The Oracle of Food

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It was a Saturday family lunch at the Pie Shack that sealed the deal.

Family restaurant decisions are a bit of a tangle at our house, with everyone having preferences and problems getting them all to overlap. An alternative to the usual choices? Let Andrea decide for us.

Last month’s ode to the Pie Shack led us out into the far heights in search of pizza, and our trust was rewarded. She was right: on a cold day, the surfboards and skater tack (and Ms. Pacman!) did bring smiles to our cranky, hungry faces.

The good news is that my colleagues at the Journal seem to have noticed as well. Albuquerque cyberspace’s favorite foodie is now the Journal’s restaurant reviewer (sub. req.). For those of us in the cyberworld who think the planet revolves around our bytes, who already know all about text messaging and blogs, it’s worth noting that this is an unarguable social good: Andrea is now in a position to lead even more people to good meals. “Though I wish those idiots at the Journal didn’t make you pay to read her reviews on line,” he said with a grin.

(update: forgot the obligatory link to Andrea’s own blog)

More on Blog Rage

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A friend sends along Jim Brady’s column from today’s Washington Post:

For all the good things it has brought our society, the Web has also fostered ideological hermits, who only talk to folks who believe exactly what they do. This creates an echo chamber that only further convinces people that they are right, and everyone else is not only wrong, but an idiot or worse. So when an incident like this one arises, it’s not enough to point out an error; they must prove that the error had nefarious origins. In some places on the Web, everything happens on a grassy knoll.

Yeah. What he said.

In Which I Utterly, Completely, and For the Last Time (I Promise, Really) Swear Off All Participation in the Hockey Wars

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Dan Sarewitz is so predictably right that it’s become comical.

“(S)cience,” Sarewitz argues, “supplies contesting parties with their own bodies of relevant, legitimated facts about nature, chosen in part because they help make sense of, and are made sensible by, particular interests and normative frameworks.”

In the resulting hoohaws, Sarewitz argues, the debate happens on the terrain of science, rather than the terrain of the underlying policy/value disagreement, with each side believing it will win the larger battle if it can grab the scientific high ground.

Continue reading ‘In Which I Utterly, Completely, and For the Last Time (I Promise, Really) Swear Off All Participation in the Hockey Wars’ »

Bomb Town News Observer

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By coincidence, I’m drinking my morning coffee from this mug:
Bomb Town News Observer coffee mug

It’s my favorite mug.

Former quarterly (and printed on paper), the Bomb Town News Observer has gone 21st century:

This morning my mate came across “Crazy Cat Man,” as we dubbed him, sitting out on the sidewalk in front of his house grinding corn with a stone.

“Corn? Are you sure?” I asked, when she related the story later.

Yes, it was corn or some other grain, being ground with a stone (a metate, prounounced Meh-ta-tay)–in the traditional manner of the Anasazi–by a man who makes a living doing something related to nuclear weapons design or maintenance, on a sidewalk, in the middle of winter, wearing shorts.

He used Tupperware to collect and contain his strange booty, which he was manufacturing in heaps.

We’ve now got a pretty good idea of what he eats for breaksfast. Atole anyone?

Los Alamos is, in fact, a strange place.

Santa Ana Winds

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The Santa Ana winds are a fixture of my Southern California childhood – heavy, warm and dry with the hint of smoke and danger. I remember them as a fall phenomenon, though a more careful reading of the literature suggests they really spanned the winter and sometimes stretched into spring.

According to Kit Stolz, they’re now coming later, reaching into February with enough regularity that the firefighters have taken notice.

Drought Update

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More than halfway through our winter precipitation season, the snowpack is pathetic and the runoff forecasts dismal.

Snowpack map
(courtesy Western Regional Climate Center)

Tania Soussan has more in this morning’s Journal (sub. req.):

Several places set new record lows for snowpack as of Feb. 1.

The forecast calls for spring river flows to be 27 percent of average in the Santa Fe River, 40 percent in the Rio Grande near Española, 25 percent into Elephant Butte Reservoir, 30 percent into Santa Rosa Reservoir and 53 percent into Navajo Reservoir.

And if near-normal or greater rain and snow doesn’t materialize this month— something that appears unlikely— the runoff forecasts will drop again March 1.

Armijo said the stage is set for what could become a record low winter for rain and snow.

NRCS runoff forecast

Global Cooling

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The usual caveats apply: just a single number, more to understanding climate change than surface temp., etc. NASA’s GISS team has posted its global January number, with fodder for everyone to misinterpret. On one side, you could argue it’s cooling. (You’ve got to be careful in picking your starting year to make that case, but that does’t stop people from regularly doing it.) On the other side, you could argue that the five warmest Januaries in history globally have come in the last five years. Cherrypickers, have at it. Or you could just ignore the arguments and lay in a stockpile of salty snack foods in preparation for the winter Olympics.

Wait! Could we make a case that global warming threatens the winter Olympics?