Gillette

Looking at it today, one can marvel at its fine workmanship and detail. As an instrument of singular and utilitarian purpose, it was well ahead of its competition at the time. It was designed so that the user did not need to unscrew and take apart the head from the stem in order to change blades. You simply turned the base of the milled stem, and the head that held the blade would open like twin doors to expose the cavity into which the blade would fit perfectly.

It was made entirely of metal, and in certain respects it was as finely wrought as an expensive Zeiss camera. For example, a milled ring just below the head was engraved (engraved, not simply stamped) with odd numbers from 1 to 9, with dots in between to indicate the even numbers, and each number or dot provided a definite click-stop. What this ring did was raise and lower four platens within the head. The platens were there to press up against the inserted blade. The idea was to allow the thin flexible blade to expose more or less of its sharp shaving edge to fit the user's needs, a lower number on the ring giving a closer shave.

I have owned this gem (and indeed its fine construction is more like that of a piece of jewelry than a shaving razor) for a half-century. It was made in the U.S.A. Beneath the head is stamped this information along with the maker's logo—a diamond with the name "Gillette" run through by an arrow—and the then ubiquitous "REG.U.S.PAT.OFF". On the inside of the blade-holder are the words ""PAT.NOS.ON PKG".

Compare this work of art with the colorful monstrosities of today, with their multiple thin metal blades embedded in a plastic shaving head, and with their ribbed and rubbery stems that are meant to provide an ergonomic fit.

This is just another example of oldtime American ingenuity and quality that one can hardly find these days.

Other Blogs

After randomly scanning other people's blogs, I came up with a few surprises.  There are bloggers who submit just a few postings, and then fade away, never to return.  There are others who blog for a while, take a sabbatical for some months or a year or more, and then return.  There are blogs that are purely commercial in nature.  There are blogs that are just filled with plain unvarnished gibberish.  Within the vast panoply of blogs from all over the world, you can find some that are worth paying a return visit to.

Gas

The top story in the news today is the high price of gasoline, and what the voters want the government to do about it.  Some people say that there is price gouging going on, others disagree. Some say that the run-up in oil and gas prices is cyclical and unavoidable, like fluctuations in the stock market, others say the greedy oil companies are to blame for the current spike in prices.

Today the President has taken a small step toward easing the tension by suspending deliveries to the nation's strategic petroleum reserves. That brought oil prices down a smidgen, but a barrel of crude is still well above $72.

The fact is simply this: we could and should years ago have foreseen what is happening today, and our leaders could have started a program to temper our reliance on fossil fuels by developing alternative sources of fuel.  We are the only country to have the know-how to send men to the moon, so why is it so difficult to get our scientists to figure out other economical means to propel our economy?  

Brazil has never sent anyone to the moon (as yet, though there is one Brazilian astronaut up there in space), but there are now more Brazilian cars running on 'flex-fuel' (a combination of ethanol and gasoline) than on straight gasoline.

If the Brazilians can do it, how about us?

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Cookbooks

When we visit Costco, my wife and I would head first for the book section, where the latest bestsellers are usually on display, in multiple stacks ten or more deep. Costco's book section is not the ideal place to browse. People with loaded shopping carts tend also to be browsing there, or at the adjacent tables filled with boxes of DVDs and music CDs. There can be a lot of reaching across and bumping against the carts or against other people. And if the carts have bawling toddlers sitting in them alongside the boxes of laundry detergent, bathroom tissue, and gallon plastic bottles of cranberry juice, it makes the browsing experience even less agreeable.

The paperback of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code" is out, and there are stacks and stacks of them. This novel has been one of the biggest sellers over the past several years, and now that the movie will hit the multiplexes, sales will surely mount even higher.

The Costco book stacks are typically arranged in some kind of order. First come the new hardbacks at one end of the table, with no discrimination between fiction and non-fiction, then further along come the paperbacks, then the reference books and Bibles, travel guides, health and self-help works, and, at the far end, the cookbooks.

Ah, yes, the cookbooks. Hundreds of them in at least a score of titles, big ones, little ones, heavy ones, light ones, spiral-bound ones, ring-bound ones. Cuisines from all over the world are featured. This is especially true here in the Bay Area, with its multiethnic, multicultural population.

Cookbooks are fascinating things. I suppose that is because food is always fascinating, and so is its preparation. Not only is there such a variety of cuisines, but there are so many ways of preparing them, so many recipes, so many hints and shortcuts.

Personally I never buy a cookbook that does not have color photos in them. I understand that the professional photographers who illustrate the cookbooks must resort to tricks to make their pictures look good, like spraying artificial (and inedible) gloss on a roast to make it appear fresh and mouthwatering. Still, for me any cookbook without pictures is not worth buying. I need to see, in full color, what the final dish looks like. I'm a visual kind of guy, and if the dish has no eye appeal, that does it for me.

We have too many cookbooks at home, far too many. I would guess that we have some thirty or forty cookbooks, including some very old ones. (We also have family recipes collected over the years and kept in ring binders. Some of these recipes are generations old, and there are no pictures attached.) We do not need to buy any more cookbooks. But from time to time we do.

The sad truth is that we get suckered by the pictures in the cookbooks, or by one or two of the recipes in them.

There's no way in God's green earth that we will ever try even a minute fraction of all the recipes in those cookbooks in our lifetime.

When I do refer to a cookbook, it is one that my wife's sister wrote that I tend to favor. My wife's sister is a culinary professional, and the owner of a fine restaurant on Long Island. She has written many cookbooks.

The reason I like her cookbook is that it has easy recipes. Simple ingredients, brief instructions. And the resulting dish is always delicious.

Sunny San Francisco

Took some pictures, it being such a fine day. The air was brisk but the sun kept things warm.

Remember

Today is the centenary of the Great San Francisco Earthquake and Fire.  Brrrrr!

Travel Scenes

Helsinki, Finland


Copenhagen, Denmark


St. Petersburg, Russia


Tallinn, Estonia


Stockholm, Sweden

More Street Photography

It was such a glorious day today (after all that rain these past weeks) that I took the opportunity to take some pictures. Here they are.

1. Intersection 2.Monolith 3.Rooftop 4. Frankenstein

Easter

We have had a strange late winter and early spring in northern California.  Back in February we had sunny skies and temperatures in the mid-seventies, really gorgeous days when the first buds began to emerge.  Then came the storms and biting cold in March, high winds and record-breaking periods of rain.  In the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers, the waters rose to flood levels, threatening the dykes.  In Marin County, heavy rains caused mudslides, and a hillside engulfed a house, killing a seventy-three-year-old man.  The vagaries of nature can have tragic consequences.

In two days' time it will be the centennial celebration here in San Francisco of the Great Earthquake and Fire of 1906.  The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco are having photo exhibitions of that terrible event, and the newspaper has over the past week published articles about what happened a hundred years ago. Tonight the National Geographic television channel will have a program about the quake. The newspaper's media critic has said that the program is poorly done, but I plan to watch it anyhow, after our Easter dinner.  Everyone knows that it is only a matter of time before California will again suffer a devastating earthquake.  But we live every day trying not to think about it.

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Easter Sunday, and the skies are overcast.  Last night it rained again, quite heavily just before dawn.  The air is still chilly.  Fallen wisteria blossoms cover the wet deck outside the kitchen.

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On National Public Radio a couple of days ago I listened to reviews of a couple of Korean movies that sound interesting.  Here's what the New York Times' critic says about one of them, called The President's Last Bang:

"A head of state, notorious for his womanizing, is gunned down during a night of carousing by his director of central intelligence. In Hollywood this scenario would be a screenwriter's fantasy. In South Korea it's a true story, which Im Sang-soo has transformed into a curious, gripping movie that is part tense political thriller, part chaotic and bloody black comedy. In 1979 Park Chung Hee, who had ruled South Korea since 1961, was assassinated by the director of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency. Park, a sometimes brutally authoritarian leader who had overseen his country's economic modernization, is portrayed in the film (by Song Jae-ho) as a sour old man living in a cocoon of elaborate protocol, tight security and self-indulgence - more like a crime boss than a head of state."

I've added the movie to my watch list.

Shanghai 1930s

This is the famous Bund as it looked seventy-some years ago. The old colonial-style buildings are still standing today, many of them, and except for the widened esplanade on the waterfront and the extreme makeover of Pudong across the Huangpo River, this part of Shanghai has been left pretty much as it was back then.

Saigon 1930s

More photos from the Traveler. This time the pictures are of Saigon. (Click on images to enlarge.)

Formula

Sometimes our recipes can be much improved if we adjust the proportions of certain ingredients.  I find that reducing the hubris and adding more of the humilitas will improve the dish immeasurably in most cases.

Moluccas 1930s

Banda Bay, Moluccas


Anchorage, Banda

Batjan Roads, North Moluccas


Ambon, Moluccas









These photographs were taken by a traveler who made many trips to Asia in the years before the Second World War. It was a time when most travel was by steamship. For the more remote Spice Islands, then part of the Netherlands East Indies, such travel would typically have been on a tramp steamer or freighter, such as those you see in the pictures.

(Click on the pictures to enlarge them.)

The Joy of Blogging

I began 'The Daily Muse' seven months ago. Told some family members and friends about it after there was enough material to make it worth their trouble to check it out.

Some of the people contacted have been kind enough to offer feedback, for which I am grateful. Once in a while a stranger might pay a visit to the 'Muse' and leave a comment. I soon learned to separate the wheat from the chaff, the automatically-generated comments intended by their originators to turn a new blogger into a prospective customer for their products or services.

Need to learn some HTML if I am to give the blog a smarter look, to get away from this rather humdrum format, but with so many things occupying my time these days, learning a new language goes way down the list.

It can be a very personal business, this blogging, as you may have noted. If you have checked other blogs at random, you will see some very hairy intimate stuff out there.

But the way I think about it, blogging is just a way besides e-mail to stay in touch with friends who have access to the Internet. Its anonymity is a great blessing. And even though inviting visitors to view my blog removes its anonymity, I do not find that discouraging in the least. If some readers choose to pass along this blog address to others who may find it of interest, they have my blessing to do so.

And no, I'm not selling anything.

'Street' Photography

Nothing much to write about today, except that the weather has been simply gorgeous, even though the forecast says rain later this evening. You can click on the pictures to enlarge them - the upper one is titled "3:15PM", and the lower is "Taqueria."

Reunions

The posting on March 28 to celebrate my wife's birthday attracted heartfelt responses from her friends around the world.  It happens that these good friends are classmates of hers from way, way back, when they all attended a revered high school in Hong Kong.

Over the years, my wife and I have attended reunions in different parts of the world organized by the remarkably loyal graduates of this fine institution.  I use the term 'remarkably loyal' advisedly, for I personally know of no other group of alumnae (or alumni, for that matter) who share a love for their alma mater in as devoted a manner as these women do.  

They hold worldwide reunions every few years in cities where there are sufficient numbers of them to form effective working committees.  All of these reunions have been successes on a grand scale, and each time they attract hundreds of alumnae from all corners of the globe.

Equally remarkable in terms of loyalty are the husbands of these lovely women.  The menfolk are as much a part of the frequent school reunions as their spouses, and unreservedly they share each other's enthusiasm for those events. Even, in some cases, to the point of becoming teary-eyed when the women sing their school song.

In a few weeks' time we will join a number of my wife's classmates and their husbands on a week-long cruise to Alaska.  The last time we had the benefit of their company was about a year ago, on a cruise to the Mexican Riviera. This time will be even better.

Shakespeare

This paragraph from a book I've been reading will serve to illustrate how many of our clichés the English-speaking world owes to William Shakespeare.

"No one in any tongue has ever made greater play of his language.  He coined some 2,000 words—an astonishing number—and gave us countless phrases.  As a phrasemaker there has never been anyone to match him.  Among his inventions: one fell swoop, in my mind's eye, more in sorrow than in anger, to be in a pickle, bag and baggage, vanish into thin air, budge an inch, play fast and loose, go down the primrose path, the milk of human kindness, remembrance of things past, the sound and the fury, to thine own self be true, to be or not to be, cold comfort, to beggar all description, salad days, flesh and blood, foul play, tower of strength, to be cruel to be kind, and on and on and on and on.  And on.  He was so wildly prolific that he could put two catchphrases in one sentence, as in Hamlet's observation: 'Though I am native here and to the manner born, it is a custom more honored in the breach than the observance.'  He could even mix metaphors and get away with it, as when he wrote: 'Or to take arms against a sea of troubles.' "

— Bill Bryson, The Mother Tongue — English and How It Got That Way , Harper Collins, New York, 1990, pp 64-65

My father

My father, were he alive today, would have been ninety-two years old.  He was born on this date in 1914.  He died at the very young age of forty-two.  God grant that his soul, and the souls of all the faithful departed, rest in eternal peace.

Tea-bags

Consider the lowly tea-bag. Whoever thought up its design deserves admission into the hall of fame for ingenuous inventions.

The little bag itself is made out of a type of porous paper, much like the rice paper that as kids we used to build our balsa wood model airplanes with. This bag is made in such a way that it has two compartments, not exactly mutually exclusive, but separated by a neat double fold at the base. The finely crushed tea leaves, enough to produce one cup of strong, and two cups of weak, tea, are contained in equal measures within the two compartments, which were designed to allow water to flow through, and thus offer the leaves greater exposure to the hot liquid, so as to produce a richer brew.

The bag is folded over neatly at the top, neatly as in the manner of a gift parcel, and the fold is held by a tiny metal staple. (I am sure that you could not find a staple gun in the stationery store that handles such tiny staples.) Besides holding the bag close, this staple also encloses a short cotton thread. At the opposite end of the thread is a small printed label, in the case of the yellow Lipton's tea-bag the label is on a lightweight card, and in the case of some Chinese tea-bags it might be thinner paper. This label is held to the thread by another staple, so two staples per each two-compartment tea-bag.

The yellow Lipton label bears the words "Lipton", "Yellow Label Tea", "Finest Blend", and "Quality No.1", quite a lot of advertising in a ¾ inch by ¾ inch area.

But that's not what is really remarkable about the tea-bag label. Where at the top it is attached to the thread that is attached to the tea-bag by a staple, at the bottom the same string is neatly secured in a tiny slit cut into the label, so that when you pick up the tea-bag, the thread, which measures about 3 ½ inches in length, does not fall free, but acts as a secure belt around the bag, running from pole to pole like a meridian of longitude. You then gently take the thread out of the slit, hold it at the label end, with the tea-bag dangling like a pendulum, and place the bag in a tea-cup.

Now we come to the true ingenuity of the design. I repeat, whoever thought up the tea-bag must be one of the world's great inventors, to share space in the pantheon with Leonardo, Edison, Bell and their ilk. That little slit at the base of the tea-bag label serves a dual purpose. We have already described the first.

How often we have run into a situation like this — we take a tea-bag and place it in a cup, with the thread and label hanging over the cup's rim, we then pour hot, preferably boiling, water into the cup, and suddenly the weight of the water drives the string and the label into the cup. It then becomes a messy business to extricate the hot, wet thread and soggy label from the quickly brewing tea. Nobody wants to add milk and sugar to tea with a label floating in it.

Now, this is how the tiny slit in the label comes into play.

Before you add the hot water, you wind the thread through the ear of the tea-cup, once, to anchor it, and then you slip the thread back into the little slit in the label, and voilá, the label and thread remain firmly secured and will not be sucked in when you pour hot water into the tea-cup.

You see what I mean by ingenuity. This humble tea-bag has it in spades.