Cafe Jack - Yahoo!

Couscous is a course ground wheat product popular in North Africa and the Middle East. It's available in small boxes with some spices in supermarkets, or for a better deal - buy it in the bulk food section. If it's not in your supermarket, most whole food co-ops sell bulk couscous. It's much cheaper buying it in bulk, than buying the little boxes of couscous with the spice packet.

The type that's sold in most stores is the Moroccan variety (smaller grains than the Israeli or Lebanese couscous). It's pre-steamed and then dried, making cooking very simple and quicker than rice or pasta. Just put the couscous in a glass bowl or a sauce pan, cover it with boiling water and let it sit (if you like you can put a piece of plactic wrap over it). The easiest way to cook it is to microwave a cup or so of water, depending on how much couscous you need, in a medium size glass bowl until it's hot. Remove the bowl and pour the couscous into the water. After a few minutes fluff it with a fork and it's ready. You can also make a broth, flavored with whatever you like (onion, garlic, chicken, beef..etc), and use that instead of water for rehydrating your couscous.

It can be used like rice - added to vegetable dishes, stir fries, or served on the side. It should be fluffy and light if cooked properly. I have better luck preparing it and then adding it to a dish than trying to add it in the dry state to something I'm cooking (generally when I do that it ends up turning into a porridge-like mush).

A typical couscous dish that I made tonight involved sauteeing fresh garlic and a little onion in a good oil, adding tofu and seasoning it with a little hot sauce and soy sauce and then letting the tofu absorb the garlic/onion flavor. Add mixed vegetables. I used a corn, red/green pepper, black bean, broccoli frozen mix. Microwave the water for your couscous and add the dry couscous to the hot water and set it aside. After the veggies are cooked - add the couscous. After it was cooked and I tasted it - I added some red beans to give it a little more texture and sea salt to perk up the flavors.

Posted by jackcrossen at 06:36 PM | Permalink

I was looking at a hoax news story that showed up in my email (complete with photo-shopped pictures and semi-real sounding copy) and thought how interesting it is that the web retains it's usefulness as a sometimes reliable information source given how easy it is to fake stuff.

I gave up on email "revelations" a long time ago (other than for their entertainment value), but the web is still okay for gleening some information - provided you have a sense for where legitimate information comes from.

Here's some tips to help you from getting fooled when it comes to "news" (assuming you don't want to be fooled) -

- "News" for the most part comes from "news organizations".

Think Reuters, UPI, Time, New York Times or one of the other 4500 news sources you see on Google News. If someone emails you some "news" or you read it on a blog, it's probably good to check the google machine to see if anyone else has heard of it. It could be that your Aunt Matilda scooped the press...but unlikely.

- Learn to use Google.

If you get an email with something about say....."exploding hot water"- key in the words and see what you get. "Ahah!", you say, "the first hit for that term brings me to the Urban Legend Pages of snopes.com"

- Check Urban Legends Reference Pages aka snopes.com. (see above)

Sometimes even the mainstream media will get bamboozled, but they generally police their own e.g. Jason Blair, or Dan Rather, to name two recent examples. I see Dan's back on TV but I doubt if Jason Blair will ever get another job in journalism. There is no such system to keep the hoax emailers, photoshoppers, maker-uppers, on the web in check, but still savvy web-users are quite good at ferreting out bs.

I think it's difficult for people who didn't grow up in the electronic culture to smell when something is fishy. It's not just the electronic culture though - since the same can be said for snail mail - if you don't have a nose for bs you'll waste a fair amount of time reading or even worse replying to offers for "free" stuff, "too good to be true offers" etc. Most of us get to the point where we know we can safely recycle a letter, without opening it, by just looking at it.

Part of the ability to spot a hoax depends on how trusting you are (not everyone has to be a skeptic thank goodness). Some of the best people at spotting jokes/hoaxes happen to be people that actually create that sort of thing. It takes a devious sort of mind to dream some of this stuff up. If you tend to be a practical joker, or fake email/web page creator - it gives you a leg up, when spotting a hoax, compared to those who aren't so inclined.

I guy I know who immigrated to the U.S. told me when he first came to this country it was very confusing for him to get so much "personalized" mail. It took him awhile to understand that the letter from the real estate agent, or car dealer, or Publisher's Clearing House shill Ed McMahon - wasn't really to him at all. He used to show me letters and ask me if he needed to write back - I'm sure he's as big a skeptic as anyone nowadays.

You can imagine how difficult it would be to "sense" what is valid information without understanding the culture. Assume you are new to a country and don't know a particular magazine is satire, you might think "The Onion" and "Time" are equally valid sources for news (at least for awhile). If I lived in Mexico or China - I'd have no clue what was a valid source of information vs. what is biased, satirical, or pure propaganda - plus since I'm uni-lingual (English is my first and only language) - I'd be clueless.

On the other hand I think some people just like weird stuff and don't really care if it's factual or not. I'm guessing that the majority of people who listen to Art Bell, or read The Weekly World News, or National Enquirer, fall in this category - they like stories and don't particularly care if they are fiction or non-fiction.

I really don't mind bogus emails or web stories, because I generally have no problem sifting through them. To be honest I almost never look at snopes or other hoax-busting sites - I don't really care what other people choose to believe (provided it doesn't harm me or someone else), and it doesn't give me pleasure to point out that they are wrong.

I just treat non-verifiable information from TV, radio, email or the web as a story - not true or false - just a story. Maybe a good story, or not a good story - maybe a funny story...but just a story. If it's something that I need to know about I'll figure out what I think is a close approximation of the truth.

Certainly sometimes hoaxes are not okay - you have to consider the context - we obviously aren't talking about serious work here. Scientists don't look kindly on getting fooled as we have seen with the South Korean cloning fiasco. Personally I'm hoping no one at the NIH creates a hoax paper that my Doctor reads in understanding how to treat me, or for that matter I hope he's not googling the web and treating everything he reads as factual...or for God's sake reading the email he get's for herbal, or other, miracle remedies.

One of the goals of education is not teaching us what to think - but rather how to think - to question - research - reframe - and weigh - information. That's what we want a Doctor, lawyer, professional, or any other person to do when they are working on something where there is a potential for harm should the information be incorrect.

In my opinion the web is far from replacing traditional sources of learning - learning by doing, learning from others, books, libraries, schools, magazines etc. It might be an adjunct to those sources of learning but certainly not a replacement. That's one of the reasons I don't get too excited when I see something that sounds phoney in an email or on the web (I'm not treating it as the sole source or even a primary source for learning), any more than I would a TV show, a radio program, one person's opinion etc.

Since the vast majority of the internet and email is pretty fluffy anyway, and if you are so inclined - go ahead and make stuff up and put it on the web or in an email, you'll be carrying on a long tradition of hoaxes in our society - from the 1938 War of the Worlds Broadcast to the Art Bell Chupacabra to the "Almost Live" April Fools Day Collapse of the Space Needle to name just a few. It'll give the skeptics something to do.

Postscript - I had my tongue in my cheek when I suggested making stuff up and posting it on the web or sending it around via email - I have very little respect for people who just want to "fool" people to make them look foolish. If someone makes it clear that they are writing satire (or attempting to) fine - but the idea of putting something on the web or in an email, and making it appear real, so that you are able to "fool" someone isn't saying a lot. Conversely as I said earlier I have almost no interest in correcting people who send me things, or post things on a personal web page, that appear to be erroneous - for the same reason - I have no desire to make regular old people like you and me look foolish.

I do a good enough job doing that on my own - thank you very much.

Posted by jackcrossen at 06:15 AM | Permalink

Camp Erin is a weekend overnight camp designed to help children cope with the loss of a loved one.

The camps are named after Erin Metcalf, a young girl who died at the age of 17 from cancer. One of Erin's wishes was to help young people who are grieving. Jamie Moyer and his wife Karen helped realize that wish when the first Camp Erin was established by Providence Hospice and Home Care in Snohomish County Washington. Today there are six camps - three in Washington, one in Idaho, Oregon, and Arizona - and a seventh opening in California in 2007.

The camps are free of charge. If you know someone who might benefit from such a camp, or would like to volunteer your services - contact information is given on the Moyer Foundation home page linked to above.

Posted by jackcrossen at 02:02 AM | Permalink

Orion has a collection of unpublished letters from Edward Abbey a champion of wilderness preservation. He was born in 1927 and died in 1989 and loved the Four Corners area of Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. He graduated from the University of New Mexico with a degree in Philosophy.

He was a controversial writer who inspired some radical environmental groups. Two of his most famous works are "Desert Solitaire" and "The Monkey Wrench Gang". He was called the Thoreau of the America West by Larry McMurtry. Most of all he was an individual - and a talented writer with a sense of humor, as you can see by perusing these letters.

     

Posted by jackcrossen at 09:51 PM | Permalink

This Rolling Stone music video of Camera Obscura's song Lloyd, I'm Ready to be Heartbroken is great. Funny, cool and remiscent of some weird super straight Lawrence Welk Show people dancing in a sort of 60's Vegas-like fantasy world, totally not connected with the lyrics.

That song comes from Camera Obscura's album Let's Get Out of This Country

Gotta like the name of this album of their's too....

Underachievers Please Try Harder

Posted by jackcrossen at 12:53 AM | Permalink