My Bro

On Friday, November 16, 2018 (which was Saturday, November 17, in New Zealand, where he lived,) my beloved brother Robin passed away very suddenly, apparently from a heart attack, at the age of 52. He had seemed fine up to that point. There were no specific warning signs that his family can identify. I learned about it while driving from Des Moines airport to Grinnell. When I noticed I had two missed calls via WattsApp from my mother (my phone had been turned off for the flight,) along with a text to "call as soon as you can," I knew something terrible had happened, but I didn't expect this. My first assumption was that one of my brothers had had a non-fatal heart attack (we have a family history of coronary disease.)

My thoughts are with Robin's wife Jackie and children, who are obviously devastated. More than anything else, Robin was a dedicated family man. Robin and Jackie arranged their lives and their careers as physicians around their family's interests and needs, and they and their children did so much together. Robin and his family were a loving and mutually nurturing unit who excelled at having fun together.

I went out to New Zealand for his funeral, which was held at St. George's Presbyterian Church in Takapuna (north Auckland) on Tuesday, November 25, at 1pm. Three days after Robin's death (November 20 in New Zealand), my brother David's severely disabled step-son, Aron, passed away at the age of 23, probably from a seizure. David also lives in the Auckland area. Aron's funeral was held at St. Patrick's Church in Pukekohe on Saturday, December 1, at 2pm. There was a brief cremation ceremony the day after each funeral.

It's easy to list times and dates. It's not so easy to process this, or even to talk about Robin, as shock and disbelief give way to grief. In any case, this isn't the appropriate venue to do so. My philosophy is to find good in every situation, but this is a challenge. Much that is beautiful has come out of the support family members and friends have offered one another through these joint tragedies. I am very motivated to believe in some sort of afterlife and am taking another look at religion. I have to hope that Robin's spirit is happy somewhere. 'Also that his wonderful qualities -- his warmth, kindness, and sense of humor -- will live on in those left behind. His daughters certainly personify those gifts, and I will try my inadequate best to do the same.

Yesterday, I sponsored a four-year-old boy from Madagascar named Mandresy through one of those programs (this one is called Unbound) where you pay a little bit every month and correspond with "your" child twice a year. I searched for a child born on Robin's birthday; Mandresy was the only one. He is described as a "wise" child. So maybe a little bit of Robin will live on through Mandresy ...

Vegan Cooking Demo

Last night, I attended one of JL Fields' (author of several books on vegan cooking) fabulous cooking demonstrations in downtown Colorado Springs. This time, she demonstrated five recipes that would work well for Thanksgiving dinner: a colorful salad, "cheesy" mashed potatoes with white bean gravy, green beans with Sweet Earth's Benevolent Bacon, and an easy bread pudding. Who knew vegan cooking could be so wonderfully delicious as well as healthy?

My two main takeaways were to use more arugula (very tender, great in warm salads) and more white miso, which adds a cheesy, slightly tangy taste and contains probiotics.

I plan to attend her next class, Fancy Finger Foods and Clever Cocktails for Holiday Entertaining.

JL mentioned the Vegan Ladyboss community, which I will look into.

The Great Vegan Butter, Cheese, and Eggs Debate

So what is the best vegan "butter"? Many people think it is Earth Balance, which I have successfully substituted for real butter in baked goods. Unlike most margarines, it contains no hydrogenated oils. Coconut oil also seems to work well. The creative Mel at A Virtual Vegan has come up with a recipe for Easy Vegan Butter that I need to try.

I have yet to taste a good non-liquid vegan cheese, but I haven't really experimented with many. I'll keep trying ...

I have, however, a recipe for cashew bechamel sauce that is to die for!

The very creative Mel at A Virtual Vegan just came up with a recipe for Vegan Cheese Sauce that sounds delicious. It includes tofu and nutritional yeast. I plan to try it out tonight with elbow macaroni. By hook or by crook, I'll sneak healthy ingredients down the gullets of my finicky family members!

Update: I made it, and it was good! I will probably add a little white miso if I try it again.

I also have a recipe for vegan mozzarella here. This one uses cashew nuts and vegan coconut yogurt. Shout out to Dana at Minimalist Baker for those recipes!

As for eggs, the only substitute I have tried (and it seems to work well in cakes) is 1/4 cup of applesauce per egg. One can also apparently substitute 1/4 cup of mashed banana or mashed silken tofu per egg. Other egg substitutes: mix 1 tsp of baking soda with 1 tsp of white vinegar; or mix 1 Tbsp of either flax meal or chia seeds with 3 Tbsp of hot water per egg. Then there are several commercial egg replacers one can buy at the supermarket.

An intriguing egg substitute is aquafaba, the brine from canned legumes. Usually chick pea brine is used. Three tablespoons of aquafaba is equivalent to one egg. Each can of chick peas produces 1/2 to 3/4 of a cup (or about eight to 12 tablespoons) of aquafaba.  One can also beat aquafaba with a little cream of tartar, sugar, and vanilla extract, to produce aquafaba meringue. I have to give that a try.

Update: There's a good discussion of egg substitutes at One Green Planet here.

Mel (again) has a fabulous-sounding recipe for Earl Grey Vegan Cake with Lemon Frosting that she bakes with aquafaba and her own vegan butter. I really have to try that one!

2018 World Chess Championship

The 2018 World Chess Championship between Magnus Carlsen of Norway and Fabiano Caruana, who holds both Italian and U.S. citizenship, started today at The College in Holborn, London. Caruana has been creeping up the FIDE rankings to #2 in the world. Carlsen has a rating of 2835; Caruana is just behind him at 2832. The two are also very close in age. Carlsen will turn 28 later this month (11/30) and Caruana turned 26 last July (7/30). Both players have been preparing for months and have a team of experts along to help them. Carlsen even brought his own chef.

Carlsen has a very impressive resume. He has been world champion since 2013, when he beat Viswanathan Anand. He defended his title against Anand in 2014 and again against Sergei Karjakin in 2016. He has been the highest rated player in the world since January 1, 2010. As a child prodigy, he was known as "the Mozart of chess." He holds the highest peak rating, 2882 (achieved in 2014), in history. Caruana has been a strong grandmaster for years, but has only recently ascended to challenger status for the world crown.

Carlsen has become a swashbuckling champion who appears annoyed by journalists and publicity and often behaves like a surly teenager. There is something charming, however, in his insouciance and candidness. Caruana, universally known as Fabi, seems much more mature, polished, and courteous. He is kind, calm, and unassuming. He reminds me of my son, so I'm rooting for him.

Game 1 is underway! Caruana has the white pieces, and Carlsen responded to 1) e4 with the Rossolimo Sicilian Defence. Caruana is in time trouble, and it looks like Carlsen has the better position with strong king-side attacking chances

One can follow the moves in real-time here, and The Guardian offers commentary here.

Should Caruana win, he will be the first U.S. champion since Bobby Fischer beat Boris Spassky back in 1972.

It's really fun to watch the game. Chess is not generally considered to be a spectator sport, but  Caruana has to now move very quickly, so things are happening fast. Carlsen is playing for a win. I will update the match as it progresses.

Update: After Caruana blundered on his 17th move, Carlsen had a won position until he also blundered while in time trouble. Unwilling to give up the point, he persevered for several excruciating hours until a draw was agreed.

11/10: Game 2 is underway. Carlsen opened as white with 1) d4, and the game continued as a queen's gambit declined. The experts are opining that the game now looks draw-ish. My completely non-expert and ignorant opinion is that 25) ... Bxf3 looks very good for black. I think he could pick up the d-pawn and would have far better pawn structure in the end game...

Update: Fabi did indeed play 25) ... Bxf3, and picked up a pawn. The pundits are saying it's a theoretically drawn rook and pawn ending. I'm sure they're right, but I'm not seeing it ...

Update: Unsurprisingly, the pundits were right. The players agreed to a draw after 49 moves. The score stands at 1-1.

11/12: Game 3 is afoot. It's another Rossolimo Sicilian, as in the first game. According to the Norwegian supercomputer Sesse, white (Fabi) has a significant advantage. The Guardian commentary on this game offers mixed predictions from two grandmasters at move 17. Norwegian Simon Agdestein thinks the game is headed for another draw; Judit Polgar describes black (Magnus) as being in "survival mode." Judit's sister, Susan, is live-tweeting and thinks white has a superior position but that it is holdable for black.

Update: According to Susan Polgar, the position is now "99.99% draw", although she suspects Magnus will play on for hours to "burn off some anger that he got outplayed in the opening again."

Update: Draw agreed after 49 moves. The score stands at 1.5 to 1.5

11/13: Game 4 is going on. Magnus opened with 1) c4, the English Opening. Magnus played the opening surprisingly slowly, given that he must have prepared for many responses. Queens are off the board before the 20th move, usually a sign of an upcoming draw. According to analysis on Twitch, their computer thinks the position is equal.

Update: Magnus offered a draw, which was accepted, on the 34th move. Shortest game of the four so far. 2-2

Magnus may be happy to draw his way to 6-6, as he is expected to have a major advantage in the tiebreak, which would consist of four short games (25 minutes per player for the first 40 moves, with a 10s increment after each move.)

11/15: Game 5, with Caruana as white, was the third Rossolimo defense and the fifth draw (after 33 moves.) The Guardian commentary is here.

Instant Pot Ace

Hooray!!!!!!!!!!😀 My new all-dancing, all-singing, very clever thing just arrived! 🎊🎉🎶 For some reason, the Instant Pot Ace is only available from Walmart, and it only costs $99. It has eight settings: Smoothie, Purée, Crushed Ice, Ice Cream, Soy Milk, Rice Milk, Nut/Oat Milk, and Soup. It also has a self-cleaning function. To make soup, you just throw in the ingredients (uncooked), and press the "Soup" button. The Ace cooks and blends everything for you. I just used it to make vegan ice cream with two bananas, some vanilla essence, and a can of coconut milk. It is soooooooo good!!! I will post some recipes here as I experiment further.

"And They Just Let You"

There's an interesting article, Trump Didn't Win in Spite of the Access Hollywood Tape. He Won Because of It, by Robyn Pennacchia up at Wonkette. Pennacchia says that when the Access Hollywood Tape , in which Trump brags about grabbing women "by the pussy", was released, she knew as soon as she heard him say "And they [the women] just let you" that he had won the election.

She believed these words allowed his base to identify with his power -- in this case, the power to put women (and therefore other groups) "in their place". This assertion of hierarchy gave his angry, frightened supporters some belief that they could retain their position on the totem pole, above women, minorities, trans people, and all the other groups that were gaining in relevance and acceptance and which they feared would somehow ascend at their  expense.

Pennacchia attributes some of this resentment to burgeoning social media apps that have exposed conservatives to new views that scare them. She feels they had more social power when they were living in little bubbles in rural areas, insulated from new developments, and having the complexities of the outside world interpreted for them by Rush Limbaugh. It was enormously disturbing to them to be bombarded with alternative viewpoints on Facebook and Twitter.

I don't know how much of a role social media played in energizing this demographic. Perhaps the world changed so fast with same sex marriage, Black Lives Matter, the #metoo movement, immigration, and universal healthcare (even for "those people") that they panicked about being left behind, forgotten and stripped of their former unearned privileges. Identifying with a narcissistic bully and strongman gave them hope they could regain their former dominance.

This has resulted in a tremendous backlash against "identity groups", which are really people who do not wish to be identified as "groups" but as individual human beings. Thanks to Trump's election,  authoritarians have the power to game the system. Institutions that threaten their power are under attack.

Some hope for the future ... Over half of the nation disapproves of Trump.

Brat Kavanaugh ...

... threw a tantrum at a hearing today before the Senate Judiciary Committee as he responded to allegations that he had sexually assaulted Christine Blasey Ford.

Sometimes he was asked HARD questions ...

... and sometimes he even saw a DEMOCRAT! 

Poor little Brattie thinks the evil Clintons are trying to sic his former victims on him. And that stuff in his high school yearbook about "ralphing" and the "100 Kegs Club" and being a "Renate alumnius" is irrelevant because he came first in his class twice in high school and he also played on the football team. And how dare any nasty senator ask him to request an FBI investigation?! People who went to Georgetown Prep just don't get investigated. As he explained to them almost politely, if they have any questions, they should just ask him. And of course he shouldn't have to take a polygraph test because they've become unreliable since he advocated for their use in 2016. And, no, nobody should ever question Mark Judge ever, OK!!!??? Was he the "Bart O' Kavanaugh" who puked in the back of someone's car? Well, he has a weak stomach, and he pukes when he eats spaghetti. And how dare Amy Klobuchar ask him if he's ever been blackout drunk. What if she's been blackout drunk herself? Q.E.Effin'.D, dude! And the person who said he would get incoherently drunk and was belligerent and aggressive while in that state, well, haha, that was just a college roommate who once had a dispute with someone else. And, no, the fact that he's incoherent, belligerent, and aggressive when he's sober doesn't mean anything, and anyone who says otherwise is just a big, fat, stinky, partisan butthead who shouldn't be allowed!

The Kavanaugh Controversy

Brett Kavanaugh, Donald Trump's recent nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, is facing allegations of sexual misconduct as reports of his past behavior surface.

So far, this is what I know:

1) Christine Blasey Ford, a psychologist and researcher, has accused Kavanaugh of sexually assaulting her at a summer party in 1982 when he was a 17-year-old student at Georgetown Prep and she was a 15-year-old student at Georgetown Visitation. Both schools were extremely expensive, Catholic, and single-sex. Ford alleges that Kavanaugh and his friend and schoolmate, Mark Judge, both of whom were very drunk, pushed her into a bedroom and that Kavanaugh lay on top of her, tried to pull off her swimsuit, and covered her mouth when she tried to scream. She claims Judge drunkenly jumped on top of them, causing them to fall and giving her time to get away. Although she doesn't remember the time or location of the incident and has not been able to correctly identify other people who were at the same party, she appears very confident in her recollections and in the identity of her attackers. She has passed a lie detector test and called for an investigation.

2) Mark Judge, now a recovering alcoholic, described Georgetown Prep as "a nest of debauchery" and says his drinking and "immorality" began there. In his memoir, Wasted: Tales of a Genx Drunk, he wrote about a "Bart O'Kavanaugh", who drank until he passed out and "puked" in someone's car.

3) In his high school yearbook, Brett Kavanaugh lists himself as treasurer of the "100 Kegs or Bust" club. Members were apparently committed to drinking 100 kegs of beer.

4) Also in his high school yearbook, Kavanaugh bragged of being a "Renate alumnius [sic]." A photograph of the football team is captioned "Renate alumni". The Renate in question appears to be a Renate Schroeder Dolphin, who initially supported Kavanaugh. In a statement to the NYT, she said, "I learned about these yearbook pages only a few days ago. I don't know what 'Renate Alumnus' actually means. I can't begin to comprehend what goes through the minds of 17-year-old boys who write such things, but the insinuation is horrible, hurtful, and simply untrue. I pray their daughters are never treated this way. I will have no further comment." Kavanaugh, through his lawyer, claimed that he merely kissed Renate, which she denies.

5) Deborah Ramirez, a former Yale classmate of Kavanaugh's, has alleged that he exposed himself and dangled his privates in her face during a drinking game that occured in the 1983-1984 academic year. She claims to recall another male student shouting down the hall that "Brett Kavanaugh just put his penis in Debbie's face." She admits to having been drunk and slurring her words at the time. The New Yorker has has contacted several of Kavanaugh's and Ramirez's former classmates. One says he remembers hearing about the story second-hand and that he is certain he was told that Kavanaugh exposed himself to Ramirez. Others declined to comment or said they don't remember the party.

6) Kavanaugh's freshman roommate at Yale, James Roche, describes Kavanaugh as a "notably heavy drinker, even by the standards of the time" who was "aggressive and belligerent" when drunk, and that he remembers Kavanaugh "drinking excessively and becoming incoherently drunk."

7) Amy Chua (of "Tiger Mom" fame), a Yale law professor who has endorsed Kavanaugh, apparently told a group of her students that "it's not an accident" all of Kavanaugh's female law clerks "looked like models." Her husband, Jeb Rubenfeld, allegedly told a student that Kavanaugh "hires women with a certain look." Rubenfeld now denies the comments were ever made.

8) Michael Avenatti, lawyer to Stormy Daniels, claims he has credible evidence of at least one more accuser.

9) Kavanaugh, in a 2015 speech at the Catholic University of America Columbus School of Law, joked that "What happens at Georgetown Prep stays at Georgetown Prep," and went on to say, "I think that's been a good thing for all of us."

10) In 1998, while working for independent counsel Ken Starr on the Monica Lewinsky case, Kavanaugh encouraged the Independent Counsel to ask Bill Clinton several very prurient, invasive, and explicit questions. In the same menu, he accuses Clinton of disgracing "his Office, the legal system, and the American people by having sex with a 22-year-old intern and turning her life into a shambles -- callous and disgusting behavior that has somehow got lost in the shuffle."

It's hard to prove decades-old allegations, but what reason would these women have to lie when telling the truth is only going to bring down further humiliation on their heads? Points 2, 3, 4, 6, and 9 certainly make the allegations seem more likely than not.

If one assumes the allegations are true, then one has to ask whether the behavior, while falling-down drunk, of a young man in his late teens is relevant to his fitness to do a job today. We know, at the very least, that he drank heavily, could be unpleasant when drunk, and, as the Renate quotes in his high school yearbook reveal, his attitude toward women could be exploitative and callous. Perhaps he's gone through a St. Augustine-style transformation and is now a veritable saint? Even if one assumes that to be true, how could he be a credible arbitrator when ruling on decisions that involve young people? If he got away with attempted rape as a teen, how could he be taken seriously if a case came before the court involving, for example, sexual abuse or discriminatory sentencing of young black teens (and many young black men have done hard time for marijuana possession, never mind attempted rape)? His image and the verifiable aspects of his behavior would undermine respect for his judgments and hence for the justice system.

And then point 10 annihilates his credibility.  If he wanted to play Torquemada to Bill Clinton, how can he play obsequious sycophant to Donald Trump, whose "locker room talk" literally involved bragging about sexual assault? How can he complain that Clinton's behavior (which, while inappropriate, involved consensual oral sex with another adult, not attempted rape of a minor) was disgraceful and shameful, while he has not publicly condemned Trump's pussy-grabbing comments? This is a major point against Kavanaugh. It shows him to be yet another partisan, holier-than-thou hypocrite with a political agenda and a less than spotless personal life of his own.

Kavanaugh appears to be just another good, old boy -- an entitled, over-privileged, self-absorbed elitist who has never been held accountable for his behavior as he's sipped from the silver spoon. He may not be possessed of any outstanding ability. Without his Georgetown Prep education and pedigree, he might not have been accepted to Yale; without Yale, he might not have got into Yale Law School; and without Yale (or Harvard) Law School, it's very unlikely he would have been nominated for the Supreme Court. That crucible of privilege and elitism doesn't simply buy people greater status than they're worth; it tends to render them unsympathetic and callous toward people outside their coterie of power. This is reflected in Kavanaugh's objectification of women (the allegations are unproven, but his comments about "Renate" are not.)

The Hampton Roads Area

I recently spent a wonderful few days few days (9/6 to 9/11) with Craig in Chesapeake, VA, and its surrounds. It was a work trip for Craig, but I went with him to celebrate our anniversary on Sunday, September 9. As we were there over the weekend, we had time to do some sight-seeing. We also enjoyed sampling some of the local restaurants.

I was initially a bit puzzled that the area is called Hampton Roads. Roads? Apparently the word comes from roadstead, meaning a sheltered body of water and defined in maritime law as "a known general station for ships, notoriously used as such, and distinguished by the name." In this case, the "notoriously used" body of water incorporates the Chesapeake Bay, and the mouths of the Elizabeth, Nansemond, and James Rivers, along with several smaller rivers, which empty into the bay. "Hampton Roads" refers both to the roadstead and the surrounding metropolitan area in Southeastern Virginia and Northeastern North Carolina, which includes Norfolk, Chesapeake, and Virginia Beach in Virginia, and Elizabeth City and Kill Devil Hills in North Carolina.

The area felt like a resort with its beaches, waterways, lush foliage, heat, and humidity. Being used to dry heat, I found the humidity somewhat novel and surprisingly relaxing, although I also appreciated the A/C and the hotel pool.

While we were out there, we visited the Virginia Aquarium. We didn't get out into the marshland hike, but we enjoyed the usual sampling of sharks, jellyfish, and rays.

On Sunday, which was our anniversary, we visited Dismal Swamp State Park, with its canal, creeks, and dense forest,  just across the state border near South Mills, North Carolina. As we walked along the boardwalk, just a little above the marsh, we saw lots of butterflies, a turtle,  and several dainty, little white-tailed deer. At the end of the boardwalk, we saw an exhibit containing two very playful North American river otters. The beauty of the site is tarnished by its association with slavery. Slave labor was used to drain and log the swamp, and a long canal was built with slave labor. Escaped slaves (sometimes called "maroons") took refuge in the swamp, and it was used as a route along the Underground Railway. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow captured the contrast between the natural beauty of the site and its cruel past in the poem The Slave in the Dismal Swamp. Two stanzas that juxtapose the natural beauty of the swamp with the suffering that occurred there are:

"A poor old slave, infirm and lame;
     Great scars deformed his face;
On his forehead he bore the brand of shame,
And the rags, that hid his mangled frame,
     Were the livery of disgrace.

All things above were bright and fair,
     All things were glad and free;
Lithe squirrels darted here and there,
And wild birds filled the echoing air
     With songs of Liberty!"

Possibly as a response to Longfellow's poem, David Edward Cronin, who fought for the Union during the Civil War, painted Fugitive Slaves in the Dismal Swamp, Virginia, in 1888.

Fugitive Slaves in the Dismal Swamp, 1888

Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote an anti-slavery novel,  Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp, about maroons living in the swamp.

For our anniversary dinner, we revisited an Italian restaurant, Reginella's Trattoria & Pizzeria in Chesapeake I'd fallen in love with a few days earlier. Craig suggested going somewhere "fancier", but I enjoyed it so much the first time that I was delighted to go there again. I was not disappointed! 'Wonderful food, and the chianti was very good too!

While Craig was at work on Monday, I drove up to Jamestown. I took Highway 64, which meant crossing over Chesapeake Bay via the bridge tunnel. On the way, I stopped in Williamsburg and visited the College of William and Mary.

Jamestown, on the banks of the James River, was established in 1607 and was the first permanent English settlement in the Americas. Initially, it seemed a miserable place to stay. On May 24, 1607, Captain Christopher Newport dropped off 104 men and boys at the site and went back to England. When he returned with about 100 more settlers in January, 1608, only 38 of the original 104 had survived. Another convoy of nine ships, bearing supplies and more colonists,  left England on June 2, 1609, but two of the ships were separated from the others in a storm (possibly a hurricane). One of the two, the Sea Venture, was stranded in Bermuda, while the other returned to England. Seven made it to Jamestown, where they dropped off another 200-300 settlers but few supplies. In the meantime, the colony leadership had begun to quarrel. John Ratcliffe threatened to have John Smith hanged, and eventually sent him back to England to "answer for his conduct." This was probably a blessing in disguise for Smith, given that he escaped the coming famine and avoided the same fate as Ratcliffe, who was captured in November, 1609, by Powhatan's forces and tortured to death. At the start of the winter of 1609, there were some 500 settlers living at Jamestown. Only 60 were left when help arrived in May 1610. That winter is known as the Starving Time. The Jamestown fort was besieged by Native Americans and lacked stores of food. Colonists were forced to eat horses, cats, and dogs, and even, according to archaeological evidence discovered in 2012, practiced survival cannibalism,

The colony stumbled on, recovered, and became profitable through its tobacco industry. Pocahontas, the favorite child of Powhatan, the paramount Native America chief of the region, was kidnapped and held for ransom by the settlers in 1613 as part of some Anglo-Indian conflict. While in captivity, she converted to Christianity, adopted the name Rebecca, and, in April 1614, at the age of 17, she married the tobacco planter, John Rolfe. They had one son, Thomas, who had one daughter, Jane, who had one son, John Bolling (Jane married a Robert Bolling and died shortly after the birth of their first child.) After that, the family became much more prolific, and many people, including two former first ladies (Edith Bolling Wilson and Nancy Reagan), claim to be direct descendents of Pocahontas. At the gift shop in Jamestown, I bought The True Story of Pocahontas: The Other Side of History, by Dr. Linwood "Little Bear" Custalow and Angela L. Daniel "Silver Star". More on that later ...

In Defense of Iowa

I used to think of Iowa as the armpit of the US, one of the most "un-cool" states in the Union. After all, it doesn't have mountains, a Great Lake, or an adjacent ocean, and it produced Chuck Grassley. Now one of my kids is going to Grinnell College in central Iowa. I've visited the state twice in the past year, and was pleasantly surprised by how pretty and pleasant it is. It reminds me of the English countryside.

Iowa is bounded to the west by the Missouri River and to the east by the Mississippi. It is criss-crossed by several other rivers and streams and has a number of lakes and ponds. The presence of all this water means the state is wonderfully green and lush, at least in the summer. Although usually considered to be a prairie state, Iowa has about three million acres of trees and forest, which adds up to about one acre per resident.

US News ranks Iowa as the best state in the nation, based mostly on its ratings for infrastructure, health care, education, and opportunity. I'm not sure most people would agree. The weather is usually either hot and humid or freezing cold. While the population of the state is growing faster than the US average, many young people leave Iowa for better opportunities elsewhere. According to a 2015 report by United Van Lines, the top ten states people are moving to don't include Iowa. Instead they are (in order of rank) Oregon, South Carolina, Vermont, Idaho, North Carolina, Florida, Nevada, D.C., Texas, and Washington, while the top ten states people are leaving are New Jersey, New York, Illinois, Connecticut, Ohio, Kansas, Massachusetts, West Virginia, Mississippi, and Maryland.

However, as someone once said to me rather defensively about Birmingham, UK, "It's no' as bad as it's painted." Iowa is surprisingly beautiful. I feel a subjective sense of permanence to the place. I love the ubiquitous rain and the charming old Victorian homes on shaded tree-lined streets. Des Moines, which straddles the Des Moines River, is an attractive modern city. Iowa City, on the banks of the Iowa River, is a vibrant university town, home to the University of Iowa, which has, according to the Princeton Review, some of the happiest students in the nation. Iowa City is also a UNESCO City of Literature and is home to the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a pretty Riverwalk. I haven't yet been up to Cedar Rapids, but I'm looking forward to doing so. It is a center of Czech and Slovak (a significant part of my husband's heritage) culture and is home to the National Czech and Slovak Museum & Library and several Bohemian restaurants and bakeries.

I guess I'll be seeing more of Iowa and other Midwestern states over the next few years. My daughter will be traveling to Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and around Iowa to play tennis, and I hope to get out to see some of her matches.

Cancer Sucks!

Some of my friends have, in the past three of four years, had cancer. I am so grateful that they have all recovered, but sadly they and their families suffered greatly. Now another friend, a young man who is very close to one of my kids, is fighting this horrible disease. He was diagnosed with Stage 4B non-Hodgkins lymphoma on Christmas Eve of last year. He was started almost immediately on an aggressive course of chemotherapy. Further tests showed he had developed Hodgkins lymphoma as well. It's apparently very unusual to get both. He continued to receive chemotherapy and began to feel much better. However, a recent scan showed that the cancer has either progressed or transformed. Apparently the chemo he had works in 95% of cases. He is, unfortunately, in the 5% for whom it does not work and now it appears he has become resistant to chemo.

Thankfully there are further options for him. He is currently visiting the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, TX. It is one of the best cancer treatment facilities in the world and may be able to offer him some innovative and experimental treatments. He may be able to try platinum-based chemotherapy. Another option is a stem cell transplant. If he goes that route, his immune system would be so badly weakened that he'd have to be confined to a sterile room with no physical contact with other people for a month. A third option could be gene therapy. I understand that gene therapy is still experimental, but I spoke to someone yesterday who knows someone who was apparently cured by it (very vague, I know, but still encouraging). In December 2014, MD Anderson published the results of a study that showed the effects of Sleeping Beauty gene therapy (so named because the "Sleeping Beauty" gene can awaken DNA that can replicate itself and insert the copy back into the genome). The results were encouraging, and the therapy can only have improved since that study was published. Our young friend is in the best possible hands.

Diet may be a factor in treating or avoiding cancer. Some studies have shown that cancer cells grow faster in an acidic environment, so an alkaline diet has become a popular anti-cancer approach. However, apparently one can't alter the pH of one's blood through diet. Vegetarians on average have lower risks of developing cancer, and vegans are at even lower risk. According to Lindsey Wohlford, an MD Anderson Cancer Center dietitian, eating red and processed (because they contain chemical preservatives) meats can increase the risk of certain types of cancers. Also eating meats prepared at high temperatures can increase one's risk of kidney cancer. According to the American Institute of Cancer Research, one should eat mostly plant-based foods such as fruits, vegetables, and whole grains, while avoiding sugary drinks. The AICR recommends that at least 2/3 of one's plate should be made up of vegetables, fruits, whole grains, and beans. The center also recommends maintaining a healthy weight and being physically active. The AICR offers a number of suggested recipes that reduce the likelihood of developing cancer.

Further Cooking Adventures

So yesterday I took two cooking classes.

In the morning, I attended a salads class at The French Kitchen. I suck at making salads, so I needed it. There were six students present, and we made 16 or 17 different salads between us. We had a wonderful buffet lunch together, during which we ate most of them, but we were able to take home four salads and a tub of French vinaigrette. After the class, I bought a couple of loaves of The French Kitchen's wonderful baguettes, four small jars of jam, and some European butter. We had those with the salads and some other bits and pieces for dinner last night.

Yesterday afternoon, I attended a vegan cooking class (this one was a demonstation and tasting, not a hands-on class) at our local Natural Grocers. We learned how to make buckwheat galettes. These were Breton galettes, a type of pancake, not the free-form pastries that have the dough edges folded up around the sides to encase a filling. Our instructor, who is from Breton, France, brought along a traditional heavy 13" galette pan, but, as it didn't work particularly well with the induction cooktop she used, she made most of her galettes in an ordinary frying pan. One can also use a "crepe maker" griddle. Galettes are made from buckwheat (or sarrasin), a gluten-free pseudograin that is rich in protein, zinc, copper, and manganese. Buckwheat is considered a "pseudograin" or one of the ancient grains because, like quinoa, chia, and amaranth, its seeds come from broad-leaf plants, not grasses, from which come "cereal grains", such as wheat, rice, corn, and millet. We also learned to make a vegan béchamel sauce, with cashews as the primary ingredient, and a vegetable filling of mushrooms and spinach. I thought the end result was absolutely delicious! This dish will be my new comfort food.

Buckwheat Galettes with Spinach and Mushroom in a Cashew Béchamel Sauce

3 cups buckwheat flour
4 cups water
Salt and pepper to taste
Sunflower oil (for cooking, apparently sunflower oil provides the best taste)

Mix ingredients; stir until smooth, allow to rest for at least 30 minutes in fridge; when ready to cook, remove from fridge and stir in about a cup of water (the batter should have the consistency of heavy cream); fry as for crepes.

Cashew Béchamel Sauce

2 cups of cashews, soaked in water
1 cup chopped onion
2 cloves garlic, minced
2 cups vegetable broth (or 1.5 cups broth and 1/2 cup of white wine)
3 Tbsp nutritional yeast
1 Tbsp onion granules
pinch of freshly grated nutmeg
pinch of white pepper
1 tsp sea salt

Saute the onions in water/broth until softened but not caramelized; add garlic and stir for a minute or two; add all ingredients to blender and blend until very smooth.

Vegetable filling

16 oz. mushrooms of choice (the instructor used cremini mushrooms, which were very tasty)
10-16 oz. baby spinach
A little vegetable broth

Cook mushrooms on medium to high heat in a little vegetable broth for 5-8 minutes; add spinach and cook for 3 minutes; add cashew béchamel sauce and cook for 2 minutes. One can experiment with other vegetable fillings. Our instructor recommended asparagus.

Add filling to galettes and fold.

English Toffee

So last night, Paige and I attended a class at The French Kitchen Culinary Center in Colorado Springs. While many of the classes involve French cuisine, this one was an "English Toffee" class.

The toffee is very easy to make and absolutely delicious. The key seems to be to measure ingredients very precisely. I don't think I'm supposed to give away the center's recipes on a public blog, but here is a similar recipe. One can play around with it and sprinkle, for example, ground peppermint candy, toasted coconut, other types of nut, etc., over the melted chocolate.

I'm told that it would be sacrilegious to: 1) use Hershey's chocolate chips (Belgian chocolate chips are apparently better), and 2) use American butter (which I understand has less butterfat and less beta carotene than European butter; I think Irish butter will do).

Note: The final temperature for the "hard-crack stage", achieved when boiling the toffee, is given in the linked recipe as 300°F. This applies at sea level. Above sea level, the temperature needs to be dropped by 2°F for every 1,000 feet one ascends.

Weekend Sports

This has been a good weekend for sports fans.

Wimbledon concluded today with the men's final. As expected, Novak Djokovic beat unlikely finalist Kevin Anderson 6-2, 6-2, 7-6. Yesterday Angelique Kerber beat Serena Williams 6-3, 6-3. Serena seemed a little sluggish and made a slew of unforced errors. Iga Swiatek of Poland won the girls' final. Cori Gauff, who turned 14 just last March and won the French Open girls' championships last May, made it to the quarter finals. In the boys' final, Chun Hsin Tseng, who also won the French Open boys' championship this year, prevailed over Jack Draper of the UK.

And then there was the World Cup. France beat Croatia 4-2. Emmanuel Macron, who was in Moscow watching the game, was ecstatic! Paige's friend, who is currently in France, said that she could hear people screaming every time the French scored. Yesterday was Bastille Day, so this has been a weekend of celebration for France.

Educated: A Memoir, by Tara Westover

Further to the theme of escaping from dark caves, I recently read Educated: A Memoir by Tara Westover. Educated is an absorbing read (I read it in one sitting) about Tara Westover's journey from growing up in a dysfunctional, Mormon, survivalist family to her eventual schism with her parents after breaking away to go to college. Tara is the youngest of seven children (birth order: Tony, Shawn, Tyler, Luke, Audrey, Richard, Tara), and her parents are Gene and Faye (those are the names she uses in the book; their real names are Val and Laree). She grows up on a farm on the slopes of Buck's Peak in Idaho.

Instead of going to school as a child, Tara helps her mother deliver babies and make herbal concoctions or works in dangerous conditions in her father's scrapyard. She doesn't get a birth certificate until she is nine, and then her family can't remember the exact day of her birth. She is expected to grow up to be a "good Mormon woman" -- to be subservient to her husband and father, to marry young, and to produce many children. The Westover family suffers a litany of gruesome accidents, most of them brought about by Gene's dismissal of reasonable safety considerations and his unswerving beliefs that "the angels" would protect his family and his wife would be able to heal their many injuries. As she reaches her teens, her older brother Shawn, in a classic case of projection, begins calling her a "whore" and a "slut" and becomes physically and emotionally abusive. Her parents trivialize the abuse. To escape Shawn, Tara decides to go to college and, with some advice from her brother Tyler, she prepares for the ACT. The first time she takes it, she scores 22. She retakes it, this time getting 28, which means she can go to Brigham Young University in Utah. From there, she wins a Gates Cambridge Scholarship and ends up getting a Masters and then a PhD from Cambridge University, and she also earns a fellowship to Harvard.

Her father, Gene, is clearly "off his chum". He holds many paranoid beliefs, such as that the government is out to get him, that schools exist to  lead children away from God, that doctors are evil socialist instruments of the government (he claims that choosing between his wife's herbal medicine and modern medicine is akin to choosing between God and Satan), and that the the "Days of Abomination" are coming. He rails against "the Illuminati". He stockpiles food, weapons, and gas so that the family will be prepared to defend itself against the "End of Days" and Ruby Ridge style government attacks. He predicts that Y2K will be a time of catastrophe and is crushed to be proven wrong. He occasionally enters almost catatonic states. His self-belief is absolute. He sees his opinions as facts and believes that he speaks for God. He is extremely sexist. On one occasion, he demands that Tara help him with breakfast by saying, "You're a woman, aren't you? Well, this here is a kitchen!" Tara speculates that he might have bipolar. One of her university professors, in response to Tara's essay about "an uncle" with the disorder, thinks he perhaps has schizophrenia. He has been widely "diagnosed" on the Internet as severely narcissistic.

Shawn is disturbed, dangerous, and abusive, and his mental health is not improved by a series of  major  head injuries. He has a long history of violence, aggression, and degradation of women. He physically and emotionally bullies both Tara and Audrey, her older sister, while her parents look the other way. He shoves his wife, Emily, out of their mobile home in sub-zero temperatures and brutally stabs his dog, a German shepherd, to death with a small knife.

Tara's mother, Faye, appears to be a talented woman who is under the thrall of her domineering husband. Her few fledgling efforts to spread her wings and assert herself are quickly snuffed out by the force of his personality. She, too, sustains a traumatic brain injury in one of the family's depressingly frequent accidents, and, as in many of the other cases in which a family member is hurt, she doesn't get any medical help. Gene believes doctors would be unable to help her and that she is "in God's hands". In the aftermath of the accident, Faye spends a week in the basement and is very badly bruised about the head and face. She appears confused and for months cannot remember her own children's names. For weeks, she has raccoon eyes, which indicates she may have had a serious brain injury. She is never the same after the accident. She embraces magical thinking and believes in her power to heal by transmitting energy and making herbal tinctures.

Finally Audrey and Tara agree to stage an intervention to address Shawn's problems. Faye initially indicates she is on board with the plan. Then comes the gaslighting. Faye, under pressure from Gene, who claims Tara has "no proof" of Shawn's behavior, reneges. Tara's parents visit her at Harvard, intent of enforcing her submission to their views. They invite themselves to spend a week in her dorm room (Gene in the bed, Faye on an air mattress, Tara on the floor). Gene, with fanatical conviction, believes Tara is at fault and in need of forgiveness. He insists she requires a "priesthood blessing" (with Gene, of course, being the priest), meaning that he would lay hands on her head and cast out the "evil" that caused her to openly confront Shawn's issues. Tara realizes that "what my father wanted to cast from me wasn't a demon. It was me." She refuses his blessing, thus retaining her authenticity. Her parents are shocked and leave immediately, with Gene saying he can no longer be around "the devil". Tara is devastated and suffers a breakdown. As of the writing of the book, Tara has had very little contact with either parent.

Tara returns to the UK, where Shawn harasses her with terrifying death threats. Her parents remain in denial. Gene accuses her of being hysterical; her mother claims that Tara's reality is "warped". In the midst of all this, Tara gets a message from her sister, Audrey, to whom their father has explained that Shawn has been forgiven by "the Atonement of Christ". Audrey says Tara should forgive him too. She accuses Tara of giving herself over to "the realm of Satan" and of being controlled by Lucifer.

Tara returns to Idaho for her grandmother's funeral. During the service, she realizes four of her siblings, none of whom has a high school diploma, work for her parents' company. The other three, all of whom earn PhD's, have left their childhood home and established independent lives. She reflects on her struggle to break away and establish selfhood, musing, "You could call this selfhood many things. Transformation. Metamorphosis. Falsity. Betrayal. I call it an education."

Tara's memoir has caused much controversy among the friends and family of the Westovers, many of of whom resent her exposé. As a result, she has been brutally scapegoated. This onslaught has sometimes left her second-guessing her own reality testing.

The Westovers' family lawyer, Blake Atkin, issued a dismissive statement of the book, saying it should be read with a "grain of salt" and points out that three of the seven Westover siblings earned PhDs. He feels this proves that their home education was not neglected.

Two of Tara's siblings, who don't leave their names, have written negative (1-star) reviews of her book on Amazon. I have copied these below:

"Not completely false, but very little actual truth. I was there, and what I saw was was my parents, who were struggling themselves at the time to make ends meet, send there gifted daughter to College at the age of sixteen at great financial sacrifice to them. She would have us believe that she did it all herself, and that's fine, she worked hard and deserves credit. But to say that she received no help or support is total bullcrap! This family produced three Phd's, and the other siblings are all moderately successful! She has told the lies about living 'off the grid', and an abusive family, and 'survivalist family' so much that she may actually believe the crap she says; this is just sad. Our parents were not perfect. They made mistakes. All parents do. But, they did the best that they could and do not deserve all of this crap coming at them! Rather, they deserve love and gratitude."

"I was absolutely shocked and appalled when I read this book. It is full of lies and deceptions. It has very little truth and what truth it does have is blown way out of proportion. What she calls off the grid in a compound was actually house on a farm with City Water and Power. (It's inside city limits not on top of the mountain.) She portrays our dad as being anti-government anti doctors. When in reality he is just a conservative that believes in the Constitution. And because she does not believe the same way she has labeled him as such. She says that he's against doctors but half of my siblings were born in the hospital. We also were taken to the hospital for broken arms, broken legs, and hernia surgery, eye doctor appointments all were accidents not work related but swing off swing sets extra ... We went ot the dentist regularly and all that needed braces had braces. We had the choice of going to school or being homeschooled . Some of my siblings chose to go to school some of us were homeschooled. My dad believed in Freedom in his house. I could tear this book apart line upon line but to do so I'd have to rewrite the whole book. Anyone that knows this family knows this book is a complete and utter lie. There's nothing good or uplifting about this book."

These reviews include a few straw men. For example, Tara never claims in the book that she "received no help or support". In fact, she points out that her parents helped her financially while she was at BYU. She doesn't claim her home was "off the grid", although many of the reviewers mention that it was. She explains that her father wanted to be off the grid. She also states that the first four Westover children were born in the hospital, and that the kids saw a homeopathic dentist. Her father was not always opposed to doctors; he embraced that view later in life. Also, some of the hospital interventions occurred because Tara or someone outside the family took one of the family members to hospital or called an ambulance. Hence, I don't find these negative reviews credible.

Tara's brother, Tyler, gave her book a 5-star review on Amazon, but disputed some of her recollections. I think, he has since removed his review, but there is a copy here.

Tara's former boyfried, Drew, writes a very positive review (5-star) affirming Tara's version of reality.  His is perhaps the sanest voice among the reviewers and describes behaviors common to most abusive families. Here it is:

"Overcoming the gaslighting
by Drew Mecham on April 8, 2018

In the interest of full disclosure, I'm the "Drew" from this book, and although Tara and I are no longer together, I've met all of the key figures in this book on many occasions. Although I don't have as intimate a knowledge of growing up in the Westover family as a sibling would, I observed first hand everything Tara describes in the third part of the book and heard many stories about earlier events, not just from Tara, but from siblings, cousins, and her parents themselves. I find the claims of factaul inaccuracy that have come up among these reviews to be strange for two reasons. First, in a post-James Frey ("A Million Little Pieces") world, publishers are incredibly careful with memoirs and "Educated" was extensively fact checked before publication. Second, no one claiming factual innacuracy can do more than make vague claims that the book is full of lies. While every Westover sibling, as well as their neighbors and friends, will have different perspectives and different memories, it is very difficult to dispute the core facts of this book. "Educated" is about abuse, and the way in which both abusers and their enablers distort reality for the victims. It's about the importance of gaining your own understanding of the world so you're not dependent on the narratives imposed on you by others. I've heard Tara's parents attack schools and univerisities, doctors and modern medicine, but more importantly, I've seen her parents work tirelessly to create a world where Shawn's abuse was minimized or denied outright. I've seen them try to create a world where Tara was insane or possessed in order to protect a violent and unstable brother. I was with her in Cambridge when Shawn was calling with death threats, then saw her mother completely trivialize the experience. For Tara's parents, allegiance to the family is paramount, and allegiance to the family requires you to accept her father's view of the world, where violence is acceptable and asking for change is a crime."

Gene and Faye (in reality, Val and LaRee) Westover have become quite wealthy and prominent through their business, Butterfly Expressions, which deals in alternative medicine. Whether or not Tara should have exposed her already visible family to public scrutiny and criticism is not my place to judge. It is easy to find out that "Shawn"'s real name is Travis and to learn the names of his children, who will no doubt eventually read about their father in Tara's book (I suspect that they won't learn much new). Perhaps Tara's exposure will provide some protection to his wife and children. Tara's parents and Shawn all appear to victims of mental illness, traumatic brain injury, or both. Is it fair to publicize the tribulations of vulnerable and damaged people, even if they have hurt you? Again, it is not my place to judge the author's choices, but I certainly understand how frustrated she must feel by her family's denials and belittlement.

Clearly, Tara felt some sort of need to counter her voicelessness through the written word. Her father's narcissism and the strait-jacket of fundamentalist religious expectations could have crippled and permanently infantilized her. In the book, she says, "My life was narrated for me by others. Their voices were forceful, emphatic, absolute. It had never occurred to me that my voice might be as strong as theirs." She has a strong, lyrical, educated voice, and her book has allowed it to be heard. I think her narrative is very honest, and it is not her version of reality that I question.

This meme has been floating around the Internet, but I have not seen it attributed to anyone. It refers to the narcissist's tendency to gaslight and shift blame, and I think it describes what Tara's parents did to her:

The Hymn of the Narcissist

That didn't happen.
And if it did, it wasn't that bad.
And if it was, that's not a big deal.
And if it is, that's not my fault.
And if it was, I didn't mean it.
And if I did ...
You deserved it.

The Boys in the Cave

So of all the many things in the world one could worry about, I've been fixating much of my emotional energy on the Thai soccer team that has been trapped in the Tham Luang caves in Chiang Rai. Chiang Rai is the northernmost province of Thailand and abuts Myanmar and Laos.

There's is such a sweet, sad, and extraordinary story that merges a Tom Sawyer-style adventure, Buddhist spirituality, truly heroic sacrifice, cutting edge science, triumph, tragedy, and family drama. Eleven boys, aged 11 to 16, and their soccer coach, "Ekk", decided to go caving to celebrate the birthday of one of the boys. In retrospect, it was an unwise decision, especially with the monsoon season approaching, but how could the caves not appeal to those kids? When I was a child, those caves would have had all the allure of a phantasmagorical mystery.

As we know, the caves flooded, and the team retreated deeper and deeper into the labyrnthine passages. They eventually found themselves on a ledge four kilometers from the cave entrance, and there they waited for between nine and ten days until two intrepid British divers, John Volanthen and Richard Stanton, an Internet engineer and a firefighter, found them. The two British divers mapped a dark and difficult six-hour journey, upstream through rushing waters, to the area where the team was trapped.

Over 100 elite divers, most of them volunteers, helped with the search and resuce mission. Buddhist monks set up a shrine and kept a constant prayer vigil at the cave entrance. Workers tried to drain the caves and mounted strenuous searches for alternative entry points to the chamber. Elon Musk came up with several ingenious ideas and went as far as having a mini-submarine built to rescue the trapped boys (it doesn't look as though it'll be needed, but I gather that it's ready to go). The local and international efforts to help have been quite uplifting. The rescue has galvanized the world.

Sadly, one diver, Saman Gunan, a 38-year-old former Thai navy SEAL, died on Friday, July 6. He apparently passed out, ostensibly having run out of air, in one of the narrow underwater passages. After his death, Thai officials were very hesitant to dive the team out. They feared that the boys, most of whom can't swim, might panic, which could potentially be fatal.

I've seen a relatively experienced diver panic. On our honeymoon in the Maldives, Craig and I set out on a boat with a group to do a "drift dive" -- we would go down 20 or 30 feet and then drift with a fast-moving current along the side of a reef. The boat would follow the current and pick us up a couple of hours later. We were accompanied by a British man, who was a little put out to be diving with mere beginners like us. He'd dived some of the world's best dive spots, such as the Red Sea and the Caribbean. He had the most expensive equipment, including a full drysuit (as opposed to a mere wetsuit). So we arrived at our dive site, submerged, and were immediately enthralled by the reef life as we were whisked off by the current. Then hysterical shrieking shattered the peace. Our Brit was hanging onto a rock like a limpet and screaming bloody murder. Our dive instructor was trying to pry his hands loose so she could take him back to the boat, but he clung on frantically. I think the speed of the current scared him. She waved us off, and we continued on our own. Thankfully the boat was able to locate us when we eventually surfaced, and our dive instructor was able to get our Brit back to the boat safely.

Anyhow, eight members of the soccer team have been successfully "dived out" of the cave, four at a time, in the past 48 hours or so. Four boys and their 25-year-old coach, "Ekk", remain. Ekk was initially particularly malnourished as he insisted on giving all available food to the 12 boys with him. He lost his entire family to disease when he was just 10 years old, and he entered a Buddhist monastery at 12 and remained there for 10 years, before leaving to take care of his grandmother. He taught the boys to meditate while in the cave, and that seems to have kept them calm.

It appears that the rescued boys were given full-face masks and taken out as a group by ten divers. Each boy was hugged beneath the body of a rescue diver, as the other rescuers provided support. They seem to have made the dangerous journey far more quickly and safely than was expected. Apparently, the most dangerous part of the cave, a tunnel that was only 70cm wide, was drilled and widened, which must have eased the ordeal a little.

The rescue is now on hold for another 10 to 20 hours as teams replenish the decreased oxygen in the caverns and replace used air tanks and gear along the route. Five people remain stranded, but are being provided with food and medical care. They must be chomping at the bit to be freed. I hope to wake up tomorrow and hear good news of their release!

Update on July 10: Hooray!!! The last four boys and their coach have been rescued from the cave! There has been something incredibly endearing about the attitudes displayed by all those involved with the rescue. The parents of the boys, far from expressing anger toward the coach, did everything they could to reassure him that they did not blame him. One even went so far as to call him "my dear Ekk". The rescue teams seemed calm, purposeful, and determined. The trapped boys appeared cheerful, amazingly serene, and appreciative. Perhaps their Buddhist spirituality helped them cope with the ordeal. Apparently being calm and pleasant and showing respect and self-control are central aspects of Thai culture, drawn in part from Theraveda Buddhism. Thais value sanuk, an ethos of light-heartedness, playfulness, and fun. During songkran, the celebration of the Thai New Year from April 13 to April 15, the entire country indulges in ... a water fight! Everyone gets water guns and sprays everyone else. The Thai culture seems respectful, non-confrontational, and joyful. There is a Thai Buddhist Temple in Peyton, CO, and a Jodo Shinshu Buddhist Temple in Denver. I would love to attend a service at either one.

Update on July22: As expected, given that an anesthesiologist, Richard Harris, was the last person out of the cave, it appears that the boys and their coach were sedated for the evacuation. While there have been conflicting reports of the drug they were given (Thai Prime Minister Prayuth Chan-O-Cha said they were given an "anti-anxiety medication"), it seems they were given Ketamine. Photos and videos of the boys during the rescue suggest they were fast asleep. Ketamine seems like a useful tool for the future.

Of Unsatisfactory Nations and Unsung Places

It's discouraging, at the moment, to be a liberal in the US. With Hillary Clinton getting almost three million more votes than Trump and Senate Democratic candidates getting 23 million more votes than Republican candidates, we are a marginalized majority, playing second fiddle to an increasingly radicalized, reactionary, monumentally propagandized, and frequently racist minority. The triumph of the minority has much to do with voter suppression and gerrymandering.

The Supreme Court recently declined to address, in time for the 2018 midterms, a case of extremely  partisan gerrymandering in North Carolina, where in 2016 Republican congressional candidates won 53% of the statewide vote but 77% of congressional districts. The legislator responsible for drawing the map, Rep. David Lewis, was quite open about his self-serving  intentions. As he put it, "I think electing Republicans is better than electing Democrats. So I drew this map to help foster what I think is better for the country." And now it is very likely that this cabal of unfairly elected politicians, who clearly do not represent the will of the majority, will install a hard right Supreme Court judge, who will continue to promote an inequitable system for decades to come.

Canada has been looking increasingly attractive lately. Trudeau, even more so when compared with Trump, appears to be the thoroughly decent and ethical leader of a thoroughly decent and ethical nation. Canada wins over the US on immigration, climate change, women's rights, universal health care, education, gun safety, and fair trade. Canada is, according to the World Happiness Report 2018, the seventh happiest nation in the world, after Finland, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Switzerland, and the Netherlands. The US ranks 18th. The parts of Canada that I have visited -- Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, and parts of British Columbia, including Vancouver, Squamish, Whistler, and Victoria -- are beautiful, interesting, and enriching places. British Columbia is spectacularly gorgeous! I fell in love with Victoria, which appears to have everything, from cream teas to hundreds of breathtaking beaches to incredible scenery to nearby lakes and mountains to the kind of weather I like.

As Craig pointed out this morning, white fascism is a global problem and hardly unique to the US. He sent me an article about racial discrimination in, of all places, Denmark, where "ghetto children" are required to attend assimilation training in "Danish values". Every country has its own problems.

I think my family would be happy in Canada. And, yet, we are very fortunate and advantaged here. I'm not sure my children would necessarily be happier or have better opportunities there. This is in part due to the fact that we are relatively privileged Americans. We have a lovely, spacious home in a beautiful area, outstanding health insurance, and wonderful opportunities for our children. I recently  had the opportunity to examine four Canadian universities/colleges, to spend at least a night in a dorm at each, and to sample their dining hall food. Nice as each was, I think my kids have better standards of living at their colleges here. I'm not sure that a Canadian university education would be quite as individualized or rigorous as that my children are receiving here. Paige has been taught one-on-one for harp, voice, and piano, and is being individually tutored, with a little class tailored entirely to her interests, over the summer in preparation for her honors thesis. Her classes have all been tiny. She is taking a geology class this summer at a local community college. She's using the same textbook that students at elite schools use, the class comprises about 20 students, the instructor is outstanding and engaging, and, being in Colorado, she's having amazing field trips and options for geological exploration. As much as she's learning in the classroom, I think she's learning far more outside of it. Daniel has been showered with attention by his teaching staff and has been offered unusually good research opportunities. His education has been challenging, broad, and thorough. He's in an honors society and has attended weekly physics lectures, intended for graduate students, throughout his time at the School of Mines. Laura has also been given a great deal of individual attention and enjoys small classes sizes. She has been able to find work and volunteering opportunities suited to her nurturing nature while studying at community college. She is considering transferring into either CSU Fort Collins or UCCS to study dietetics. Both would be a lot of fun for her. UCCS is becoming increasingly appealing to out-of-state students because of its location. It's star is in the ascendant, particularly in the areas of health sciences, engineering, and music. The new residence halls and student town homes are unusually comfortable and well-appointed. Emma has the good fortune of being about to head out to Grinnell, where I feel she will have the best of everything, from science labs to athletic facilities to an outstanding and highly individualized education.

Perhaps more importantly, as my kids point out, we should stay here and try to change things, rather than running away. As they say, progress is like the stock market -- lots of ups and downs, but the general trend is up. Emma has already been instrumental in going to Washington D.C. and lobbying for climate change legislation. There is certainly much we could do to be agents of change and much to appreciate here.

Yesterday, Craig and I went for a little hike near our house. The air was clean, the surrounding terrain beautiful, and, on the way home, we stopped off at our country club for drinks and snacks. We sat out on a terrace with beautiful views of the Front Range and soaked in the glory of our surroundings. We have a lovely home in a beautiful setting. There is much we would miss if we moved.

Our little part of "flyover country" is very pleasant. According to a 2018 US News & World Report, Colorado Springs, just to the south of us, is the second best place to live in the US, and Denver is third. I'm not sure how accurate this list is, given that Des Moines, Iowa, ranks fourth. However, also according to US News & World Report, Iowa is the best state to live in in the Union, based on metrics that include health care, the economy, education, opportunity, crime, infrastructure, fiscal stability, and quality of life. Some of the happiest cities in the US are in Colorado. Boulder is supposedly #1, followed by Fort Collins at #4, and Colorado Springs at #18. According to a 2016 Business Insider Report, Colorado also contains some of the healthiest cities in the nation, with Boulder at #1, Fort Collins at #5, Denver at #8, and Lakewood at #16. According to a Forbes report, Colorado Springs is the fifth most-educated city in the US. On top of all that, Colorado has recently transitioned from red to purple to, at least, light blue.

While the political situation is certainly not ideal, we have good lives, the kids have fabulous opportunities, and we have the power and freedom to, per Ghandi, "be the change we want to see in the world". Canada would certainly be an attractive option, but we could do worse than staying where we are. I have far more faith in my children's generation than in my own. Perhaps they will be the ones to restore decency and sanity to this country. It could happen sooner than expected.

The French Kitchen

So yesterday I took a cooking class at The French Kitchen Culinary Center in Colorado Springs. The center has a wonderful, clean, modern kitchen (quartz countertops and Miele appliances), where classes are taught, as well as a bakery and a store that sells both food (including many items that are difficult to find elsewhere) and cooking supplies.

Yesterday, we made a Passion Fruit Cake, and we each got to take our cake home. I'm used to simple recipes that call for two cups of flour, three eggs, etc. The recipe we used yesterday was extremely precise. We had to measure out x grams of flour, y grams of egg yolk, z grams of egg white, etc. Also, we needed to sieve not just the flour and the sugar, but the egg yolk. While the class was waiting for the passion fruit mousse to set in the freezer, our instructor served us a snack of three homemade breads (sour dough, country, and baguette) with butter and four homemade jams. Absolutely divine! She also gave us some English toffee (to die for!) at the start of the class. The class was amazingly well organized. We had aprons waiting for us, and every station was set out for each student with scales and cooking equipment. All the ingredients we used were very high quality. Some are a little hard to find (such as passion fruit puree), but one can purchase them at the center.

The store carries a variety of syrups. We could help ourselves to water and syrups during the class. They were very tasty and would no doubt make great additions to cocktails. Apart from a number of fruit-flavored syrups, there were also hazelnut and French vanilla flavors, which would be great in coffee.

It was so much fun, and the cake is soooooo good! The French Kitchen offers dozens of classes, most of which sell out weeks in advance. I'm signed up for Salads next month, and Paige and I are signed up for English Toffee. I hope to take Bread and Jams, Strawberry Cake, Opera Cake, Vegetables, Quiches, and many more. I may suggest a vegan or vegetarian class at some point, or perhaps a class in cooking French lentils (lentilles du Puy).

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

I just finished reading Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi, a historical novel that follows the lives of two half-sisters and their descendants through six subsequent generations and over 200 years. Effia and Esi were born to the same mother but different fathers in West Africa in the late 1700s. Effia grew up in Fanteland, while Esi lived with her family in Asanteland until the age of 15. The first chapter describes how Effia remained in what is now Ghana and married a white man, a slave trader named James Collins. Esi, on the other hand, was sold into slavery and shipped across the Atlantic. The ensuing chapters describe the lives of their descendants, leading up to very recent times when Effia's great-great-great-great-grandaughter, Marjorie, meets up with Esi's four-times-great grandson, Marcus, in California. The book ends with Marcus and Marjorie visiting Ghana together.

The novel was so sad that it hurt to read. While tragedy stalked the family on both sides of the Atlantic, Esi and her descendants suffered far more. The effects of slavery were devastating to them and caused unimaginable loss and suffering. Esi, her daughter Ness, her grandson Nojo, Nojo's wife, Anna, and Esi's great-grandson H, were all very suddenly torn away from any immediate family, some of them on more than one occasion. Sadly, separatating brown-skinned people from their family members is a practice that continues to this day. Even after slavery was abolished, its aftermath caused immense hardship to the children and grandchildren of slaves in the book as they suffered from racism, lack of opportunity, inadequate education, poverty, and addiction.

It is only in the final chapter of the book that Marcus, who is doing a PhD in sociology at Stanford, shows that perhaps his generation of descendants of slaves will be able to move beyond the curse of the past. However, Marcus also grapples with the legacy of enslavement that blighted the lives of his ancestors. He struggles with his research as described on p. 289 of my edition (First Vintage Books, April 2017): "Originally, he'd wanted to focus his work on the convict leasing system that had stolen years off of his great-grandpa H's life, but the deeper into the research he got, the bigger the project got. How could he talk about Great-Grandpa H's story without also talking about his grandma Willie and the millions of other black people who had migrated north, fleeing Jim Crow? And if he mentioned the Great Migration, he'd have to talk about the cities that took that flock in. He'd have to talk about Harlem. And how could he talk about Harlem without mentioning his father's heroin addiction -- the stints in prison, the criminal record? And if he was going to talk about heroin in Harlem in the '60s, wouldn't he also have to talk about crack everywhere in the '80s? And if he wrote about crack, he'd inevitably be writing, too, about the 'war on drugs'. And if he started talking about the war on drugs, he'd be talking about how nearly half of the black men he grew up with were on their way either into or out of what had become the harshest prison system in the world. And if he talked about why friends from his hood were doing five year bids for possession of marijuana when nearly all the white people he'd gone to college with smoked it openly every day, he'd get so angry that he'd slam the research book on the table of the beautiful but deadly silent Lane Reading Room of Green Library of Stanford University."

Those last few sentences of the above paragraph are absolutely chilling, especially given today's announcement of the retirement of Justice Anthony M. Kennedy and the fact that his replacement will be nominated by Donald Trump, a man who called for the restoration of the death penalty back in 1989 when five black boys, the "Central Park Five", were wrongly convicted of assaulting and raping a white woman in Central Park. Their sentences were eventually overturned, thanks to DNA evidence and the conviction of a serial rapist named Matias Reyes. Disturbingly, Trump doubled down on his racial animus in October, 2016, one month before he was elected president, saying, "The police doing the original investigation say they were guilty. The fact that that case was settled with so much evidence against them is outrageous." What sort of successor to Justice Kennedy is this instinctive racist capable of selecting? I have to hope that the Democrats will be able to hold the line against Trump's worst impulses in the coming confirmation struggle.

Gyasi also deals with the collusion of Africans in the slave trade. She describes how the Fante (Effia's step-family) captured members of the Asante (Esi's family) and sold them to the British.

Yaa Gyasi was born in Mampong, Ghana, in 1989, and moved to the US in 1991. While she now lives in the San Francisco Bay area, she grew up for the most part in Huntsville, Alabama, where her father was a professor of French at the University of Alabama and her mother worked as a nurse. She completed Homegoing, her first (and thus far only)  novel, when she was just 25 years old. She studied english literature at Stanford and later graduated  from the Iowa Writer's Workshop. She has won several awards for her book, and I hope she will continue writing. I'd love to read her autobiography one of these days!

The Pain in Paint

So we needed some paint to touch up the exterior walls of our house. We had a 5-gallon bucket, a bucket labled Benjamin Moore, of paint left over from when we had our house painted about 10 years ago. I made the 25-minute drive (with an additional detour to a store that used to stock Benjamin Moore) to take it to the nearest Benjamin Moore stockist. There were several numbers on the bucket, but those indicating the color had worn off. The paint store could match the paint visually, but they didn't have a computer that would do so. I decided we wanted to be as precise as possible, so back home to visit our HOA office as they have to approve and then record our exterior paint colors. Hooray! They had the exact names of our "Benjamin Moore" paints. I returned to the store, armed with the names of the paints. A staff member pulled up the colors, but they were completely different from our house colors. I left her with the old bucket and asked her to match the color as best she could. It would apparently take 24 hours to get the paint ready. In the meantime, I went home, searched through my filing cabinet, and found an old color card of the paint that we'd used for our shutters and door frames. Hallelujah! The paint was Kelly-Moore Green Thumb 149. Kelly-Moore, not Benjamin Moore. Mystery solved. Kelly-Moore is apparently a completely different company from Benjamin Moore, and, according to "the paint lady" at The Paint Gallery, it is mostly sold in California and Arizona. There are only two Kelly-Moore suppliers in Colorado, and the nearest one is in Longmont, 70 miles away. So we'll just have the paint matched at the nearest paint store or buy the Benjamin Moore equivalent if we need to repaint the exterior in the future. I picked up the matched paint yesterday.

In the meantime, for prosperity and future reference, this is what we have:

Trim: Kelly-Moore, Swiss Cream
Shutters and Doors: Kelly-Moore, Green Thumb, darkened by 25%
Walls: Either Kelly-Moore, Juniper, lightened by 25% or Benjamin Moore Moon Shadow

Addendum, 7/1/18: The plot thickens. The paint is not Kelly-Moore. Kelly-Moore Green Thumb is definitely not what we have on our shutters and doors. We changed the original scheme because it was almost identical to our neighbor's colors, and we didn't update our HOA.  Farblunget!!! What we have, in fact, is a standard suggested exterior color scheme by Benjamin Moore, but we took it from an old brochure that is no longer available. Anyhow, thank goodness for spectrophotometers!

Father's Day

Happy Father's Day (for yesterday) to Craig.

I think he had a good day. He attended, as team captain, a tennis tournament at noon, and he hit against the ball machine for an hour and a half prior to that. Our friends from Florida (they moved out from Colorado a few years ago) were in Denver, and we had vague plans to meet up with them. One of their daughters, a student at Rick Macci Tennis Academy, wanted to hit at altitude again. Craig booked a court for her and Emma to hit yesterday afternoon at our club. We decided to go out somewhere for dinner. At around noon, I thought it might be best to give them the option of eating at our home, where they could stretch out and be more comfortable.

The house was a pigsty. We didn't have enough food for ten people. I hadn't planned a dinner menu. I had four hours to clean the house, buy some food, and make dinner. I immediately went into panic mode (a.k.a. "being a grouch") and started stomping around vacuuming. And then ... the miracle happened. Those children of mine, who were so helpless and so in need of care themselves not so long ago, took over!

Daniel went out to the store and bought all the food we needed. Paige cleaned the house so I could focus on cooking. Daniel, once he'd unpacked the groceries, zipped through the house tidying and organizing. Laura, as soon as she got home from work, joined in. Emma helped tidy up the living room before she and Craig joined our friends at the club for tennis and swimming. By 4 o'clock, when the girls finished up playing tennis, the house was clean and tidy, and we had several vegan and vegetarian (our friends are also vegetarian) dishes ready to go. We had watermelon gazpacho with tofu "feta", two dishes warming in Instant Pots (asparagus risotto and umami-flavored beans), a salad, vegan hot dogs ready for the indoor grill (it was raining), packages of shoestring fries ready to cook in the airfryer, a freshly-baked chocolate cake, and ice cream with various toppings.

When our friends arrived, Paige made margaritas for the adults and played the harp in the background as we had dinner. She showed our friends' kids her newly-acquired geology collection, which intrigued them to no end. S., Craig's friend, is from South Africa, so we watched The Gods Must be Crazy in the movie theater and drank South African wine. It was a very pleasant, relaxed, and comfortable evening.

Having adult children is a new and wonderful paradigm. Daniel decided to clean up our two-acre yard as a Father's Day gift for Craig (he also bought Craig a nice Fitbit). He created a Google spreadsheet of tasks that needed to be accomplished, roped in other family members where possible, and slaved away in the hot sun (last week was brutal) while Craig was out of town to surprise him when he got home.

I am so delighted with my children. They are kind, good people who want to help others. They are capable and competent and lend their energies and talents to making life better. I am constantly surprised and touched to find them supporting Craig and me, when I always thought it was our job to support them. Being the kind of people they have become was the best Father's Day gift they could have given Craig!

Paige's Week in Geological Time

Paige's geology adventures continue apace. Last Sunday, she visited the Denver Museum of Nature and Science and spent some time at the gems and minerals exhibition. Last Monday and Wednesday, she had geology classes (lecture and lab). Last Tuesday, we went up to the Colorado School of Mines Geology Museum in Golden. We didn't walk the Bob Weimer Geology Trail associated with the museum because of the heat, but we need to fit that in to see the dinosaur tracks, etc. And today, we went up to the Victor Gem and Mineral Show in the adorable mountain town of Victor (population 409) on the southwest side of Pikes Peak.

Victor, a former gold rush town, is a bit deserted these days. It was founded after Winfield Scott Stratton discovered gold near what is now the town on July 4, 1891. At one point, Victor had a population of 18,000 people and was, together with nearby Cripple Creek, the second biggest gold mining district in the country. Gradually the mines became worked out, and the cost of gold declined relative to the cost of mining it. There is still gold in the area. One of the vendors at the show showed us some gold ore that he recently found while walking near Cripple Creek.

Paige's spoils from the Victor Gem & Mineral Show

Paige returned with a malachite clock, two pieces of petrified wood (the one on the left is Blue Forest petrified wood and is 58 million years old; the one on the right is between 280 and 320 mllion years old), a pendant and a cabochon. The latter two contain azurite, malachite, and chrysocolla.

She liked, but did not buy (it cost $800), a piece of Blue Bird Gem Silica, which looked something like this:



We lunched at the Gold Camp Bakery on 3rd Street, which offered delicious pastries, soup, salads, and various pies, and we looked at a couple of antique stores.

We need to go back to Victor with Craig. He would love the beautiful 90-minute drive through the mountains and forests, and I think my train aficionado would very much enjoy a ride on the Cripple Creek & Victor Narrow Gauge Railroad. We also need to visit the Victor Lowell Thomas Museum. One can go out the back and pan for gold.

Further adventures await ...