white like me

Op-Ed Columnist
White Like Me
By FRANK RICH
Published: January 17, 2009

I cannot testify to what black Americans feel as our nation celebrates the inauguration of our first African-American president. But I can speak for myself, as a white American who grew up in the segregated nation’s capital of the 1960s. Barack Obama’s day is one that I never thought would come, and one that I still can’t quite believe is here.

Last week I joined a group of journalists at an off-the-record conversation with the president-elect, a sort of preview of the administration’s coming attractions. But as I walked some desolate downtown blocks to the standard-issue federal office building serving as transition headquarters, ghosts of the past mingled with hopes for the future. The contrast between the unemployed men on Washington’s frigid streets and the buzzing executive-branch bees inside was, for me, as old as time.

My particular historical vantage point is a product of my upbringing as that odd duck, a native Washingtonian whose parents were not in government. The first presidential transition of my sentient lifetime, Kennedy’s, I remember vividly. Even an 11-year-old could see that the sleepy Southern town of the Eisenhower era was waking up, electrified by youth, glamour and the prospect of change.

But some of that change I didn’t then understand. J.F.K.’s arrival coincided with Washington’s emergence as the first American city with a black majority. Many whites responded by fleeing to the suburbs. My parents did the opposite, moving our family from the enclave of Montgomery County, Md., into the city as I was about to enter the fifth grade.

Our new neighborhood included the Sidwell Friends School. My mother, a public school teacher, decreed that her children would instead enroll in the public system that had been desegregated a half-dozen years earlier, after Brown v. Board of Education. In reality de facto segregation remained in place. Though a few African-Americans and embassy Africans provided the window dressing of “integration,” my mostly white elementary, junior high and high schools had roughly the same diversity as, say, today’s G.O.P.

I wish I could say we were all outraged at this apartheid. But we were kids — privileged kids at that — and out of sight was out of mind. Except as household help, black Washington was generally as invisible to us as it was to the tourists who were rigidly segregated from the real Washington while visiting its many ivory marble shrines to democratic ideals.

Gradually we would learn more — from our parents and teachers, from televised incidents of violent racial confrontations far away, and from odd cultural phenomena like the 1961 best seller “Black Like Me.” In that book, a white novelist darkened his skin for undercover travels through deepest Dixie, whose bigotry he then described in morbid firsthand detail to shocked adolescents like me.

Surely such horrific injustices could not occur in our nation’s capital.

But as an unintended consequence of Washington’s particular brand of Jim Crow, white public school students got a tiny taste of what racially mandated second-class citizenship could mean. In those days, the city didn’t even have the bastardized form of “self-government” it has now; it was run as a plantation by Congressional District panels led by racist white Southerners (then Democrats). These overseers didn’t want to lavish money on an overwhelmingly black school system, and they didn’t. By the early 1960s, per-student spending in Washington was less than that of any state, impoverished West Virginia and Mississippi included.

If Washington’s white schools received a larger share of that meager budget, as they no doubt did, it was still obvious that our teachers had far fewer resources than their suburban and private school counterparts. Extracurricular activities could be curtailed by the costs of light and heat. The curriculum was also abridged, lest anyone get too agitated by America’s racial inequities. In my history class, the Civil War was downsized to a passing speed bump. In English, we read “Tom Sawyer,” not “Huckleberry Finn.”

Now that we were teenagers, we had both the curiosity and mobility to investigate the strangely undemocratic city that dealt us this hand. In the words of Constance McLaughlin Green, a Pulitzer Prize-winning urban historian, the District’s black population had long occupied “a secret city all but unknown to the white world round about.” We wanted in on the secrets.

There was so much we didn’t know, so much Americans still don’t know. Take the Lincoln Memorial, to which the Obama family paid so poignant a nocturnal visit this month. If you look up coverage of the memorial’s 1922 dedication ceremonies in The Times, you can read of President Harding’s forceful oration commemorating the demise of slavery. You also learn that Dr. Robert R. Moton, the president of the Tuskegee Institute, was invited to pay tribute to Lincoln “in the name of 12,000,000 Negroes.”

Here’s what The Times did not report about Moton: “Instead of being placed on the speaker’s platform, he was relegated along with other distinguished colored people to an all-Negro section separated by a road from the rest of the audience.” So wrote Green in “The Secret City,” her landmark history of race relations in Washington. This was no anomaly. A local Ku Klux Klan had been formed months earlier, with no protests from either Congress or the white press, and the young Harding administration had toughened the exclusion of blacks from the city’s public recreation facilities.

The eye-opening “Secret City” recounting this secret history was not published until 1967, some four years after the Lincoln Memorial served as a backdrop for “I Have a Dream.” It was also in 1967 that I graduated from Woodrow Wilson High. As a valedictory, a bunch of us on the school paper voted to publish an editorial in favor of home rule for D.C. “Washingtonians have to beg, plead and cajole members of Congress for funds to renovate slums and slum schools,” it read. That was putting it mildly; we still had much to learn. But the editorial was enough of an irritant that our principal tried to censor it, which prompted a brief civic kerfuffle (“Student Editorial Banned at Wilson” read the headline in The Washington Post) and jump-started a few starry-eyed careers in journalism and political activism.

It was one year later that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated and Washington’s secret city exploded. The fires and riotscame within a block of the building where the Obama transition set up shop.

One would like to say in the aftermath of the 2008 election that everyone lived happily ever after. But the American drama, especially when it involves race, is always more complicated than that.

Looking back at my high school years, I’m struck by how slowly history can move. The great civil rights legislation of the Johnson administration had been accomplished in 1964 and 1965, but by the time of my graduation the impact was minimal — even in the city where the laws were written and passed. Today the nation’s capital still has no voting representation in Congress and is still a ward of the federal government, reduced to begging, pleading and cajoling for basic needs. Some 19 percent of the population lives below the poverty line, and that 19 percent remains a secret city to many who work within the Beltway.

Washington is its own special American case, but only up to a point. For all our huge progress, we are not “post-racial,” whatever that means. The world doesn’t change in a day, and the racial frictions that emerged in both the Democratic primary campaign and the general election didn’t end on Nov. 4. As Obama himself said in his great speech on race, liberals couldn’t “purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap” simply by voting for him. And conservatives? The so-called party of Lincoln has spent much of the past month in spirited debate about whether a white candidate for the party’s chairmanship did the right thing by sending out a “humorous” recording of “Barack the Magic Negro” as a holiday gift.

Next to much of our history, this is small stuff. And yet: Of all the coverage of Obama’s victory, the most accurate take may still be the piquant morning-after summation of the satirical newspaper The Onion. Under the headline “Black Man Given Nation’s Worst Job,” it reported that our new president will have “to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind.”

Those messes are enormous, bigger than Washington, bigger than race, bigger than anything most of us have ever seen. Nearly three months after Election Day, it remains astonishing that the American people have entrusted the job to a young black man who seemed to come out of nowhere looking for that kind of work just as we most needed him.

“In no other country on earth is my story even possible,” Obama is fond of saying. That is true, and that is what the country celebrates this week. But it is all the tragic American stories that came before him, some of them still playing out in chilly streets just blocks from the White House, that throw both his remarkable triumph and the huge challenge ahead of him into such heart-stopping relief.
Via Aaryn

i've got it something fierce

Then again, it might be the jetlag ...

Kitchenheimer's: When you're in the kitchen going around in circles because you can't remember what you were doing there.

I was in the kitchen this morning walking around in circles wondering what the hell I was looking for when the microwave beeped reminding me I was heating up my cup of coffee. My Kitchenheimer's is getting worse!
Via UrbanDictionary.com

and a totally insufficient dowry ...

I'm admittedly behind on Christmas and other things, given my trip to Southeast Asia. Anyhow, this 12 days of (Indian) Christmas video from Aashish killed me. Be sure to watch the whole thing.

Via Aashish

gone walkabout

Leo and I are headed to Southeast Asia for a spell. We'll do our best to post photos and share our adventures along the way.

le tour du chocolat

For future reference, includes map.

Journeys: Le Tour du Chocolat
By AMY THOMAS
Published: December 14, 2008

THE French have elevated many things to high art: fashion, flirting, foie gras. Chocolate is no exception. With boutiques that display truffles as rapturously as diamonds, the experience of visiting a Parisian chocolatier can be sublime.

The problem, of course, is squeezing in as many of these indulgent visits as possible while also giving the rest of the city its due. My solution: devote one full day to chocolate boutiques, and do it in style. So, on my last visit to Paris, I took to the city’s Vélib’ bike system and mastered a two-wheeled circuit of eight of the chocolatiers that had the best reputations and most glowing reviews in city guidebooks and online message boards. It was exhilarating and exhausting, not to mention decadent. It was a chocoholic’s dream ride.

The Vélib’s — industrial-looking road bikes that are already icons of Parisian-chic just a year and a half after the city initiated the program — made the moveable feast more fun. Progressing from pralines to pavés, I spun by the Eiffel Tower, zipped across the Seine and careened through the spindly streets of St.-Germain-des-Prés alongside other bikers: Parisians in summer dresses and business suits, their front baskets toting briefcases, baguettes and sometimes even Jack Russell terriers.

Practically speaking, the bikes were all but essential. How else could I cover five arrondissements in as many hours, while simultaneously countering a day of debaucherous extremes?

The hedonism began in the center of town with the oldest master on my list, Michel Cluizel (201, rue St.-Honoré; 33-1-42-44-11-66; www.chocolatmichelcluizel-na.com), who has been making chocolate since 1948. A short distance from a Vélib’ station at the intersection of Rues de l’Echelle and St-Honoré, I passed luxury stores flaunting billowy gowns and four-inch Mary Janes and stepped inside what was just as divine: a store where molten chocolate spews from a fountain and the shelves are stocked with bars containing as much as 99 percent cacao.

Mr. Cluizel has a single American outpost, in Manhattan, at which I’ve indulged in hot cocoa made with a blend of five cocoa beans. At his Parisian shop, managed by his daughter Catherine, I discovered the macarolat (1.55 euros, or about $2 at $1.29 to the euro). A chocolate version of the macaroon, it has a dark chocolate shell filled with almond and hazelnut praline, the nuts ground coarsely to give a rich, grainy texture. It was two bites that combined creamy and crunchy, snap and subtlety. But it was just two bites; I wanted more.

A quick spin west landed me at the doors of Jean-Paul Hévin (231, rue St-Honoré, (33-1-55-35-35-96; www.jphevin.com). A modern blend of dark wood cabinetry, slate floors and backlit wall cubbies where cobalt-accented boxes of bonbons are displayed, the space would feel intimidating if not for the shopkeepers, who are both numerous and gracious as they juggle the crowds ogling mango coriander macaroons and Pyramide cakes. After considerable debate — would it be ridiculously gluttonous to have a “choco passion,” a cocoa cake with chocolate mousse, chocolate ganache and praline puff pastry, so early in the day? — I settled on a caramel bûche (3.20 euros). Larger than an individual bonbon but smaller than a Hershey bar, the silky caramel enrobed in delicate dark chocolate hit the sweet spot.

With the choco-salty taste lingering on my tongue, I picked up a bike outside the Hôtel Costes, craning my neck to spy any A-listers — were Sting and Trudie in there? Beyoncé and Jay-Z? — and set out for the 16th Arrondissement.

Just beyond the Place de la Concorde I veered onto Avenue Gabriel. It is a curving street that winds past both the United States Embassy and Pierre Cardin’s showcase for young artists, Espace, before eventually turning into a narrow cafe-lined passage where you have to weave around double-parked delivery trucks. Hoping to avoid throngs of wide-eyed tourists on the parallel Champs-Élysées and cars haphazardly zigging and zagging on the rotary around the Arc de Triomphe, I took the residential backstreets to Avenue Victor Hugo.

It was on this street that I found the most eccentric chocolatier on my list: Patrick Roger (45, avenue Victor Hugo; 33-1-45-01-66-71; www.patrickroger.com). It’s not just the chocolate sculptures (a life-size farmer, for example), seasonal window displays (a family of penguins, also life-size) or snazzy aquamarine packaging he’s known for: his intensely flavored bonbons are as bold as they come.

“I do think Patrick Roger is outstanding since he combines new, unusual flavors,” said David Lebovitz, an American chocolate connoisseur, author of “The Great Book of Chocolate” and a Paris resident. But, he added, Mr. Rogers “isn’t doing weird flavors just to be trendy, like others tend to do in Paris nowadays.”

I sampled a few to confirm. The Jamaica has a rich coffee flavor from ground Arabica coffee beans; the Jacarepagua blends sharp lemon curd and fresh mint, and then there’s the Phantasme, made with ... oatmeal. Each costs less than 1 euro.

About 90 minutes in, I had tasted creamy, salty and tart and had traversed a good stretch of the city. I was high — on Paris and sugar — coasting beneath Avenue Kléber’s towering chestnut and plane trees toward the Place du Trocadéro in the 16th Arrondissement. Winding my way down the steep hills of the Rue Benjamin Franklin and the Boulevard Delessert, past romantic cafes and limestone edifices, alternately beige and gray depending on the light, I felt as though I was in a quaint Gallic village, not the capital city. That is until I was spit out across the river from the grandest Parisian landmark of all: the Eiffel Tower.

Digital cameras flashed, souvenirs were hawked and regiments of tour buses idled in one big mechanical whir. It was as if every foreigner had descended on the monument at that very moment. I didn’t exhale until I entered the quietly sophisticated Seventh Arrondissement.

Michel Chaudun (149, rue de l’Université, 33-1-47-53-74-40) is wildly talented as an artist and chocolate sculptor (his watercolors decorate the store along with chocolate Fabergé eggs and African statues), to say nothing of his reputation for being one of the world’s best chocolatiers. After 22 years of turning cacao into sublime bonbons, he’s responsible for influencing many of the city’s newer generation of chocolatiers.

His pavés are particularly worshipped. They’re sugar cube-size squares of cocoa-dusted ganache that you deftly spear from the box with a toothpick and then allow to melt a little on your tongue a little before biting into the rich creaminess. Fresh and luscious, they’re also hypersensitive to warm temperatures. Which meant — tant pis — if I tried to save any for later, they would wind up a choco-puddle.

Hopping on and off the Vélib’s so often courted a certain amount of trouble. Parisian cynicism reared its head when a disgusted man at a station told me that 90 percent of the bikes don’t work. I wouldn’t say the defective bicycles were that frequent, but I learned an essential checklist: Are the tires inflated? The rims, straight? Is the front basket intact? Do the gears work? Is the chain attached? With these things checked, you’re good to go, as I was after savoring the last pavé from my modest box of six (3.40 euros).

Cutting across the square fields in front of Les Invalides I glided by college students throwing Frisbees and old men playing pétanque. To my right, the gilded dome of Les Invalides; to my left, more gold crowning the ornate Alexandre III bridge. This was a decadent journey indeed.

Finally, in the Sixth Arrondissement, it seemed I could toss an M & M in any direction and hit a world-class chocolatier. There was the whimsical Jean-Charles Rochoux (16, rue d’Assas, 33-1-42-84-29-45; www.jcrochoux.fr), where gaudy chocolate sculptures of garden gnomes belie the serious artistry of his Maker’s Mark truffles.

Christian Constant (37, rue d’Assas, 33-1-53-63-15-15), a Michelin-starred chef and award-winning chocolatier, excels at such spicy and floral notes as saffron and ylang-ylang. Pierre Marcolini (89, rue de Seine, 33-1-4407-3907; www.marcolini.be), the lone Belgian of the group, offers 75 percent dark chocolate from seven South American and African regions. Buzzing, I intended to finish the circuit in grand style.

The line snaking out of Pierre Hermé’s slim boutique (72, rue Bonaparte, 33-1-43-54-47-77; www.pierreherme.com) told me I was doing the right thing. When I made it inside the snapping automatic doors, it was (forgive me!) like being a kid in a candy store: pristine rows of cakes adorned with fresh berries, coffee beans and dark chocolate shavings.

“Un Plénitude, s’il vous plait.”

I took my treasure to a nearby park and tucked into the dome-shaped cake filled with chocolate mousse and ganache, crunchy caramel and fleur de sel. I relished the fluffy whipped richness, the bite of dark chocolate and the tang of salt. Had I died and gone to heaven? No, it was just a rapturous day in the City of Light and dark chocolate.

PEDALING FOR PAVÉS

After doubling the number bicycles since the program started last summer to 20,600, Paris’ Vélib’’ (www.velib.paris.fr) is now the largest free bike program in France. There are 1,451 stations in the city, or one approximately every 900 feet. Each station has about 15 to 20 bikes. The bikes are simple: three speeds, an adjustable seat, a bell and basket and a headlight.

By purchasing a one-day or weeklong pass at the kiosk located at a station, you can hop on any bicycle and drop it at your next destination. To unlock a bike, you punch in your personal access code at the kiosk.

Though it’s called a free bike program (Vélib’ is short for vélo libre, or free bike), a day pass costs 1 euro. The first half-hour on the bike is no additional charge, the second half-hour is 1 euro, and the third half-hour is 2 euros. After that, it’s 4 euros every half-hour. The shorter your trips, the lower the cost. My total cost for five hours was 12.60 euros, or about $16.15 at $1.29 to the euro.

orange-scented roasted root vegetables

Leo and I had lots of carrots, turnips, onions, and some sweet potato to use up before our vacation, so we looked for a root vegetable recipe. This one knocked our socks off tonight with chicken piccata, some roasted green beans, and viognier.

Orange-Scented Roasted Root Vegetables This no-fuss side dish roasts while you're tending to the rest of the meal.

4 cups (1-inch) cubed peeled sweet potato (we had 2 cups)
3 cups (1-inch) cubed peeled rutabaga (we used 1 1/2 cups of turnips)
2 cups (1-inch) sliced parsnip (we used 2 1/2 cups of carrots)
1 tablespoon vegetable oil (we used grapeseed)
2 medium onions, each cut into 8 wedges
Cooking spray (we omitted this)
1/3 cup packed brown sugar
2 tablespoons orange marmalade (because we were out of orange marmalade, we used the last of the Navarro vineyards cranberry pinot noir wine jelly that Diana L. sent us. We also added 1 TBSP orange zest to give it an orange aroma)
2 tablespoons lemon juice
1 tablespoon sweet honey mustard (we used organic yellow mustard and added honey)
1/4 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground red pepper (we forgot this)
Dash of ground nutmeg (we forgot this)

Preheat oven to 400°.

Combine first 5 ingredients in a bowl; toss. Arrange vegetables in a single layer in a shallow roasting pan coated with cooking spray. Bake at 400° for 45 minutes; stir twice.

Combine sugar and remaining ingredients in a small saucepan; bring to a boil. Reduce heat; simmer 1 minute. Pour over vegetables; toss gently. Bake an additional 15 minutes or until vegetables are tender.

Yield: 7 servings (serving size: 1 cup)

CALORIES 229 (11% from fat); FAT 2.8g (sat 0.5g,mono 0.7g,poly 1.1g); IRON 1.4mg; CHOLESTEROL 0.0mg; CALCIUM 84mg; CARBOHYDRATE 50.7g; SODIUM 148mg; PROTEIN 3g; FIBER 4.9g

Cooking Light, NOVEMBER 1997

you're the one that i want

Leo and I were enthralled as we watched this. Ruby, not so much.

And for the record, it's Canine Dancesport, not dog dancing.

Getting two dogs to do it (and different moves at that) is more than my brain can process at the moment.

no more pencils, no more books. no more teacher's dirty looks.

I just crossed another item off of life's to-do list: getting a graduate degree.

Three and a half years have passed since I started, and I'm relieved to be done. Now, it's time to get back to the rest of my to-do list.

just ask ruby

Research News: Dogs Understand Fairness, Get Jealous, Study Finds
by Nell Greenfieldboyce
Morning Edition, December 9, 2008 · Dogs have an intuitive understanding of fair play and become resentful if they feel that another dog is getting a better deal, a new study has found.

The study, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, looked at how dogs react when a buddy is rewarded for the same trick in an unequal way.

Friederike Range, a researcher at the University of Vienna in Austria, and her colleagues did a series of experiments with dogs who knew how to respond to the command "give the paw," or shake. The dogs were normally happy to repeatedly give the paw, whether they got a reward or not.

But that changed if they saw that another dog was being rewarded with a piece of food, while they received nothing.

"We found that the dogs hesitated significantly longer when obeying the command to give the paw," the researchers write. The unrewarded dogs eventually stopped cooperating.

Scientists have long known that humans pay close attention to inequity. Even little children are quick to yell "Not fair!" But researchers always assumed that animals didn't share this trait.

"The argument was that this is a uniquely human phenomenon," says Frans de Waal, a professor of psychology at Emory University in Atlanta and a researcher at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center.

That changed in 2003 when he and a colleague named Sarah Brosnan did a study on monkeys. Monkeys had to hand a small rock to researchers to get a piece of food in return. Monkeys were happy to do this to get a piece of cucumber. But the monkeys would suddenly act insulted to be offered cucumber if they saw that another monkey was getting a more delicious reward, a grape, for doing the same job.

"The one who got cucumber became very agitated, threw out the food, threw out the rock that we exchanged with them, and at some point just stopped performing," says de Waal.

In that experiment, the monkeys considered the fairness of two different types of payment. But when Range and her colleagues did a similar study with their trained dogs, testing to see if dogs would become upset if they only got dark bread when other dogs received sausage, they found that dogs did not make that kind of subtle distinction. As long as the dogs got some kind of food payment, even if it wasn't the yummiest kind, the animals would play along.

Dogs, like monkeys, live in cooperative societies, so de Waal was not surprised that they would have also some sense of fairness. He expects other animals do as well. For example, he says, lions hunt cooperatively, and he "would predict that lions would be sensitive to who has done what and what do they get for it."

sleep with the right people

"Gay, straight, black, white ... marriage is a civil right!"

Leo and I shouted this with D and Ophy at a protest Saturday night. We walked from A-1 Storage on PCH to the Manchester Grand Hyatt. A-1's owner gave $750K to Yes on 8. Doug Manchester gave $125K to Yes on 8. (Side note: Manchester ostensibly donated the money to support marriage ... yet he and his wife are separating and getting divorced. Yes, folks. Karma can be a beeeyotch.)

Anyhow, the coalition of marchers included Latino hotel workers and white gay boys (and girls), uniting as part of Sleep With The Right People.org. I found it very encouraging that Latino hotel workers seeking to unionize and get a fair wage and fair working conditions could get behind gay rights (and vice versa). It leaves me hopeful that the gay community and African Americans can get on the same page, as well.

Op-Ed Contributors: Showdown in the Big Tent
By CAITLIN FLANAGAN and BENJAMIN SCHWARZ
December 7, 2008
Los Angeles

THE attitude of white, liberal Hollywood toward African- American churches has long been one of almost participatory respect. Whether it’s Gospel Brunch at the House of Blues on Sunset Boulevard, or the Blind Boys of Alabama on the iPod, or a serious — reverential — mention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference over dinner, the understanding is clear: the black church is a foundational institution in the history of the civil rights struggle, and its music (although it makes reference to Jesus Christ as a personal savior) is smoking hot.

It was only recently that the A-list discovered that this love is unrequited. Last month, Proposition 8 passed, making gay marriage illegal in California, and the demographic that lent insult to injury was the state’s African-American voters.

They came to the polls in record numbers to support Barack Obama, and they brought with them a fiercely held and enduring antipathy toward homosexuality: 7 in 10 blacks voted in support of traditional marriage. Whether that was the game-changer or not is a question for near-constant debate. Many gay activists have begun quietly to suggest that had Hillary Clinton been the Democratic nominee, Prop 8 would not have passed.

Of the values progressives hold dear, none can be as central or as cherished as the promotion of diversity. It is a word that has become almost a term of art. When a private school champions its embrace of “diversity,” parents understand that the admissions office is not dying to enroll the son of a white evangelical minister or the daughter of a founding partner of a white-shoe law firm. Rather, we know that the school makes an intentional effort to include children of certain minority groups among its student body, and that most important among those groups are African-Americans and the children of gay families.

Left-leaning California’s horror about this newly revealed schism between two of its favorite sons is a situation that cries out for a villain, but the one that liberal white Hollywood has chosen for the role probably won’t make it all the way to the third act.

“It’s their churches,” somebody whispered to one of us not long after the election; “It’s their Christianity,” someone else hissed, rolling her eyes. Apparently the religion espoused by the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. is now the enemy, at least among the smart set, and if this sounds like a regional issue, it’s not.

What we in California have been forced to confront, before anyone had even had the chance to sweep up the tinsel or plop the first Alka-Seltzers into the glasses of water after that heavenly night in Grant Park, is that there’s a big difference between coalition politics and rainbow party politics.

A coalition is composed of groups that may dislike — or even hate — one another, but who understand the shared political expediency of standing together. Rainbow party politics involve bringing together masses of people who are identified by being burdened by a particular grievance. Soon enough — in groups forged of such friable bonds, and almost always when matters of morality and lifestyle come into play — you will discover that one oppressed group does not necessarily support the goals of another oppressed group.

Hollywood, of course, is a city full of statesmen and moral authorities, and many of them ran to their pulpits and Web sites to get on the right side of this issue, but there was no way to hold both truths together in a position that was both acceptably liberal and coherent. “At some point in our lifetime,” said George Clooney, “gay marriage won’t be an issue, and everyone who stood against this civil right will look as outdated as George Wallace standing on the school steps keeping James Hood from entering the University of Alabama because he was black.”

To the opponents of Proposition 8, this kind of analogy is a rallying cry; but as white Hollywood has recently discovered, to the blacks who voted for the measure, it’s galling. Comparing the infringement on civil rights that gays are experiencing to that suffered by black Americans is to begin a game of “top my oppression” that you’re not going to win. The struggle for equality — beginning with freedom from human bondage (see: references to the book of Exodus at the Gospel Brunch) — has been so central to African-American identity that many blacks find homosexual claims of a commensurate level of injustice frivolous, and even offensive.

Furthermore — and perhaps even more painfully for those of us who support gay marriage and all that it represents — Christian teaching on marriage is not the only reason so many blacks supported Proposition 8. Although it has come as a shocking realization to many in this community, a host of sociological studies confirm that many blacks feel a significant aversion to homosexuality itself, finding it morally and sexually repugnant. And here in essence is the problem with the Democrats’ big tent, as well as the grounds for a wholly new kind of culture war that is probably going to make us long for the clear lines and simple enmities of the old one. The New Deal coalition was a mass movement based on building a more just economic and political order, embracing Protestant evangelicals and Catholic immigrants, segregationists and integrationists, radical left-wingers and unionized working men from the steel belt, all holding their noses with one hand and pulling the lever with the other. Many of us who voted for Mr. Obama want the same things that the New Dealers wanted; we aren’t trying to advance a cause as much as we want to regain so much lost ground.

“This is our moment,” the president-elect has told us, stirringly. This is our time to stand shoulder to shoulder, the hipsters of Washington Square and the minivan moms of Minnetonka. Our nation is seeing huge numbers of its citizens slide into actual — and virtually intractable, if we keep hold of President Bush’s policies — poverty. We can stand together on these big issues, or we can balkanize ourselves with the help of good old-fashioned identity politics, which didn’t serve too well the last time around.

As anyone who ever had to sit through a lecture on “the paradox of tolerance” can tell you, it’s possible to create a vast utopian society forged of many previously disenfranchised groups — but you don’t want to ask too many questions.

Caitlin Flanagan is the author of “To Hell With All That.” Benjamin Schwarz is the national and literary editor of The Atlantic.

beyond gay and straight: mexico's muxe

I thought this article (and the accompanying slideshow) were fascinating.

A Lifestyle Distinct: The Muxe of Mexico
By MARC LACEY
Published: December 6, 2008

Mexico City — Mexico can be intolerant of homosexuality; it can also be quite liberal. Gay-bashing incidents are not uncommon in the countryside, where many Mexicans consider homosexuality a sin. In Mexico City, meanwhile, same-sex domestic partnerships are legally recognized — and often celebrated lavishly in government offices as if they were marriages.

But nowhere are attitudes toward sex and gender quite as elastic as in the far reaches of the southern state of Oaxaca. There, in the indigenous communities around the town of Juchitán, the world is not divided simply into gay and straight. The local Zapotec people have made room for a third category, which they call “muxes” (pronounced MOO-shays) — men who consider themselves women and live in a socially sanctioned netherworld between the two genders.

“Muxe” is a Zapotec word derived from the Spanish “mujer,” or woman; it is reserved for males who, from boyhood, have felt themselves drawn to living as a woman, anticipating roles set out for them by the community.

Anthropologists trace the acceptance of people of mixed gender to pre-Colombian Mexico, pointing to accounts of cross-dressing Aztec priests and Mayan gods who were male and female at the same time. Spanish colonizers wiped out most of those attitudes in the 1500s by forcing conversion to Catholicism. But mixed-gender identities managed to survive in the area around Juchitán, a place so traditional that many people speak ancient Zapotec instead of Spanish.

Not all muxes express their identities the same way. Some dress as women and take hormones to change their bodies. Others favor male clothes. What they share is that the community accepts them; many in it believe that muxes have special intellectual and artistic gifts.

Every November, muxes inundate the town for a grand ball that attracts local men, women and children as well as outsiders. A queen is selected; the mayor crowns her. “I don’t care what people say,” said Sebastian Sarmienta, the boyfriend of a muxe, Ninel Castillejo García. “There are some people who get uncomfortable. I don’t see a problem. What is so bad about it?”

Muxes are found in all walks of life in Juchitán, but most take on traditional female roles — selling in the market, embroidering traditional garments, cooking at home. Some also become sex workers, selling their services to men. .

Acceptance of a child who feels he is a muxe is not unanimous; some parents force such children to fend for themselves. But the far more common sentiment appears to be that of a woman who takes care of her grandson, Carmelo, 13.

“It is how God sent him,” she said.

Katie Orlinsky contributed reporting from Juchitán, Mexico.

caucasian anyone?

The WT Russian scares me.

White Russians Arise, This Time at a Bowling Alley
By STEVEN KURUTZ
Published: December 2, 2008

AMONG the significant dates in the history of Kahlúa, the Mexican coffee liqueur, surely March 6, 1998, rates a mention.

That was the release date of “The Big Lebowski,” the Coen Brothers movie about an aging slacker who calls himself the Dude, and who, after a thug urinates on his prized rug, becomes caught up in a Chandleresque mystery.

Played with slouchy brio by Jeff Bridges, the Dude’s chief pursuits involve bowling, avoiding work and drinking White Russians, the sweet cocktail made with vodka, Kahlúa and cream or milk.

The movie was a flop when it was released, but in the decade since, “The Big Lebowski” has attracted a cult following, and as the film’s renown has grown, so has the renown of the White Russian, or, as the Dude calls them, “Caucasians.” The drink is the subject of experimentation at cutting-edge bars like Tailor, in SoHo, which serves a crunchy dehydrated version — a sort of White Russian cereal. The British electro-pop band Hot Chip, meanwhile, recently invented a variation named the Black Tarantula. Not long ago, the cocktail was considered passé and often likened, in its original formula, to an alcoholic milkshake.

“When I first encountered it in the 1970s, the White Russian was something real alcoholics drank, or beginners,” said David Wondrich, the drinks correspondent for Esquire. Now, ordering the drink is “the mark of the hipster,” he said.

Americans’ renewed appreciation for coffee, spurred by Starbucks, which now markets its own coffee liqueur, may have also contributed to the White Russian’s comeback.

To see the White Russian renaissance in full bloom, it is instructive to attend a Lebowski Fest, the semiannual gatherings where fans of the movie revel in the Dude’s deeply casual approach to life. There, the White Russian is consumed in oil-tanker quantities.

This was much in evidence at a fest held last month in New York, where 1,000 or so “achievers,” as the movie’s buffs call themselves, took over Lucky Strike Lanes, a bowling alley in Manhattan. The White Russian demand was such that, in addition to two bars, a White Russian satellite station had been set up and bartenders were in back mixing vats of reinforcements.

It turned out that management was following a directive from the event’s organizers. “When we line up a venue, we always have the White Russian talk,” said Will Russell, a founder of the Lebowski Fest.

Mr. Russell has learned from experience to lay in provisions. He recalled an incident at an early festival in his hometown of Louisville, Ky.

“Milk sold out within a one-mile radius of the bowling alley” where the event was held, he said. “We had to go to every local mini-market and gas station to satisfy the requirements of the achievers.”

At Lucky Strike Lanes, the line at the White Russian station was often 10 deep, and it wasn’t uncommon for someone to sidle up to the counter and say, “I’ll take four.” The bartender would lift a 12-quart plastic tub, straining to hold it steady as the mud-colored liquid sloshed.

Several people were dressed in character, including four men who showed up as white Russians: white painter pants, white T-shirts, brown fuzzy hats. Each drank their namesake, except one guy, who nursed a bottle of Miller Lite. “I’m lactose intolerant,” he said.

The White Russian is not for the faint of stomach. “The cream is going to build up,” said Ted Haigh, the author of “Vintage Spirits & Forgotten Cocktails.” “If you’re drinking these all night, the sugar will build, too, and you’ll have a hell of a hangover.”

If not an expanded waistline. A popular deviation is the Slim Russian, made with either soy or low-fat milk.

Still, some prefer the drink precisely because it is so rich. “I’m one of those fat guys that guzzle milk by the gallon,” said Steve Barber, 28, an antique motorcycle restorer from Saugerties, N.Y., who was attending his first Lebowski Fest and came dressed in a flak vest like the Dude’s Vietnam veteran buddy, Walter. Unlike a lot of Lebowski fans, Mr. Barber has a taste for the drink that predates his viewing of the movie. Several years ago, he said, he used to mix himself a White Russian every day for breakfast: “I called it the ‘Big Boy Milkshake.’ “

Lebowski viewers often develop a taste for White Russians that carries beyond the film or the festivals.

“I’d had them before, but not regularly,” said Don Plehn, 39, a district court clerk from Baltimore. “I drink a lot more of them now.” Mr. Plehn took a sip of his third White Russian of the night and said, “It’s a slow-sippin’ drink.”

Lebowski adherents may have vaulted the White Russian to icon status, but serious cocktail enthusiasts still deride it for being simplistic and overly sweet — a confection designed to appeal to unserious drinkers.

“It’s hard to think of a more boring drink, except, perhaps, when it’s spraying from the Dude’s mouth,” said Martin Doudoroff, a historian for CocktailDB.com.

Skeptics like Mr. Doudoroff would probably blanch at a variation called the White Trash Russian. “You take a bottle of Yoo-hoo,” Mr. Russell said, “drink half, then fill it with vodka and enjoy.”

Believed to date to the 1950s or early 1960s, the White Russian has no great origin story; its culinary precursor is the Alexander. Having been popular in the disco ’70s, the cocktail is, in the words of Mr. Doudoroff, “a relic of an era that was the absolute nadir of the American bar.”

As it happens, this was the period when Jeff Dowd was living in Seattle, driving a taxi and doing a lot of “heavy hanging,” as he put it. Mr. Dowd, 59, an independent film producer and producers representative, is the inspiration for the Dude — a character Joel and Ethan Coen created by taking what Mr. Dowd was like back then and exaggerating a bit, although the White Russians preference is spot on.

“There was a woman I lived with named Connie,” Mr. Dowd said, by phone from his office in Santa Monica, Calif., beginning a rambling oration that was highly Dude-like. “She and her boyfriend, Jamie, were mixologists. We were hanging out and drinking at that time. We went from White Russians to Dirty Mothers, a darker version of a White Russian. It was a very hedonistic period.”

Mr. Dowd moved on from White Russians years ago, but has started drinking them again, mainly so as not to disappoint fans. “When I first met Cheech at the Sundance Film Festival,” he said, referring to Cheech Marin of the comedy duo Cheech and Chong, “the first thing we all wanted to do is smoke a joint with him so we could tell our grandchildren, ‘Hey, I smoked a joint with Cheech.’ Well, people want to say they had a White Russian with the Dude. I don’t want to turn them down, which has added a little extra tonnage to me.”

It has become customary for achievers to scrutinize “The Big Lebowski,” parsing the film’s most trivial details for deep meaning. Which begs the question: Why is the White Russian the Dude’s chosen beverage, beyond the fact that Mr. Dowd briefly drank the cocktail years ago? Theories abound.

“The Dude is very laid-back and the White Russian has a laid-back element,” Mr. Russell said. “You can’t just grab it and go. There’s a ritual to it.”

Mr. Barber said: “The Dude almost holds himself to a higher class than he’s in, which could explain the White Russian. It requires more thought than just popping a top.”

Then again, the reason could be even simpler.

“When I do drink a White Russian, it does go down easy,” Mr. Dowd said. “It actually is a good drink. It’s essentially a liquefied ice cream cone that you can buy in a bar.”

savage consumerism

Wal-Mart Employee Trampled to Death
By ROBERT D. McFADDEN and ANGELA MACROPOULOS
November 29, 2008

The throng of Wal-Mart shoppers had been building all night, filling sidewalks and stretching across a vast parking lot at the Green Acres Mall in Valley Stream, N.Y. At 3:30 a.m., the Nassau County police had to be called in for crowd control, and an officer with a bullhorn pleaded for order.

Tension grew as the 5 a.m. opening neared. Someone taped up a crude poster: “Blitz Line Starts Here.”

By 4:55, with no police officers in sight, the crowd of more than 2,000 had become a rabble, and could be held back no longer. Fists banged and shoulders pressed on the sliding-glass double doors, which bowed in with the weight of the assault. Six to 10 workers inside tried to push back, but it was hopeless.

Suddenly, witnesses and the police said, the doors shattered, and the shrieking mob surged through in a blind rush for holiday bargains. One worker, Jdimytai Damour, 34, was thrown back onto the black linoleum tiles and trampled in the stampede that streamed over and around him. Others who had stood alongside Mr. Damour trying to hold the doors were also hurled back and run over, witnesses said.

Some workers who saw what was happening fought their way through the surge to get to Mr. Damour, but he had been fatally injured, the police said. Emergency workers tried to revive Mr. Damour, a temporary worker hired for the holiday season, at the scene, but he was pronounced dead an hour later at Franklin Hospital Medical Center in Valley Stream.

Four other people, including a 28-year-old woman who was described as eight months pregnant, were treated at the hospital for minor injuries.

Detective Lt. Michael Fleming, who is in charge of the investigation for the Nassau police, said the store lacked adequate security. He called the scene “utter chaos” and said the “crowd was out of control.” As for those who had run over the victim, criminal charges were possible, the lieutenant said. “I’ve heard other people call this an accident, but it is not,” he said. “Certainly it was a foreseeable act.”

But even with videos from the store’s surveillance cameras and the accounts of witnesses, Lieutenant Fleming and other officials acknowledged that it would be difficult to identify those responsible, let alone to prove culpability.

Some shoppers who had seen the stampede said they were shocked. One of them, Kimberly Cribbs of Queens, said the crowd had acted like “savages.” Shoppers behaved badly even as the store was being cleared, she recalled.

“When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, ‘I’ve been on line since yesterday morning,’ ” Ms. Cribbs told The Associated Press. “They kept shopping.”

Wal-Mart security officials and the police cleared the store, swept up the shattered glass and locked the doors until 1 p.m., when it reopened to a steady stream of calmer shoppers who passed through the missing doors and battered door jambs, apparently unaware that anything had happened.

Ugly shopping scenes, a few involving injuries, have become commonplace during the bargain-hunting ritual known as Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. The nation’s largest retail group, the National Retail Federation, said it had never heard of a worker being killed on Black Friday.

Wal-Mart declined to provide details of the stampede, but said in a statement that it had tried to prepare by adding staff members. Still, it was unclear how many security workers it had at the Valley Stream store for the opening on Friday. The Green Acres Mall provides its own security to supplement the staffs of some large stores, but it did not appear that Wal-Mart was one of them.

A Wal-Mart spokesman, Dan Folgleman, called it a “tragic situation,” and said the victim had been hired from a temporary staffing agency and assigned to maintenance work. Wal-Mart, in a statement issued at its headquarters in Bentonville, Ark., said: “The safety and security of our customers and associates is our top priority. Our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families at this tragic time.”

Wal-Mart has successfully resisted unionization of its employees. New York State’s largest grocery union, Local 1500 of the United Food and Commercial Workers, called the death of Mr. Damour “avoidable” and demanded investigations.

“Where were the safety barriers?” said Bruce Both, the union president. “Where was security? How did store management not see dangerous numbers of customers barreling down on the store in such an unsafe manner? This is not just tragic; it rises to a level of blatant irresponsibility by Wal-Mart.”

While other Wal-Mart stores dot the suburbs around the city, the outlet at Valley Stream, less than two miles from New York City’s southeastern border, draws customers from Queens, Brooklyn and the densely populated suburbs of Nassau County. And it was not the only store in the Green Acres Mall that attracted large crowds.

Witnesses said the crowd outside Wal-Mart began gathering at 9 p.m. on Thursday. The night was not bitterly cold, and the early mood was relaxed. By the early morning hours, the throngs had grown, and officers of the Fifth Precinct of the Nassau County Police Department, who patrol Valley Stream, were out in force, checking on crowds at the mall.

Mr. Damour, who lived in Queens, went into the store sometime during the night to stock shelves and perform maintenance work.

On Friday night, Mr. Damour’s father, Ogera Charles, 67, said his son had spent Thursday evening having Thanksgiving dinner at a half sister’s house in Queens before going directly to work. Mr. Charles said his son, known as Jimmy, was raised in Queens by his mother and worked at various stores in the area after graduating from high school.

Mr. Charles said he had not seen his son in three months, and heard about his death about 7 a.m. Friday, when a friend of Mr. Damour’s called him at home. He arrived at Franklin Hospital Medical Center an hour later to identify the body. Mr. Charles said he was angry that no one from Wal-Mart had contacted him or had explained how his son had died. Maria Damour, Mr. Damour’s mother, was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, but was on her way back to the United States, Mr. Charles said.

About the time that Mr. Damour was killed, a shopper at a Wal-Mart in Farmingdale, 15 miles east of Valley Stream, said she was trampled by a crowd of overeager customers, the Suffolk County police reported. The woman sustained a cut on her leg, but finished her shopping before filing the police report, an officer said.

Anahad O’Connor contributed reporting.

the first american thanksgiving

Op-Ed Contributor: A French Connection
By KENNETH C. DAVIS
November 26, 2008

TO commemorate the arrival of the first pilgrims to America’s shores, a June date would be far more appropriate, accompanied perhaps by coq au vin and a nice Bordeaux. After all, the first European arrivals seeking religious freedom in the “New World” were French. And they beat their English counterparts by 50 years. That French settlers bested the Mayflower Pilgrims may surprise Americans raised on our foundational myth, but the record is clear.

Long before the Pilgrims sailed in 1620, another group of dissident Christians sought a haven in which to worship freely. These French Calvinists, or Huguenots, hoped to escape the sectarian fighting between Catholics and Protestants that had bloodied France since 1560.

Landing in balmy Florida in June of 1564, at what a French explorer had earlier named the River of May (now the St. Johns River near Jacksonville), the French émigrés promptly held a service of “thanksgiving.” Carrying the seeds of a new colony, they also brought cannons to fortify the small, wooden enclosure they named Fort Caroline, in honor of their king, Charles IX.

In short order, these French pilgrims built houses, a mill and bakery, and apparently even managed to press some grapes into a few casks of wine. At first, relationships with the local Timucuans were friendly, and some of the French settlers took native wives and soon acquired the habit of smoking a certain local “herb.” Food, wine, women — and tobacco by the sea, no less. A veritable Gallic paradise.

Except, that is, to the Spanish, who had other visions for the New World. In 1565, King Philip II of Spain issued orders to “hang and burn the Lutherans” (then a Spanish catchall term for Protestants) and dispatched Adm. Pedro Menéndez to wipe out these French heretics who had taken up residence on land claimed by the Spanish — and who also had an annoying habit of attacking Spanish treasure ships as they sailed by.

Leading this holy war with a crusader’s fervor, Menéndez established St. Augustine and ordered what local boosters claim is the first parish Mass celebrated in the future United States. Then he engineered a murderous assault on Fort Caroline, in which most of the French settlers were massacred. Menéndez had many of the survivors strung up under a sign that read, “I do this not as to Frenchmen but as to heretics.” A few weeks later, he ordered the execution of more than 300 French shipwreck survivors at a site just south of St. Augustine, now marked by an inconspicuous national monument called Fort Matanzas, from the Spanish word for “slaughters.”

With this, America’s first pilgrims disappeared from the pages of history. Casualties of Europe’s murderous religious wars, they fell victim to Anglophile historians who erased their existence as readily as they demoted the Spanish settlement of St. Augustine to second-class status behind the later English colonies in Jamestown and Plymouth.

But the truth cannot be so easily buried. Although overlooked, a brutal first chapter had been written in the most untidy history of a “Christian nation.” And the sectarian violence and hatred that ended with the deaths of a few hundred Huguenots in 1565 would be replayed often in early America, the supposed haven for religious dissent, which in fact tolerated next to none.

Starting with those massacred French pilgrims, the saga of the nation’s birth and growth is often a bloodstained one, filled with religious animosities. In Boston, for instance, the Puritan fathers banned Catholic priests and executed several Quakers between 1659 and 1661. Cotton Mather, the famed Puritan cleric, led the war cries against New England’s Abenaki “savages” who had learned their prayers from the French Jesuits. The colony of Georgia was established in 1732 as a buffer between the Protestant English colonies and the Spanish missions of Florida; its original charter banned Catholics. The bitter rivalry between Catholic France and Protestant England carried on for most of a century, giving rise to anti-Catholic laws, while a mistrust of Canada’s French Catholics helped fire many patriots’ passion for independence. As late as 1844, Philadelphia’s anti-Catholic “Bible Riots” took the lives of more than a dozen people.

The list goes on. Our history is littered with bleak tableaus that show what happens when righteous certitude is mixed with fearful ignorance. Which is why this Thanksgiving, as we express gratitude for America’s bounty and promise, we would do well to reflect on all our histories, including a forgotten French one that began on Florida’s shores so many years ago.

Kenneth C. Davis is the author of “America’s Hidden History: Untold Tales of the First Pilgrims, Fighting Women and Forgotten Founders Who Shaped a Nation.”

quotable

"The bar of a café is the parliament of the people."
- Honoré de Balzac (20 May 1799 – 18 August 1850), was a French novelist and playwright. His magnum opus was a sequence of almost 100 novels and plays collectively entitled La Comédie humaine, which presents a panorama of French life in the years after the fall of Napoléon Bonaparte in 1815.

so many sheep, so little time

Yesterday, Leo and I caught Cook's Corner (America's Test Kitchen) on KPBS during brunch. The episode featured oven-baked mac and cheese and kept us enthralled as we watched the process of making the perfectly creamy entree.

Today, we read about the finer points of a sheep's milk gouda and enjoyed some grated gruyere and asiago on our eggs. So it's only fitting that I should stumble across this article this afternoon.

And, yes. They are all my favorites.

Explorer: Nibbling Through Spain’s Cheese Country
By DANIELLE PERGAMENT
Published: November 23, 2008

THE only words of caution were, “Just be careful you don’t wake up the bats.” I was in a pitch-black cave following a 44-year-old woman wearing tight jeans and a small light strapped to her forehead. While my eyes refused to adjust to the blackness, I could hear thousands — O.K., dozens — of little bat bodies shifting in slumber inches above my head. At last, we arrived.

“These are my babies,” said my guide, sweeping her arm toward a few hundred small wheels of hard, blue cheese resting on a stack of shelves. “You would like to try?”

Sure, great, now let’s get out of here.

We were in Asturias, a sliver of northern Spain that rests on the Bay of Biscay, and I had been drawn there by the region’s tagline: “The Land of Cheese.” I am, by any measure, a cheese person. While other people go to Tuscany for brunello or the Pacific Northwest for salmon, I follow cheese. Not just any fromage. I want the stuff I can’t get at home, the magic recipes that seduced the palates of the ancient Romans, the sharp ones, the stinky ones, the delicate artisanal ones that taste like little white flowers. When I found out there was a place in the world called the Land of Cheese, it was like the great cheese mothership calling me home.

My pilgrimage had led me to the bat cave last September where I was following Raquel Viejo, a local woman whose family has lived in Asturias for generations. The specialty of the region — and what was stored on those shelves — is Cabrales, a blue cow’s cheese named after the town in Asturias where it was first made. We were in the foothills of Picos de Europa, where everything is vertical: the sheer mountain faces, the steep pine trees, the skinny roads dotted with tiny cars nervously hugging the shoulders, flocks of sheep perched on the rocky lands, lone goats standing expertly on their hind legs munching from a thicket of low-hanging leaves, a cacophony of cowbells and beams of sunlight warming it all. Cheese country.

There are thousands of caves hidden in the hills here, and for centuries residents have been using them to age cheese. The specifics of each brand of cheese in various regions of Spain are regulated by a denomination of origin, or D.O., and Cabrales’s says it must be stored in cavelike conditions for at least two months so the good bacteria can kill off the bad. But recently, the craft of making Cabrales has suffered “because so many young people are leaving Asturias,” said Ms. Viejo.

A few years ago, the Spanish government created new regulations for the cheese makers in this area. Some of the old methods, like straining the milk with horsehair sieves, were done away with in favor of more modern technology, like metal strainers and mechanical devices. But the most important requirements — the dairy breed, the aging process, the lack of pasteurization — remain.

Back in her home, amid the intoxicating (some might say rancid) smell of sour milk, I tasted a slice of Ms. Viejo’s cheese, named José Antonio Bueno García after her husband. It was drier and saltier than the blues I was used to, but it didn’t taste overly blue, as some softer cheeses can. Delicious, but I couldn’t shake the image of the bats taking a few nibbles. (Do bats even eat cheese?) So my search continued.

Through another farmer in the area, I tracked down a cheesemaker a few villages over who was famous for resisting modernity. This sounded promising. Oliva Peláez Amieva, a squat woman with a wrinkled face, greeted me outside her small stone house in a purple muumuu and clogs.

“You can tell how long a family has lived here by how they make cheese,” said Ms. Amieva, who has been at it for 60 years. Her cheese isn’t Cabrales because she ignores the D.O. guidelines; in fact, it doesn’t have a name. She only makes about 200 wheels a year and most of it goes to friends and family members. For the moment, I was in the inner circle.

“The health department wants me to put in all sorts of regulations, but it wouldn’t be as good,” says Ms. Amieva, 70. “I used to sell it at the market, but I got in trouble with the police.”

Her cheese was a wonderfully sharp, dry, crumbly blend of goat and sheep milk that tasted slightly of salt and soil. And it’s labor intensive. Without modern equipment, all of Ms. Amieva’s animals are milked by hand. Once the cheese is poured into molds, she rubs each mound with salt and turns it over daily to ensure that it ages evenly; by the end, over 90 percent of the original milk volume is gone.

This isolated nook of the country has spawned hundreds, if not thousands, of artisanal cheese makers for generations. The cheese is cruder than French fromage and not as recognizable as Italian counterparts, but here, each wheel is as idiosyncratic as the person who makes it. The cheese of northern Spain is, like the land that produces it, rough, coarse and sharp, and there’s no way to taste it without traveling there.

I worked my way through a quarter of a wheel as we sat in Ms. Amieva’s modest living room, and realized, too late, that the cheese was so dry, my tongue was sticking to the roof of my mouth. Ms. Amieva offered me homemade cider, the gently effervescent, lightly alcoholic beverage that always accompanies a piece of cheese in this area. It was the perfectly sweet balance to her defiantly unnamed snack.

“The reason my cheese is so delicious,” said Ms. Amieva, without a trace of modesty, “is my hands.” She turned her meaty, callused palms over for inspection. “The natural bacteria in my skin makes the cheese more flavorful.”

To travel from village to village is to string together a perpetual cheese-and-cider festival, each farming community fiercely proud of its own, certain its concoctions are the best. Several people asked me if I thought Cabrales was superior to Basque cheese. The correct answer, of course, is “Of course.” But I had never tried Cabrales’s rival, and I was getting curious, so I steadily made my way east, until finally I crossed over into Basque country.

The first thing you notice about Basque country is that the cars all have the same bumper sticker: a cute, puffy sheep, who is the symbol of the region. Again, a very promising sign.

“You won’t find anyone here who likes Cabrales,” said Patxi Baskaran, a farmer who lives in the hills not far from Guernica (Gernika to Basques), the town infamously bombed by the Nazis in 1937. He was speaking with disdain about rival Asturias that I soon discovered was common among the Basques. Mr. Baskaran is a tall, lively man with a red face who has a way of yelling everything he says. His family has been making the same cheese for over a century on his farm. He learned the method from his father, but in order to stay competitive, Mr. Baskaran has had to teach himself how to work with modern equipment.

Mr. Baskaran makes Idiazábal, a hard sheep’s cheese with a strong, earthy flavor. Idiazábal is to Basque country what Cabrales is to Asturias — that is, there are thousands of small-scale farmers who think they make this delicious and individualistic cheese the best. And the only way to know for sure is to nibble your way through the wooded terrain of Basque country.

Mr. Baskaran was quick to tell me that he didn’t deserve credit, his sheep did. Soon it was time to meet the flock. He drove his Toyota 4runner up a deathly steep dirt road that led us above the clouds. Baht, the border collie, jumped out the window and rounded up the sheep for inspection, and hundreds of black faces paused momentarily before resuming their dinner of wild flowers. We stood on the summit of the mountain in the damp, white air, jagged cliffs looming like giant shark fins piercing the fog. “Big farms don’t make cheese like we do in Basque country because the sheep eat grains and they’re more stressed, so the milk is weak,” he said. “My sheep live peaceful lives.”

BEFORE I left Basque country, I met the least stressed sheep in all of Spain. Just west of San Sebastián, above the small town of Zumaia, there were hundreds of the puffy, four-legged cheese makers mowing a verdant field, mouthful by mouthful. They had trees for shade, a brook for water breaks, and 30 acres overlooking the dark, roiling Atlantic.

“My sheep live better than I do,” said the owner of Agerre Berri farm, José Manuel Etxberria, echoing a common sentiment in Basque country. Mr. Etxberria is 39 years old, with light eyes and skin browned from a lifetime outside. “They live very calm — they have a nice view of the ocean. In Basque, we say farmers love their sheep more than they love their women.”

And they make the cheese to prove it. Mr. Etxberria’s version, Itxas Egi, is a hard sheep’s variety with a sharp bite and the fragrant taste of clovers — strong, milky and grassy. This, he claims, is his secret ingredient: Keep the sheep happy eating nothing but sweet green grass and they will return the favor with delicious cheese “that goes perfectly with a glass of red wine and a beautiful girl.”

So did I ever find the world’s best cheese? Mr. Etxberria’s came awfully close, but I had to stop short of calling it perfect because of something he said.

“Cheese is like sheep; they all have a different personality,” said Mr. Etxberria, who has actually named most of his sheep. “And I could never choose my favorite sheep. They are all my favorites.”

HAPPY SHEEP

The best way to get to cheese country from New York is to fly into San Sebastián. A recent online search found tickets around $500 on Continental and Iberian Airlines (both stop in Madrid). From San Sebastián, rent a car (www.avis.com; www.hertz.com) and drive east on the coast to any of the seaside towns in Asturias — Llanes, Ribadesella, Caravia or Lastres.

All have affordable hotels and great cheese shops. Try Hotel Sablon (34-985-401-987; www.hotelsablon.com) or El Habana (34-985-402-526; www.elhabana.net), two cozy inns just outside Llanes. Hotel Sablon closes Dec. 14 to Feb.2; El Habana is closed until March 14. Doubles start at 42 and 118 euros, respectively. Casa Gaspar (Calle de López Muñiz, 6; 34-985-860-676) is a good restaurant in Ribadesella. To buy cheese in Llanes, visit Casa Buj (Calle Mercaderes, 13; 34-985-401-072; www.casabuj.com).

In Basque country, the lovely Hotel Iturregi (34-943-89-61-34; www.hoteliturregi.com) is in Getaria. High-season doubles start at 230 euros. Aitor Lasa (Calle Aldamar, 12, San Sebastián; 34-943-430-354) is a good local cheese shop.

i'll be glad to see the back of her, too

Reason #2,398 that we dodged a bullet.

The Wild Wordsmith of Wasilla
Dick Cavett
November 14, 2008, 10:00 pm

Electronic devices dislike me. There is never a day when something isn’t ailing. Three out of these five implements — answering machine, fax machine, printer, phone and electric can-opener — all dropped dead on me in the past few days.

Now something has gone wrong with all three television sets. They will get only Sarah Palin.

I can play a kind of Alaskan roulette. Any random channel clicked on by the remote brings up that eager face, with its continuing assaults on the English Lang.

There she is with Larry and Matt and just about everyone else but Dr. Phil (so far). If she is not yet on “Judge Judy,” I suspect it can’t be for lack of trying.

What have we done to deserve this, this media blitz that the astute Andrea Mitchell has labeled “The Victory Tour”?

I suppose it will be recorded as among political history’s ironies that Palin was brought in to help John McCain. I can’t blame feminists who might draw amusement from the fact that a woman managed to both cripple the male she was supposed to help while gleaning an almost Elvis-sized following for herself. Mac loses, Sarah wins big-time was the gist of headlines.

I feel a little sorry for John. He aimed low and missed.

What will ambitious politicos learn from this? That frayed syntax, bungled grammar and run-on sentences that ramble on long after thought has given out completely are a candidate’s valuable traits?

And how much more of all that lies in our future if God points her to those open-a-crack doors she refers to? The ones she resolves to splinter and bulldoze her way through upon glimpsing the opportunities, revealed from on high.

What on earth are our underpaid teachers, laboring in the vineyards of education, supposed to tell students about the following sentence, committed by the serial syntax-killer from Wasilla High and gleaned by my colleague Maureen Dowd for preservation for those who ask, “How was it she talked?”

My concern has been the atrocities there in Darfur and the relevance to me with that issue as we spoke about Africa and some of the countries there that were kind of the people succumbing to the dictators and the corruption of some collapsed governments on the continent, the relevance was Alaska’s investment in Darfur with some of our permanent fund dollars.

And, she concluded, “never, ever did I talk about, well, gee, is it a country or a continent, I just don’t know about this issue.”

It’s admittedly a rare gift to produce a paragraph in which whole clumps of words could be removed without noticeably affecting the sense, if any.

(A cynic might wonder if Wasilla High School’s English and geography departments are draped in black.)

(How many contradictory and lying answers about The Empress’s New Clothes have you collected? I’ve got, so far, only four. Your additional ones welcome.)

Matt Lauer asked her about her daughter’s pregnancy and what went into the decision about how to handle it. Her “answer” did not contain the words “daughter,” “pregnancy,” “what to do about it” or, in fact, any two consecutive words related to Lauer’s query.

I saw this as a brief clip, so I don’t know whether Lauer recovered sufficiently to follow up, or could only sit there, covered in disbelief. If it happens again, Matt, I bequeath you what I heard myself say once to an elusive guest who stiffed me that way: “Were you able to hear any part of my question?”

At the risk of offending, well, you, for example, I worry about just what it is her hollering fans see in her that makes her the ideal choice to deal with the world’s problems: collapsed economies, global warming, hostile enemies and our current and far-flung twin battlefronts, either of which may prove to be the world’s second “30 Years’ War.”

Has there been a poll to see if the Sarah-ites are numbered among that baffling 26 percent of our population who, despite everything, still maintain that President George has done a heckuva job?

A woman in one of Palin’s crowds praised her for being “a mom like me … who thinks the way I do” and added, for ill measure, “That’s what I want in the White House.” Fine, but in what capacity?

Do this lady’s like-minded folk wonder how, say, Jefferson, Lincoln, the Roosevelts, et al (add your own favorites) managed so well without being soccer moms? Without being whizzes in the kitchen, whipping up moose soufflés? Without executing and wounding wolves from the air and without promoting that sad, threadbare hoax — sexual abstinence — as the answer to the sizzling loins of the young?

(In passing, has anyone observed that hunting animals with high-powered guns could only be defined as sport if both sides were equally armed?)

I’d love to hear what you think has caused such an alarming number of our fellow Americans to fall into the Sarah Swoon.

Could the willingness to crown one who seems to have no first language have anything to do with the oft-lamented fact that we seem to be alone among nations in having made the word “intellectual” an insult? (And yet…and yet…we did elect Obama. Surely not despite his brains.)

Sorry about all of the foregoing, as if you didn’t get enough of the lady every day in every medium but smoke signals.

I do not wish her ill. But I also don’t wish us ill. I hope she continues to find happiness in Alaska.

May I confess that upon first seeing her, I liked her looks? With the sound off, she presents a not uncomely frontal appearance.

But now, as the Brits say, “I’ll be glad to see the back of her.”

**********

PS: Lagniappe for English mavens: A friend of mine has made you laugh greatly over the years. David Lloyd is a comic genius (I can hear you wince, David) who wrote for “The Mary Tyler Moore Show,” “Cheers,” “Taxi,” “Frasier,” Jack Paar, Johnny Carson and me, not necessarily in that order. As a language fan, he has preserved many gems for posterity in his prodigious memory bank. Here comes my favorite:

A Navy lecturer was talking about some directives on the blackboard that he said to do something about, “except for these here ones with the asteroids in back of.”

Even David couldn’t make that up.

signs of the times

25,000 people marched in San Diego last Saturday to protest the passage of Prop 8.

Via Sarah

spread happiness

Keith Olbermann's commentary to those who voted for Prop 8 is beautifully simple and heartfelt reasoning. Take six minutes of your time to listen to this in its entirety.

If you are even the slightest bit moved by this statement, please send it on to everyone you know who voted yes on 8. It just might make them think again.

Via Jerry, James, and Ophira

welcome

When Al Gore lost his bid to be president for a few reasons. One of the biggest was because the American people wanted a president they could have a beer with -- and not a brilliant man who usually came off looking like a pointy-headed policy wonk.

There are many things I admire about our new president. His intellect, his curiosity, and his clear grasp of nuance are near the top of the list. And I'd gladly have a drink (and a conversation) with the man.

Op-Ed Columnist: Obama and the War on Brains
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF
Published: November 9, 2008

Barack Obama’s election is a milestone in more than his pigmentation. The second most remarkable thing about his election is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual.

Maybe, just maybe, the result will be a step away from the anti-intellectualism that has long been a strain in American life. Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse — a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance — doesn’t get very far either.

We can’t solve our educational challenges when, according to polls, Americans are approximately as likely to believe in flying saucers as in evolution, and when one-fifth of Americans believe that the sun orbits the Earth.

Almost half of young Americans said in a 2006 poll that it was not necessary to know the locations of countries where important news was made. That must be a relief to Sarah Palin, who, according to Fox News, didn’t realize that Africa was a continent rather than a country.

Perhaps John Kennedy was the last president who was unapologetic about his intellect and about luring the best minds to his cabinet. More recently, we’ve had some smart and well-educated presidents who scrambled to hide it. Richard Nixon was a self-loathing intellectual, and Bill Clinton camouflaged a fulgent brain behind folksy Arkansas aphorisms about hogs.

As for President Bush, he adopted anti-intellectualism as administration policy, repeatedly rejecting expertise (from Middle East experts, climate scientists and reproductive health specialists). Mr. Bush is smart in the sense of remembering facts and faces, yet I can’t think of anybody I’ve ever interviewed who appeared so uninterested in ideas.

At least since Adlai Stevenson’s campaigns for the presidency in the 1950s, it’s been a disadvantage in American politics to seem too learned. Thoughtfulness is portrayed as wimpishness, and careful deliberation is for sissies. The social critic William Burroughs once bluntly declared that “intellectuals are deviants in the U.S.”

(It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas. After one of Stevenson’s high-brow speeches, an admirer yelled out something like, You’ll have the vote of every thinking American! Stevenson is said to have shouted back: That’s not enough. I need a majority!)

Yet times may be changing. How else do we explain the election in 2008 of an Ivy League-educated law professor who has favorite philosophers and poets?

Granted, Mr. Obama may have been protected from accusations of excessive intelligence by his race. That distracted everyone, and as a black man he didn’t fit the stereotype of a pointy-head ivory tower elitist. But it may also be that President Bush has discredited superficiality.

An intellectual is a person interested in ideas and comfortable with complexity. Intellectuals read the classics, even when no one is looking, because they appreciate the lessons of Sophocles and Shakespeare that the world abounds in uncertainties and contradictions, and — President Bush, lend me your ears — that leaders self-destruct when they become too rigid and too intoxicated with the fumes of moral clarity.

(Intellectuals are for real. In contrast, a pedant is a supercilious show-off who drops references to Sophocles and masks his shallowness by using words like “fulgent” and “supercilious.”)

Mr. Obama, unlike most politicians near a microphone, exults in complexity. He doesn’t condescend or oversimplify nearly as much as politicians often do, and he speaks in paragraphs rather than sound bites. Global Language Monitor, which follows linguistic issues, reports that in the final debate, Mr. Obama spoke at a ninth-grade reading level, while John McCain spoke at a seventh-grade level.

As Mr. Obama prepares to take office, I wish I could say that smart people have a great record in power. They don’t. Just think of Emperor Nero, who was one of the most intellectual of ancient rulers — and who also killed his brother, his mother and his pregnant wife; then castrated and married a slave boy who resembled his wife; probably set fire to Rome; and turned Christians into human torches to light his gardens.

James Garfield could simultaneously write Greek with one hand and Latin with the other, Thomas Jefferson was a dazzling scholar and inventor, and John Adams typically carried a book of poetry. Yet all were outclassed by George Washington, who was among the least intellectual of our early presidents.

Yet as Mr. Obama goes to Washington, I’m hopeful that his fertile mind will set a new tone for our country. Maybe someday soon our leaders no longer will have to shuffle in shame when they’re caught with brains in their heads.

I invite you to comment on this column on my blog, www.nytimes.com/ontheground, and join me on Facebook at www.facebook.com/kristof.

god hates shrimp

But don't take my word for it: Leviticus 11:9-12 (King James Version)

9These shall ye eat of all that are in the waters: whatsoever hath fins and scales in the waters, in the seas, and in the rivers, them shall ye eat.

10And all that have not fins and scales in the seas, and in the rivers, of all that move in the waters, and of any living thing which is in the waters, they shall be an abomination unto you:

11They shall be even an abomination unto you; ye shall not eat of their flesh, but ye shall have their carcases in abomination.

12Whatsoever hath no fins nor scales in the waters, that shall be an abomination unto you.

Yesterday, Leo and I walked from 1st and University to 30th and University -- and then on to our home with Ruby. We were just a few among a crowd of 10,000 people marching to show our outrage at the passage of Prop 8. We saw several signs that said it all, among them:

• "Welcome to California, where chickens have rights but people don't"
• "Mormons: Latter Day Taliban"
• "California fucked me without a condom"
• "The Mission Gathering Church is sorry for the judgemental, unchristian hate that passed Prop 8. Our community stands with your community in fighting this injustice."
• "Kiss my second class ass"

It's disheartening to see the pain, bewilderment, and shock that Prop 8 has created. While I am not a fan of violence or of hate, I am outraged at the outcome of Prop 8.

It floored me to learn that 48% of the donors to Yes on 8 disclosed that they are Mormon. It also concerned me that so much of the money supporting Yes on 8 came from out of state -- after all, we have serious concerns when residents of other countries give large amounts to our federal candidates, because it creates the impression of a real conflict of interest. But the biggest surprise of the Yes on 8 folks was the fact that my own mother gave them an ungodly amount of money.

I learned about it by opening a link sent by a friend on Monday, Nov. 3. His comments were on the role of the LDS church and out-of-state donations. I glanced through the document and saw that it listed donors by city. I looked for my hometown and saw one entry. I did a double-take when I saw that the $1,200 donation had my mother's name next to it.

I called Leo, outraged. He asked if I'd spoken to my dad yet. (I hadn't).

I called my dad, asked him if he knew that she had donated more than $1,000 to political campaigns. (He didn't.) We had a brief conversation where he gave me one-word answers and then told me that he was at a Vietnamese restaurant with her. I asked to speak to her and then she giddily told me that she had, in fact, given the Yes on 8 people $100 a month for a year. I ended the conversation by telling her that that was the last conversation I would ever have with her. (Clearly, this break was years in the making, but this was the final straw for me.)

Nearly a week later, I'm thinking about the pleas for understanding and calm in the wake of last Tuesday's election.

I'm working with my LGBT and straight friends to become active in the Repeal Prop 8 movement.

But most of all, I'm searching for a reason to hope and wondering if our new president can demonstrate the same courage that the fictional Jeb Bartlett did. As Anne Lamott said, “Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”

Barrack Obama campaigned on the platform of hope and change, yet his victory Tuesday was sullied by the passage of Prop 8 here in California, which was one of the darkest moments of my adult life. Ever the optimist, I cannot sit and simply curse the darkness. While I hope for an end to the dark ages, I'm doing my best to create some light as we wait for the sun to rise.

yes we did

Leo informed me that the fist bump is technically called a "dap." I call this cartoon genius.

Via Nuray

rooting aroung

Very cool. Too bad our California garage is too warm to cellar produce.

Food Storage as Grandma Knew It
By MICHAEL TORTORELLO
Published: November 5, 2008

IN a strictly technical sense, Cynthia Worley is not transforming her basement into a time machine. Yet what’s going on this harvest season beneath her Harlem brownstone on 122nd Street, at Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard, is surely something out of the past — or perhaps the future.

The space itself is nothing special: Whitewashed granite walls run the width and depth of the room, 16 feet by 60 feet. A forgotten owner tried to put in a cement floor, but the dirt, which takes a long-term view of things, is stubbornly coming back. “It’s basically a sod floor,” Ms. Worley said.

What’s important is that the shelves are sturdy, because Ms. Worley and her husband, Haja Worley, will soon load them with 20 pounds of potatoes, 20 pounds of onions, 30 pounds of butternut and acorn squash, 10 heads of cabbage, 60-odd pints of home-canned tomatoes and preserves, 9 gallons of berry and fruit wines, and another gallon or two of mulberry vinegar.

The goodies in the pint jars and the carboys come from the Joseph Daniel Wilson Memorial Garden, which the Worleys founded across the street. The fresh produce is a huge final delivery from a Community Supported Agriculture farm in Orange County, which they used all summer. Packed in sand and stored at 55 degrees, the potatoes should keep at least until the New Year. The squash could still be palatable on Groundhog Day, and the onions should survive till spring. Ms. Worley, who counsels and teaches adults for the New York City Department of Education, and Mr. Worley, a neighborhood organizer and radio engineer, will let their basement-deprived friends store vegetables, too.

The Worleys, like a number of other Americans, have made the seemingly anachronistic choice to turn their basement into a root cellar. While Ms. Worley’s brownstone basement stash won’t feed the couple through the winter, she said, “I think it’s a healthy way to go and an economical way.”

According to a September survey on consumer anxieties over higher fuel and food prices from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University in Ames, 34 percent of respondents said that they were likely to raise more of their own vegetables. Another 37 percent said they were likely to can or freeze more of their food. The cousin to canning and freezing is the root cellar.

“I’ve been doing local food work for a long time,” said Rich Pirog, associate director of the Leopold Center, who conducted the study. “And I’m seeing an increase in articles in various sustainable ag newsletters about root cellaring.”

According to Bruce Butterfield, the research director for the National Gardening Association, a trade group, home food preservation typically increases in a rotten economy. In 2002, the close of the last mild recession, 29 million households bought supplies for freezing, drying, processing and canning. Last year that number stood at only 22 million — a figure Mr. Butterfield said he expects to rise rapidly.

Root cellars have long been the province of Midwestern grandmothers, back-to-the-landers and committed survivalists. But given the nation’s budding romance with locally produced food, they also appeal to the backyard gardener, who may have a fruit tree that drops a bigger bounty every year while the refrigerator remains the same size.

While horticulture may be a science, home food storage definitely can carry the stench of an imperfect art. According to the essential 1979 book, “Root Cellaring,” by Mike and Nancy Bubel, some items like cabbage and pears do best in a moist environment below 40 degrees (though above freezing). To achieve this, a cellar probably needs to be vented, or have windows that open. Winter squash and sweet potatoes should be kept dry and closer to 50 degrees — perhaps closer to the furnace.

Other rules of root cellaring sound more like molecular gastronomy. For example, the ethylene gas that apples give off will make carrots bitter. As a general principle, keeping produce in a cool chamber that is beneath the frost line — the depth, roughly four feet down, below which the soil doesn’t freeze — can slow both the normal process of ripening and the creeping spread of bacterial and fungal rot. These are the forces that will turn a lost tomato in the back of the cupboard into a little lagoon of noxious goo.

But if you leave that green tomato on a vine and drape it upside down, it will gradually turn red in three or four weeks. “I’ve had fresh tomatoes for Thanksgiving,” said Jito Coleman, an environmental engineer who practices the inverted tomato — which should be a yoga pose — in a root cellar he built in the house he designed in Warren, Vt.

People who squirrel away vegetables tend to be resourceful, and they do not limit themselves to the subterranean. Anna Barnes, who runs a small media company and coordinates the Prairieland Community Supported Agriculture in Champaign, Ill., says squash hung in a pair of knotted pantyhose stay unspoiled longer than others.

Here, the cold is optional, too. It’s the bruising that comes from a squash sitting on a hard countertop, she said, that speeds senescence. (“You wouldn’t want to do it in the guest closet,” Ms. Barnes said. Or, presumably, wear the pantyhose again.)

Taken to a do-it-yourself extreme, lots of places can become stockrooms. Margaret Christie has surrendered countless nooks in her 1845 Federal-style home in tiny downtown Whately, Mass., to laying away the crops she grows in the family’s half-acre vegetable plot. Ms. Christie, 44, a projects director for Community Involved in Sustaining Agriculture, a nonprofit that supports community farming in western Massachusetts, also feeds her husband and three children from their milk goats, laying hens, pigpens and lamb pastures.

This year, she swapped a lamb for 40 pounds of sweet potatoes, 40 pounds of onions and 40 pounds of carrots from a neighbor’s farm. This cornucopia has colonized the basement, along with the family’s own potatoes. “They’re sitting next to the Ping-Pong table,” she said, in “five-gallon buckets with window screens for the lids.”

Onions, garlic and pumpkins dwell in an uninsulated attic — except in midwinter, when that space drops below freezing. Then the vegetables move into the guest bedroom. If that space has already been claimed, they occasionally hide out under the bed of her 11-year-old son. Their homegrown popcorn kernels have a way of turning up everywhere, courtesy of the neighborhood mice, who have developed their own taste for locally grown year-round produce.

The contemporary American, for whom a pizza delivery is seldom more than a phone call away, is an oddity in the annals of eating. Elizabeth Cromley, a professor of architectural history at Northeastern University, said that at one time, “just about every house had special facilities for preserving food.”

Professor Cromley has finished a book called “The Food Axis: Cooking, Eating, and the Architecture of American Houses,” which is to be published by the University of Virginia Press in 2010. She said that understanding food preservation is not a frivolous pursuit. More than 400 books instructed 19th-century Americans on how to plan a functional house, with a practical larder, basement and outbuildings, she said. “You’re not going to die if you don’t get a new dress,” she said, “but if you don’t know this, it will kill you.”

Harriet Fasenfest, 55, who lives in Portland, Ore., has been playing with her food for a long time. A semiretired restaurateur, she started “hacking up” her small city lot in the Alberta Art District to grow food. (Her husband asked, “Where will we play Frisbee?” and Ms. Fasenfest replied, “The park.”) She also teaches classes on canning and created the Web site portlandpreserve.com.

There is no digging a dry refuge from the seep and suck of a Portland winter. So in lieu of a traditional cellar, she applies the scientific method. “Last year I tried an experiment with four different varieties of apples,” she said, “to see how long it took them to rot. So I put them in a box in my shed and then they rotted. It worked!”

When she’s not filling her 10-foot-by-10-foot shed, she experiments in the cubbyholes that sit alongside the outdoor cellar stairs. Copra onions, Ms. Fasenfest has found, store better than Walla Wallas. An indoor heating vent can cure butternut squash so effectively that it can probably last in cold storage until the economy turns around (whenever that is).

Nevertheless, even those who rhapsodize about the pleasures of eating locally grown food year-round have to admit that the effort doesn’t always seem worthwhile. Ms. Fasenfest has been forced to conclude that the labor that went into growing and storing the 30 pounds of russet potatoes now beneath the stairwell was not really adequate to the reward. “If we had to survive off of those,” she said, “we’d be dead.”

7,000 reasons to hope

Diana and Ophira, together 10 years.
Dan and Kevin, together 18 years.
Lynne and Cindy, together 22 years.
Geoff and James, together 5 years.
Micki and Mychal, together 7 years.

These are just some of my LGBT friends who got legally married this summer.

Leo and I joined Diana, Ophira, Maria, and Healy (and nearly 7,000 other people) at the No On 8 vigil tonight in Hillcrest. I couldn't speak as we rounded the corner and saw thousands of people, lit candles, and signs all coming together to rally against Prop 8.

Here's my classmate Michael's wedding to the love of his life, Andrew.

Do your part and vote next Tuesday. And while you're there, please please please vote no on 8. Hate has no place in the California state constitution.