body buzz.”

Advocates for marijuana legalization see the moves in Colorado and Washington as the start of a wave. A Gallup poll released last week found that 58 percent of Americans think the drug should be made legal.

“There is definitely going to be a legalization here at some point, one way or another, like in Colorado and Washington,” said Tom Ammiano, a Democratic state assemblyman from San Francisco who has pushed the Legislature to legalize recreational marijuana use.

Still, even as public opinion in support of legalizing marijuana has grown, opposition remains strong among many, including some law enforcement organizations, which warn that the use of the drug leads to marijuana dependence, endangers the health of users and encourages the use of other drugs.

“Unfortunately, many have been convinced that marijuana is harmless, and many in policing do not believe that is the case,” Darrel W. Stephens, the executive director of the Major Cities Chiefs Association, wrote in an e-mail.

Craig T. Steckler, a former chief of the Police Department in Fremont, Calif., who is now the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, said the problems in Los Angeles and robberies of cash-rich marijuana farms in Northern California were just two of the reasons states should hesitate before legalizing the drug.

“If it’s more readily accessible, if the parents and the siblings are doing it, then it becomes available to the younger kids — it’s going to be in the house, it’s going to be in the car,” he said.

“Where does it stop?” Mr. Steckler asked. “You make all drugs legal? Or just marijuana for now and suffer for that? What happens when you find out this wasn’t such a good idea?”

After California, medical marijuana was legalized in 19 states and the District of Columbia, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

Although the law in California applies only to people who have a medical need for marijuana, like glaucoma or cancer, the requirements for getting the card to buy the drug are notoriously lax. Doctors can recommend its use for ailments as common as sleeplessness and headaches. And marijuana in California has become almost as culturally accepted, and in some parts of the state nearly as widely used, as alcohol.

“Marijuana users are much more representative of the overall adult population in California than medical marijuana populations in other states,” said Amanda Reiman, the state policy director for the Drug Policy Alliance, an organization working toward the decriminalization of marijuana.

The percentage of California drivers with traces of marijuana in their systems, 7.4 percent, was slightly higher than the 7 percent of drivers found to have alcohol in their system during a spot check last year, according to a report from the California Office of Traffic Safety. The report found that 14 percent of those checked tested positive for some kind of drug that might impair driving.

In a broad study on the ramifications of legalizing recreational marijuana about to be published in The Journal of Policy Analysis and Management, two economics professors said a survey of evidence showed a correlation between increased marijuana use and less alcohol use for people ages 18 to 29.

The researchers, D. Mark Anderson of Montana State University and Daniel I. Rees of the University of Colorado, said that based on their study, they expected younger people in Colorado and Washington to use marijuana more and alcohol less.

“These states will experience a reduction in the social harms resulting from alcohol use: Reducing traffic injuries and fatalities is potentially one of the most important,” the professors said.

Mark A. R. Kleiman, a professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and an expert on marijuana policy who was the chief adviser to Washington on its marijuana law, said the connection between alcohol and marijuana use, if borne out, would be a powerful argument in favor of decriminalization.

“If it turns out that cannabis and alcohol are substitutes, then by my scoring system, legalizing cannabis is obviously a good idea,” Mr. Kleiman said. “Alcohol is so much more of a problem than cannabis ever has been.”

Still, he said, it will take time before long-term judgments can be made.

“Does it cause problems?” he said. “Certainly. Is it on balance a good or bad thing? Ask me 10 years from now.”

Mr. Rees also said his study found no evidence of increased drug use among high school students in Los Angeles during the period when medical marijuana shops opened here, probably because dispensaries were vigilant about not risking their thriving ventures by selling to under-age consumers.

“The dispensary numbers went through the roof,” he said. “But nothing happens to marijuana use among teenagers.”

The marijuana cultivation business in Northern California has been an economic boon for many communities, creating tax revenues, an industry of ancillary industries, and local wealth, visible by expensive cars parked along once dusty streets.

“A lot of cottage industries have popped up that service the marijuana industry,” said Scot Candell, a lawyer in San Rafael who specializes in medical marijuana clients. “Labs that do testing, hydroponic stores that provide growing equipment, software developers, insurance companies that specialize in dispensaries.”

Steve DeAngelo, the founder of the Harborside Health Center in Oakland, one of the state’s largest marijuana dispensaries, said his dispensary collected $1.2 million last year in marijuana sales tax for the city.

Medical marijuana, he said, has “created a whole new cast of people who have a vested interest in cannabis.”

“What was inevitable is that the movement, at some point, would go into hyper-speed, and that is what’s happening now,” he said.

This has altered the economy of places like Mendocino County.

“I am not aware of any business in Mendocino County that doesn’t consider marijuana as part of their business plan, and that can be good and bad,” said Sheriff Thomas D. Allman.

Mr. Candell said that while regulation was important, overregulation could be counterproductive. In California, several communities outlawed all marijuana dispensaries, giving rise to delivery services, which are not subject to regulation.

In Mendocino the issue is not dispensaries, but cultivation. There has been a spectacular rise in the amount of marijuana being grown there because, under county law, individuals with medical marijuana cards can have up to 25 plants for personal use.

Sheriff Allman said he spent about 30 percent of his resources on medical marijuana cases, especially between April and October, the growing season. The No. 1 call to 911 in October is complaints about the overwhelming smell of a next-door plot.

In Los Angeles, repeated attempts to regulate the stores have failed, causing an uproar in quiet neighborhoods like Larchmont and Mar Vista. Yet there is a lesson here: San Francisco, Oakland and Berkeley, which imposed strict regulations on the shops from the start, have had few problems.

“Those cities really took charge in 1996, saying: ‘We have to figure out how we are going to regulate this. We need to figure out how marijuana could be sold, how it will be regulated, what it will mean for tax revenue,’ ” Ms. Reiman said. “As a result, those three cities have seen little to no issues in terms of crime or public safety issues.”

Consumers of marijuana are also benefiting. Competition among growers has resulted in powerful strains, raising the levels of THC, the active ingredient in marijuana, to as high as 25 percent. Previously, levels ranged from 6 percent to 9 percent.

And since cities have competing dispensaries, prices have tended to decrease or at least keep pace with street prices. At Harborside in Oakland, marijuana buds run anywhere from $240 to $360 an ounce, though patients tend to buy smaller amounts like an eighth or a quarter of an ounce.

The array of products has exploded, and now includes not only smokable buds but also hashish, marijuana-rich oils that are drunk or smoked, edible cakes and other food products, and topical ointments intended to ease skin or joint pain without providing a high.

California has learned a lot in its years of dealing with a legal form of marijuana, Mr. Candell said. “But there are a lot of states that are just now going through it, and there are things they need to know.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: November 3, 2013
An article last Sunday about California’s experience as the first state to legalize medical marijuana misstated the percentage of California drivers found with traces of marijuana in their systems during a spot check last year. According to a report from the California Office of Traffic Safety, it was 7.4 percent — not 14 percent, the total number who tested positive for some kind of drug that might impair driving.

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/27/us/few-problems-with-cannabis-for-california.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0