Monday, October 10, 2011
How they do things in the US
A recent TLS contained a review of a book about the mystery of why the US, more or less alone among the lands of the free, persists with capital punishment. Part of the answer at least seemed to be that the US is a federation with a relatively weak centre, at least in so far as domestic affairs are concerned. While the parts are rather keen on directly elected justice officials who tend to do what the electorate want; there certainly seem to be plenty of them if http://ww2.co.waller.tx.us/Elections/elected_officials.html is anything to go by. Unlike in our part of the world, with indirect democracy, where it is easier for liberal elites to ignore what the workers might want. So started to ponder about the merits of indirect democracy.
The author of the book was a journalist by trade which makes his style a bit breathless. But he managed to spring a good surprise on me last night. Pages and pages about how awful it was that billions of dollars were poured into something called the Grand Coulee Dam. No justification, more or less illegal and pushed through by FDR as a showcase project during the great depression. But then it turned out that huge amounts of electricity came on stream just in time to make huge amounts of aluminium with which to make huge numbers of aeroplanes with which to whack Hitler, who could not compete with electricity on this scale. The well built turbines whirred at 120% of their proper capacity for the duration. So it wasn't such a waste of space after all. I wonder if this is why Boeing wound up just across the Wenatchee Forest from the dam, in Seattle?
Lastly, as a former manufacturer of test cubes of concrete, I ought to mention that when making large concrete structures, such as dams, you have to insert lots of cooling pipes and pump lots of icy brine through them, otherwise the stuff would never cool down and set. It is not explained whether one needs to back fill the cooling pipe holes after the event. Squirt grout in or some such thing.
Back home, two culinary experiments. In the white corner, I experimented with making cabbage and noodle soup with chorizo. Usual drill, posh chicken stock cube, three pints of water, noodles and slivered, new season, crinkly cabbage. But needing a bit of meat to gee it up thought to slice up the stump of chorizo which was all that I had to hand. Not too sure about this: would the rather odd flavour of chorizo - not sure quite how it gets it - sit OK with the rather bland noodles and cabbage? The answer was yes, the amount of soup being large relative to the amount of chorizo. But with the oddity that the red stuff which leached out of the chorizo bound to the first bit of crinkly cabbage that it came across. So while most of the cabbage was a pale green-yellow, a small proportion was a pale orange. But clear segregation rather than mixture.
In the red corner, BH tried her hand at quince jelly, but without going to the length of straining it clear, so more like jam. But she did wind up with four small slabs of the stuff, about the size of small chocolate bars and which looked entirely as intended. She took a dim view of my suggesting that perhaps it would be simpler to have poured the stuff into jam jars to set. Not the Spanish way at all. To be taken with Spanish goat's cheese.
# posted by Jim @ 1:11 AM 
