Cap’n Ken’s Homespun Wisdom

Sarah Bernard

Ring any bells? Unless you”re a regular watcher of CNN”s American Morning, probably not.

Sarah”s a contributing editor for New York Magazine and appears a couple of times a week on the “90 Second Pop” feature.

And she”s fantastic.

Not only is she amazingly cute - dark-brown hair, big brown eyes, beautiful face, nice bod - but she”s smart, funny and seems cool as hell. Her appeal is not unlike that of the wife, which makes it much easier for the wife to put up with me saying “I love her” whenever Sarah”s on CNN.

Sarah”s starting to make solo appearances on American Morning, so her TV star may be on the rise. Thus I figure I should stake my claim as an early adopter of her charm.

She”s still such an unknown commodity that she hardly appears in Google searches outside of New York Magazine and CNN results. A Google image search turns up only two tiny shots:

This is her at some party (from Slate)

This is a shot from a New York Magazine bit on her wedding last year. No, she didn”t marry Dean from Gilmore Girls, her husband is another writer there - Hugh Lindgren.

I know, the photos don”t really show how cute she is, but trust me. Or better yet, check out American Morning on Tuesdays (her regular day) at about 7:40.

And remember … you read praise of Sarah here first.

I came home this evening to find the new issue of Wired in my mailbox. Actually, I found two copies of Wired in the mailbox, and thanks to the human kindness of the wife, Tye Fussell of 1282 Oak Grove Ave. should be getting his soon (stupid post office).

Anyway, I dug in to the mag tonight and found a really great piece on Alton Brown (host of Good Eats on Food Network) and his cooking-as-science crusade. I know TYB is a big A.B. fan, but if any of the Wisdom Nation hasn”t discovered Good Eats, it”s high on my recommended list.

I found Good Eats a couple of years ago and have become a full-fledged A.B. disciple.

I just counted, and I have 26 episodes on the TiFaux right now waiting to get burned to DVD (I”ve managed to burn out ten or so shows so far). I have both of his books and will get the new one when it comes out in September. I”ll probably buy his DVD collections, even though I have all the episodes on the TiFaux or my home-burned discs.

Since Alton”s come in to my world, I cook with kosher salt (the wife found me a very A.B.-like salt cellar to keep it in). I make steaks in a “rocket hot” cast-iron skillet. I have ventured into the world of scratch biscuits (in my pre-Atkins days). I”ve poached fish in evaporated milk. I”d feel comfortable turning pork belly into bacon (although I haven”t done it yet). I no longer break eggs on the side of the bowl, and A.B.”s omlette method has let me improve upon my already-advanced technique learned years ago from The Frugal Gormet (who turned out to be a child molestor, but that”s another show).

Good Eats is, simply, the best cooking show ever. I know more about the “whys” of cooking than I ever thought I would. A.B. provides a science lesson wrapped in a Pee Wee”s Playhouse production. He”s Bill Nye of the kitchen. You get the picture.

The Wired piece will be online June 1 if you don”t care to buy the mag. It”ll be linked here.

For more A.B., check out Alton”s site, and don”t miss his excellent if infrequently updated blog.

This morning in Atlanta, we”re dealing with a chemical plant fire out in Conyers. It”s a BioLab warehouse where they repackage things such as pool chlorine.

A big, nasty cloud of chemical haze is moving out across the far-east suburbs as I write this. Here”s a photo:

This has been going on since very early this morning, and the Atlanta TV stations are living up to their reputation as clueless and useless.

Instead of focusing on information such as what kind of damage chlorine can do to a human and what you should do if you”re in the path of the plume, the reporters provided such valuable information as “To give you a feel for the size of the cloud, if this warehouse was at Hartsfield, the cloud would stretch all the way to Sandy Springs. If it were at Six Flags …” You get the idea.

Just now, a former BioLab worker called in to WSB to tell them that this chlorine cloud is no damn joke. Apparently the only way to get the information about chlorine poisioning out is to have people who know about it to call in.

I, of course, grew up in the middle of Louisiana”s chemical alley, and I”ve seen more than my share of chemical fires, spills, vapor clouds, etc.

This is a potentially very bad situation.

But, as the WSB anchor said a while back “I”ve never seen anything like this.”

Apparently.

I got an email the other day from Norman, who had found my not-yet-publicized Big List of RSS Feeds (look in the left rail).

Mostly Norman was complaining about his feed not being listed (it was an oversight, I swear - Espresso Sarcasm is linked in my rail and is in my reader - I promise), and I was happy to correct the mistake.

But I noticed that the RSS version of his Blogger Atom feed was coming from someplace called FeedBurner. I”d created RSS versions of the Wisdom feed and a bunch of other Blooger feeds with the rather-crappy 2rss.com system, so I went over to FeedBurner to check out their service.

As it turns out, FeedBurner rocks. Not only does it easily turn Atom to RSS, there”s a bunch of other feed formats and promotional/tracking tools at the blogger”s disposal. It”s in “pre-Alpha” right now, so we”ll see how their business model (i.e. paid?) evolves, but for now, it”s the best feed-focused service I”ve found.

I converted the Wisdom feed to a FeedBurner RSS:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/CKHW

And I also set up FeedBurner versions of:

Coffee Achiever
Daniella”s Misaventures
Robin”s Ramblings
Reading in the Dark

Excellent service, that FeedBurner.

Oh, by the way, I”ve created a Big List of RSS Feeds that I”ll keep updated with my favorite feeds for your RSS enjoyment (there, it”s publicized).

If you”ve got favorite feeds you think I should list, leave a comment on this post or the Big List post and I”ll check it out (I watch my comments with the very-nice HaloScan Comments RSS feed).

And if you”re still not surfing through RSS, get with the times, man! Download BottomFeeder and plug in some of my recommended RSS feeds.

I was cruising Yahoo! News tonight and came across two bits from Iraq that compelled me to write this very un-Homespun rant.

The first was an AP story headlined “Morgue Records Show 5,500 Iraqis Killed”. The AP, it seems, felt compelled to investigate and report upon the number of Iraqi civilians since G.I. Joe came to town … while we”re still on the ground trying to un-cluster that most-clustered little bit of desert.

The fact that the story mentions how Iraq is not necessarily a worse-off place now - what with Saddam having killed about 300,000 - 500,000 people and all - just underscores how this story serves to do nothing but make us look like “bad guys” despite the fact that all-in-all the Iraqis are doing a lot better now.

The second bit was a slideshow of photos from the wedding U.S. planes supposedly hit the other day, killing 45 people. Hey look, here”s the keyboard player:

And he”s dead now! Damn you, George Bush!!

See, here”s the thing: War is ugly. In war, people die. That”s pretty much the goal of war. Typically, the people who die are soliders, but often they are civilians.

It”s unlikely the U.S. meant to kill innocent people at a wedding in Iraq. Maybe we targeted the wedding thinking it was something else. Maybe it was something else. Maybe it was a mistake. Maybe we did set out to bomb that wedding.

War is ugly.

Anybody remember August 6, 1945? A town called Hiroshima? We killed about 80,000 civilians - on purpose - in a matter of seconds. Three days later, we went back and killed another 50,000 or so civilians at Nagasaki. Again, on purpose.

Elsewhere in World War II, we killed about 100,000 civilians in Tokyo, 40,000 civilians in Dresden, and tens of thousands of others along the way to victory.

In case anybody is not clear on this point yet, let me make it crystal:

The United States has killed hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of civilians in our 228 years of existence, from the Revolutionary War through Iraq and Afghanistan. And we”re the good guys.

In war, you kill people. Sometimes you kill civilians - whether on purpose or by accident. It”s just how war works. Always has, always will.

But there was no Yahoo! News in 1945. The AP couldn”t get their hands on photos of a wedding that had just taken place in Hiroshima. The media wouldn”t have been able to get access to the morgue in Dresden to count the bodies there.

You”ll no doubt hear anti-war types talking about the 5,500 dead Iraqis in the coming days, and the Iraqi wedding photos will also get a lot of play.

The question in my mind is whether we - fat, lazy Americans - still have the stomach for war.

Somehow, I get the feeling we don”t.

I wrote a few weeks ago about my lack of enthusiasm for having a bunch of credits for iTunes songs thanks to Pepsi. I just don”t see tremendous value in what is available on iTunes. I”m not a “singles” kind of guy, and if I like a band enough to pay for their stuff, I”d still rather buy a physical CD.

But now Apple is looking to use iTunes as a platform to distribute out of print music.

Good move, Mr. Jobs.

Just think how much music has been produced over the years that is simply not available today. Stuff that was originally put out on LP that wasn”t popular enough to get re-released on CD … things that had very limited runs that you”d only find in used-record stores now … leftover cuts from once-popular albums that have never seen the light of day … alternate takes/demos/goofs (think R.E.M.”s Dead Letter Office) that fans of a given band would love to buy, but have no broad commercial market … and so forth.

The financial risk involved in pressing, packaging, distributing and retailing a CD means that only material which record companies think will be popular enough to recoup all of those physical-product costs and turn a profit are ever released.

Take, for example, the new Deluxe Edition of Weezer”s first album. The “deluxe” part is a second disc of demos, rare tracks, alternate cuts, etc. I bought it a few weeks ago and discovered that it”s part of a series of similar “deluxe” re-issues from acts like The Who and Jimi Hendrix. Good stuff, but you won”t see such re-issues for acts with more marginal appeal than Weezer (I have to figure theirs is a borderline profitable re-issue).

But cut the costs down to the $6 an hour you”ll have to pay an intern to hunt down some masters, cut them over to digital and e-mail them to iTunes, and the financials suddenly start working in the favor of a track that might only sell 5,000 copies.

So this excites me.

Let me offer Mr. Jobs and the iTunes gang a few suggestions for out-of-print and rare stuff to go track down and offer up at iTunes. This, of course, is my own personal wish list. I welcome your wishes as well.

• The Accelerators - Leave My Heart (album). These are The Accelerators from North Carolina, not the ones from Scotland. Leave My Heart is a fabulous record (produced by Don Dixon) full of songs about teenage girls, lesbians, inter-racial relationships, threesomes and more. I don”t think it was ever put on CD. I have a cassette copy of it that I made in about 1984 from the LP that one of our gang had bought.

• Studio outtakes from The Replacements” Twin/Tone records - Legend says the boys broke in to the Twin/Tone offices one night, stole all of their early masters and tossed them in the Mississippi River. But I”ve got too many bootlegs that feature outtakes from Sorry Ma” to believe this. If Twin/Tone put 1,000 alternate cuts, outtakes, f*ckups, etc. from Sorry Ma”, Let it Be and Hootenany for sale at 99 cents apiece, I”d buy every one of them.

• City compliations - How cool would it be to round up the homemade singles put out by bands back in the days before the “indie” revolution and organize them into cities and eras? I”d love to pick up tracks from all the Baton Rouge bands of the early/mid 80s, and it would be cool do sample what was going on in Chapel Hill, Seattle, Athens, Austin, etc. that never really broke out.

• “Deluxe” versions - In the mold of the aforementioned Weezer re-issue, I want a full disc”s worth of alternate tracks, outtakes, demos and bonus material from the following: London Calling, My Aim Is True, Murmur, Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables, Texas Flood, Ramones, and I”m sure a lot more if I thought about it.