Mac & Cheese

• 1lb Cavatappi pasta
• 2T butter
• 2T flour
• 1t salt
• 1/2 – 1t ground mustard
• 1/2 – 1t garlic powder
• 3c water
• 4c milk
• 1lb shredded cheddar
• 1/2c Parmesan

Melt butter in a pot, add flour – cook for ~1-2m (making a roux)

Add 1c water and the spices, stir to mix well.

Add the rest of the water, the milk, and the pasta

Cook at low simmer until the pasta is the right texture (~10-15m)

  (Don’t boil it, but if it does, add a splash more milk to replace what boiled off)

Remove from heat, add the cheeses, stir well to melt them

Let sit for about 1-2m, stir again, and serve

When reheating, add a splash of milk.

Closer to the Heart

This week, Neil Peart, the lyricist and drummer for Rush, died at 67.

I’m glad I had the chance to see them several times over their career, beginning with the Roll the Bones tour (with the inexplicable opening band Mr Big) in Salt Lake City, through 6th row tickets that my pal Michael got in Hershey Park, and concluding with the R40 tour in Philadelphia.

Many people have talked about the effect Rush songs have had on their lives, and I’m no different. It’s hard to overstate how many good songs they have, and how much more thought-provoking those songs are compared to most popular and rock music. As always YMMV. These are a few particularly outstanding selections to me.

Selection 1: 2112

The dystopian future, based on a Rand story, is a master class in showing idealism ground against the oppression of the entrenched interests. Specifically, the idealism here is that of individual expression which differs from that which those overlords permit.

Listen to my music, and hear what it can do /

There’s something here that’s as strong as life – I know that it will reach you!

Selection 2: The Trees

Organized action, even that which has the noblest stated intentions, can lead to outcomes that can only be described as evil. See also Vonnegut’s Harrison Bergeron.

Selection 3: Red Barchetta

The experience of living in a time when freedom of movement is restricted. Small acts of resistance turn ordinary people with ordinary desires into rebels. This impulse is the same one that gives us the radar detector. The brilliance here is how ordinary the dystopia feels: the better times are just “before the motor law”.

Selection 4: Mission

Would Mozart have traded places with Salieri if he had been able? The gift of creativity is a two-edged-sword.

Selection 5: The Pass

This spoke to me as a teenager quite clearly, and continues to resonate. In particular, the image of “waiting for the world’s applause” spoke to me (before I was ready to internalize it) – this song was a trigger toward growing up, in the way that a kōan is a trigger for enlightenment.

Static on your frequency

Electrical storm in your veins

Raging at unreachable glory

Straining at invisible chains

Limiting myself to five here is to omit so many powerful songs, but for today, these are my selections. Few bands produce quality music for 40 years, and Rush were one of the best. I’m sad there won’t be more, but given how much great music they made, perhaps I shouldn’t be greedy.

Uncovered

Ever since I car remember, I’ve liked cover versions of songs. I imagine this grew out of my childhood discovery of Dr Demento and his protégé Weird Al Yankovic (and I remain a fan of his to this day). Hearing the blend of the familiar melody with new lyrics was always a treat, and then cover versions of songs are basically the converse: an unfamiliar arrangement of the older lyrics.

So I have been thinking about why some covers are more pleasing that others (to me: your mileage may vary), and I’ve been working on a rough taxonomy of the types of covers in service of that idea.

Type 1: the faithful re-creation. The example that always comes to my mind is Great White’s version of Led Zeppelin’s arrangement of the Joan Baez song “Babe I’m Gonna Leave You.” If you’ve heard Zeppelin, you know exactly what Great White is gonna do. These, for me, are the province of the bar band- You’re out with friends and it’s nice to hear something familiar, in pretty much the way you expect.

Type 2: change the style / genre. These are often done for comic effect (eg The Gourds “Gin and Juice” or Dread Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven“). Comic ones are fun, but I’m more interested in the serious genre adaptations. These are the mark of someone doing something interesting – ideally opening up a different perspective on the song while keeping it high quality. These range from Devo’s “Satisfaction” through Daze’s “Eleanor Rigby“.

Type 3: the replacement. Here, the cover version completely takes over the original, even to the point that the original artist will incorporate some part of the arrangement when s/he performs. The classic case of this is Hendrix’s arrangement of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower“.

So with those examples, here are some more recent covers I’ve encountered:

“In the Air Tonight” by Nonpoint doesn’t quite gel- the genius of Phil Collins’ original was in the slow, steady increase of tension before bursting out with the most memorable drum fill ever. Nonpoint’s version is entirely too flat – there’s entirely too much going on to capture the rising tension, and the big fill feels more obligatory than cathartic. I’d call this a failed type 2.

On the other hand, Bad Wolves’ version of “Zombie” is a refreshing update of the original. Small lyric changes transform the song from being a historical time capsule about Ireland into a more global anti-war song – this, to me is when type 1 is done right: it’s respectful without being derivative.

And then you get Type O Negative’s version of “Cinnamon Girl“. I’m not quite sure what they were going for here; it’s somewhere between type 1 and 2, but done in such a way that it inspires nothing quite as much as wanting to go listen to the original Neil Young version.

The gripping hand, however, is holding Five Finger Death Punch’s version of “Gone Away“. This is such an improvement on the original that it’s hard to imagine how they uncovered this. FFDP created a delicate, emotional arrangement which revealed the brilliant song underneath The Offspring’s overly-flat version. This is type 3 at its finest.

A Not So Grand Jury

I just completed* Grand Jury service here in DC – 8 weeks of Wednesday through Friday all day.  I knew it was going to be unpleasant, but I had no idea how much it would affect my opinion of the nature of the legal system in this country.  Sol Wachtler was famously quoted by Tom Wolfe as saying that a good prosecutor could indict a ham sandwich.  He was not, and is not, wrong.

My GJ was the one designated to handle the so-called “RIP” cases – that’s “rapid indictment program”, where relatively straightforward cases are brought forward to get an indictment.  What they mean by “relatively straightforward” is well summed up by the assistant US attorney (AUSA) as “guns, drugs, and cars”.  Probably two thirds of our cases involved some combination of these three elements.  We didn’t have a “bingo” with guns, drugs, AND cars, but we had all of the combinations of the two. Drugs were certainly the plurality if not the majority of the cases.

We did have a smaller number of assaults, robberies, sex crimes, and homicides.  My experience was bad – but then I reminded myself that there was another jury across the hall that focused on the sex crime cases.

The GJ was comprised of 23 people – about half black and half white, six men, 17 women, with a variety of age ranges (skewed a little older than average due to young people not becoming DC residents).  16 people were required to have a quorum, and for all counts, there had to be 12 votes to indict on each count.

A note on how this works: the Fifth Amendment says, among other things, that “no person shall be held to answer for a capital or other infamous crime, except upon presentment to a grand jury…”  In practice, this means that Federal felonies (infamous crimes) require an grand jury to indict, while a Federal misdemeanor does not.  DC, by virtue of not being a state, has to strictly follow that rule (and the city is effectively treated as yet another federal district, while the states have a lot more leeway in defining “infamous” more narrowly.

Our statistics (with the caveat that because I had to leave early on Fridays, I missed a few cases):

We had 119 cases as of the time I left.

We had 139 targets of investigation (people who in an actual trial would be called “defendants.”)  This is because some of the cases involved multiple defendants (like a drug dealer and the “go between” who facilitates the deal).

Of those, 12 targets were women.

Those 139 people were charged with 337 counts, and all of them had at least one felony (which is why they were going before a GJ), along with occasional misdemeanors.

Of the 337 counts people were charged with, 5 counts were removed by the AUSA before we voted on them.  A typical reason was that we were told to vote on a “large capacity ammunition feeding device” charge, but when a cop testified, he said that the capacity of that magazine was 10 (the statutory limit in DC).  In addition, we declined to indict on exactly one count out of those 337.  Thus, lots of ham sandwiches.

I have a couple of random thoughts, and then a few proposals:

• The criminals arrested for carrying a pistol without a license (CPWL) have never heard of holsters.  The sheer number of people who were identified by police via clutching something while running, etc, is really striking.
• Criminals are also really stupid.  The big takeaway I’ve gotten here is “never give any information whatsoever to police if you’re in trouble”.  Don’t try to explain yourself (“it’s my girlfriends’ PCP”, “I don’t know how the gun got in my purse” etc), because it absolutely IS held against you.
• Our laws are extremely poorly written.  Example: Possession of an open container of alcohol (POCA).  You may notice that (a)(2) indicates “in a vehicle”.  As far as the AUSAs are concerned, this includes the trunk.  The implication is that there is in fact no legal way to transport a non-factory-sealed bottle of whiskey from one location to another.  The AUSAs were challenged on that specific law several times, and were “strict constructionists” about it – and argued that we had to just “follow the law”.
• Another example: there are synthetic cannabinoids which are listed on the controlled schedule (all of them have horrible chemical names) – an example of a controlled substance is “AB-Fubinaca”.  However, drug producers are not idiots, and have made some similar drugs (e.g. “AB-Chminaca”) which is not technically on the schedule list.  The AUSAs will charge “attempted distribution of synthetic cannabinoids” if they bust someone and it turns out to be non-controlled.  The justification of “attempted distribution” is that the street names used are the same (Scooby, Bizarro, etc).
• The resources used in drug busts are unreal – a few undercover cops (UC) – both buying and watching, an arrest team, jailers, the grand jury, and the court system.  The typical drug bust was a buy which was under $40, and most often under $20.
• Another example of a screwy law: Possession of a Firearm During a Crime of Violence (PCOV).  This sounds reasonable, right?  If you fight with someone and have a gun, it would make sense for there to be a harsher punishment.  Except the “or dangerous crime” portion – when you go to the definitions there, it is specifically defined as “possession of a controlled substance with intent to distribute (PWID)”.  Every one of the PCOV charges we saw was someone charged with PWID, and the AUSAs take an extreme latitude about chaining interpretations together – hypothetical example: a person is busted with 5 ziplock bags of crack.  At his home, there’s more crack, and an unloaded gun.  He would be charged with PWID and PCOV, even though he wasn’t carrying the gun outside.
• All of those drug busts were in black areas, and the overwhelming number of people had names which (when correlated with arrest locations) processed as “black”.
• Many of the cops and AUSAs had a surprising ignorance about firearms terminology and function.  There were a surprising number of “large clip” comments, and several people didn’t know how to determine the capacity of a magazine.

So here’s my thought:

First, we should legalize all drugs.  Yep, all of them.  Quit spending all of the time and resources hounding black men for doing this.  Take all of the money we aren’t spending on this, and put 10% of it into PSAs of “don’t do this it’ll kill you”, and another 10% into low-cost drug treatment programs.  Pocket the other 80%.  We can’t effectively stop people from killing themselves if they’re determined to do so, and what we’re doing just ruins their lives in the meantime.  (Example: a drug felony means that a DC resident can *never* vote or own a gun).  The net effect of these drug laws has been to disenfranchise a tremendous number of black men for their entire lives, without making the streets noticeably safer or reducing the overall drug trade.

Second, we need to make our gun laws make more sense.  It’s extremely hard to get a concealed carry permit in DC, and that should be fixed – there’s currently a subjective element to it, and that’s not how permitting laws should be written.  The charge of unlawful possession of ammunition (UA) is goofy – the AUSAs interpret ammunition as being per firearm – so if you have two loaded, unregistered guns, you’d get two UA charges.  However, the law doesn’t say that – if you have a valid registration, you are allowed to possess ammunition, full stop.

I saw a lot of overcharging targets, and I was a relatively lonely voice in my opinions about this – I look at “probable cause” as being a standard which is higher than “plausible”, and I was not in the majority there.  I’ve been called to jury duty eight times since moving to DC, and have been empaneled on five juries (including one GJ).  The next time I go in for voir dire, when they ask “can you be impartial”, I’m going to have a real problem answering yes.  This system is currently rigged, and needs to be changed before more injustice is done.
* there are two more “recall” days, for us to finish up any leftover work, such as Gaitherizing any outstanding indictments.

She’s Only Seventeen*

Years of marriage, that is.  

I’m happy to say that even when all sorts of awful stuff happened to either of us, Sarah has always been there for me (I can only hope I’m as good to her).  There is no one I’d rather have on my side, and I’ve been greatly blessed since meeting her.  

Scorpions said it best.

Our family has grown since then, and God willing, will continue to grow.  But Sarah is the foundation, and without her, nothing else would matter.

To the next seventeen!

* apologies to Winger.  Seriously, not trying to go all Mike Judge on you.

Forever Yours… Faithfully.

This is the drasha I delivered this morning at Kesher Israel congregation.

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Shabbat Shalom.

This week’s parsha is Hayei Sarah, and it is notable as the favorite portion for anyone giving a wedding or sheva berakha talk.  Of course, the rationale for this popularity is the description of hashgaha pratit – Divine guidance – in finding Rivka for Yitzhak, and the lovely descriptions of her character as the qualifiers.  Left unstated is that in this, Yitzhak gets Lavan as an in-law, setting the template for touchy relationships with in-laws down through history, but be that as it may, Yitzhak and Rivka are still one of the shining examples of a Biblical couple who behave like a couple in love.

But that story of a match made in heaven is not the only thing in the parsha.  There’s Avraham’s purchase of Ephron’s cave to bury Sarah in Hevron, which is the first evidence of actual Jewish ownership of land in perpetuity.  There’s Avraham’s awareness of his own mortality and realization that Yitzhak has not found a wife, Avraham’s later marriage to Keturah, and then his death.  His burial briefly rejoins Ishmael to the family, and then we have the descendants of Ishmael listed.  The days are just packed!

But what really caught my eye as I looked this week was the character of Eliezer.  We first met him two weeks ago in parshat Lekh Lekha – known in the south as “go on, git” – just before the Brit bein ha-betarim (the covenant of the pieces) where Avram is talking with God, and upon hearing that he will be blessed asks “what are you going to give me, given that I have no children, and Eliezer of Damascus will be my heir?”

God promptly rejects this notion, and gives Avram what must have felt like a rather improbable promise – that his own child rather than his servant will inherit him.

Eliezer, thus, gets disinherited by Heavenly decree, and continues to serve Avraham faithfully for decades more.  Along the way, he silently watches Avraham have several more adventures, up to the births of Ishmael and Yitzhak, and the circumcisions of everyone present.  And then he sees Ishmael exiled with Hagar, and following that, sees Avraham take Yitzhak up to the top of a mountain to offer him as a sacrifice.  It should be noted that this is not a recommended tactic to address youthful rebellion.  Let’s take a moment to consider Eliezer’s perspective of the Akedah: maybe he’ll be inheriting after all?  Perhaps what he’ll have to do is just out-wait Yitzhak, and then the full blessing will pass to him?

Anyway, when Avraham comes down the mountain with Yitzhak, Eliezer is back where he started: disinherited, but continuing to serve as the majordomo for Avraham’s estate.  And then come the events of this week’s parsha.  Avraham not only makes Eliezer take a vow, he does so in a highly personal way (putting their hands under each others’ “thighs”), and regarding what?

Eliezer has to go find the wife for Yitzhak to make sure that his lineage will continue.  Avraham specifically made Eliezer the instrument of his own disinheritance.

And what does Eliezer do?  He collects more information about what’s precisely required from Avraham, making sure that his instructions are clear, and then prays for Divine assistance – even to the point of giving God conditions – so that he’ll recognize the signs that God sends.

And what happens after that?  He faithfully proceeds to carry out Avraham’s wishes.

This is remarkable – the modern day analogue here is a person who is laid off being asked to train his or her replacement and then does an awesome job of it.  I know for myself, that wouldn’t feel too good – it would be an extra kick when I was down.

So why is this here?  What are we supposed to be learning from this example?

Let’s take a look at what Antignos of Sokho says in Pirkei Avot (1:3):

“Be not like the slaves who serve the master for the sake of receiving a reward, but be like the slaves who serve the master not for the sake of receiving a reward – and let the fear of Heaven be upon you.”

I must confess that for a long time, I didn’t really grasp that verse – I couldn’t see how you could truly serve God without being influenced by the promise of God’s blessing for obedience and good conduct, but right here in front of me was an example of precisely how to do that exact thing.

When Rivka sees Yitzhak in the field, many commentators discuss her dismounting as a sign of various positive attributes, but largely unnoticed is the fact that Eliezer at that point refers to Yitzhak as “my master.”  Up until that point, he had used the term to refer to Avraham.  By this subtle transference of authority, Eliezer demonstrates that his service is not merely to an individual – even to the holiest of holy men – but rather, his service is to the Jewish people.

Eliezer serves Avraham and Yitzhak in exactly the manner described in Pirkei Avot: loyally, faithfully, even to the point of self-abnegation.  We too can endeavor to serve God in the same way – loyally and faithfully, even when our own interests must be overridden.  May we have the strength and merit to put God’s will before our own, even when it is personally difficult.

Shabbat Shalom.

Answered but not Asked

There are a lot of pieces of advice which would-be parents get.  Some of the advice is good, and some of it is terrible (feel free to ignore any).  There are, however, a few areas where I got completely surprised by parenthood, so I thought sharing my example could be a little helpful.

• Work on your upper-body strength.  A newborn is something like 8lbs, but they grow and get heavy fast.  This is doubly-true with car seats, strollers, etc.  You’ll get stronger no matter what; if you start a little early, you can reduce your risk of a tendon problem, muscle tear, etc.  
• Baby sleep is different from adult sleep.  Daytime naps beget and abet nighttime sleep.  That is, “he hasn’t slept all day, so he’ll sleep well tonight” is unlikely to be correct.  Some kids sleep well on the go, but some don’t.  Each kid is different, and different parents are different.  
• If there is work that needs to be done one your house (eg refinishing floors, painting, fixing AC etc), it is a lot easier to do that during a pregnancy than once you have a kid.  It’s also easy to put things off, thinking “I have time for that.”   That rarely makes for less actual work.
• There is little that makes the horrible IKEA instructions look better than everything else’s instructions.  I’m pretty convinced that some of these things are actually IQ tests, and I failed.  I think this must be common.  I very cleverly and wrongly installed two different car seats.  

Enjoy the whirlwind!

Venti!

While many of my friends count today as 27 (3 weeks and 6 days for those in base-7), and some others ascribe assorted other significance to today, for me, what today really adds up to is 20.  Yep, עשרים, or in Starbucks’ parlance “extra-awesome-size”.

So why 20?  Because 20 years ago today, I met Sarah for the first time.  I would not have guessed that a college student who was willing to meet a stranger, but insisted on doing so in front of a different dormitory, would turn out to be the one person in the world who is absolutely perfect for me.  

There’s one person who completely shares my sense of humor, who exposes me to new and awesome things, who challenges my assumptions, and who makes me want to be a better person to be good enough to be with her.

And we met by sheer hashgaha pratit (Divine Providence).  If that’s not enough evidence of God’s handiwork in this world, maybe the fact that she’s the best mother I could imagine or want for Roya makes the miraculous unliklihood a little more clear.

So happy anniversary, love, now and forever.

Check, Please

I’ve had several doses of talk about “privilege” thrown at me recently.  I’ve spent a little time thinking about this, and I’ve come to the conclusion that the folks who toss this stuff about and treat it with great importance are as clever, and as wrong, as the phlogiston chemists.  Now, what do I mean by that?

“Privilege” as described in the relevant circles, is effectively an unearned advantage due to one’s nature – there can be white privilege, Jewish privilege, etc etc etc, and that intersectionality (sic) is effectively the idea that various portions of one’s identity as they interact with other portions create something wholly different which is qualitatively greater than the sum of the parts.

Duh.

A lot of words are spent slicing and dicing groups using particular jargon, to no practical effect whatsoever.  Why is this?  Because at the root of the issue is the fact that we are not members of a group first and individuals second – rather, we are individuals first, who have some characteristics we share in groups.  The whole privilege conversation completely falls apart when considering that the variation between individuals who share certain characteristics will necessarily be greater than the differences between the average of the characteristics.

That is, all cats are NOT gray after midnight.  So in our real world, the one with the messiness in it, what does it mean to say “you have privilege” about someone’s membership in a particular group?

Absolutely nothing.

In the original sense of pragmatism, there is no information which is gained as a result of these descriptions, and actions don’t change as a result, and therefore these are at best distinctions without a difference.  Yep, that’s the real problem here – the actual predictive power of this language is right up there with blaming weather on water sprites, and all the jargon serves to do is alienate the person being “othered” in that context.  That is, it changes the person being described from “thou” to “it”.  It serves as a way to immediately discredit the opinion of the person described as “privileged,” and find a discrete place for them in a postmodern hierarchy of victims, where to be oppressed is necessarily equivalent to being virtuous.

I’ve had this sort of language tossed at me by several people, who range from the saintly to the less-so.  I’ll speak to the saint: this language has the opposite effect of your intention, and the line of reasoning is sterile, not fertile.

How about this for a suggestion: treat people as individuals, as all being made in the image of God, and approach groupings as a way to search for what we have in common rather than what divides us.

The best thing I’ll do this week

I have the ability, like all employed people, to grumble about how frustrating my customers are: they occasionally find ways to get under my skin and leave me all itchy with complaints.  It isn’t breaking rocks in the sun, but the frustrations are real.

And my synagogue has done well, all things considered, but like any other organization, it’s got it’s ups and downs, and it is not without its share of frustrations.  

But today, I’m all sorts of sore, mostly from carrying Roya around and playing with her all day.  At Westminster Park, she crawled and climbed her way up that large twisty slide, and threw herself headfirst down it.  What followed was a look of terror followed by squeals of excitement – and the inevitable “again!”

So I’ll go forward this week, and encounter lots of daily nuisances, but am fortified by the reminder of what actually matters.