Tag: cooking

SAVE INK

Who’d a thunk. According to these tips, some fonts – like Ecofont– use a lot less ink than others. (Try Century Gothic?) Using readability to print web pages will save the expensive color ink required to print ads you probably didn’t want to print anyway.

THE BEEP

AARP reports that only 15% of hearing-aid shoppers ask for a deal; yet because the markups are so high, most of those who do ask for a deal get one. Tell Gramps.

I’m not going to say I actually receive the AARP Bulletin. But those who do tell me that this list of 99 money-saving tips includes some good ones. And most are not age-specific. For example: Did you know that – whatever your age – you can by-pass maddening voice mail instructions by dialing (in this order) 1 (which by-passes Sprint), * (which by-passes Verizon), and then # (which bypasses AT&T and T-Mobile)? Dial all three in quick succession and one of them should take you straight to the beep.

CORN PUDDING

Maureen Welch: ‘Sounds good. any chance you could post the recipe?’

☞ We had it again last night – to raves:

Charles’s Corn Pudding

Two ears of corn per person
Butter or olive oil to taste
Salt
Pepper
Jalapeno (optional)

Preheat oven to 350°

Husk and thoroughly clean all the silk from the corn. Cut ears in half so they are shorter and easier to manage on the grater. Grate corn on a box grater into a large bowl. I leave a couple of ears ungrated, and, instead, cut the kernels off with a sharp knife to add some texture.

Season however you like. I generally use plenty of coarse salt and black pepper and a very finely chopped fresh jalapeño but tonight I did not have the jalapeno so I substituted a small amount of finely chopped pimento and flat leaf parsley.

Blend thoroughly and then pour/push the seasoned corn mixture into a baking dish, smooth out and dot the top with several small pats of butter pushed into the batter. If you don’t want to use the butter you can drizzle olive oil on the top instead.

Dust the top with a bit more black pepper and course salt. Bake until done – the top should be golden and a little bubbly and the sides start to pull away from the dish. Cooking time will depend on just how much you are making; anywhere from 30 to 50 minutes.

Instead of a baking dish, I usually use a greased cast iron skillet, serving family style but it works just as well and is a bit more formal in individual ramekins baked in a Bain Marie. If it hasn’t gotten as brown as I’d like, I put it under the broiler for a minute or so to crisp up.

☞ If you don’t love it, you must have missed a step. Do it again.

STAND-UP GUY

This all started with the news that the longer you sit, the shorter you live. (Here is corroboration, just published yesterday, from a 14-year study of 123,000 people.)

So some of you suggested standing desks . . .

Clark Cole bought one . . .

And (if I remember his phrasing correctly) “Oh, Mamma” does his back ever hurt now.

He requested your help and you, shall we say, rose to the occasion:

Karen Tiede: “On what is Clark standing? My back feels much better when I have a resilient mat – look at what cashiers stand on in the grocery store.”

Margie Power: “I don’t proselytize about many things in this life, but Pete Egoscue’s books, Pain Free and Pain Free at Your PC, took me from debilitating back pain to no pain back in 2002. Just 15 minutes a day of simple postures makes all the difference. If I get the slightest twinge of back pain nowadays, I do his exercises for a couple of days and all is well.”

Jeff Cox: “Standing properly is fairly easy. Definitely, definitely, have a rest for one foot, a rail or a box or something to keep one foot off the floor. The next time you are in a pub, look at the rail at the bottom of the bar – serving this very purpose. Lifting one foot takes some strain off the back. Resting one’s elbows is probably also a good idea. Others: Work in the middle of the desk, not at the edge. Move around a bit. (Walking is less tiring than standing.) Consider not believing every bit of health advice that comes free from a financial advice website.”

Steve Margerum: “ . . . Maybe he should just take his computer down to his neighborhood bar instead.”

Tom Anthony: “It took me almost three weeks (at age 69) to get used to standing up at my computer all day, especially if I did a long hard run in the morning and was worn out before starting a six-hour computer session. I found it initially very tiring since I had never stood in one position for so long before. But your standing muscles adapt and strengthen. Now, four months later, standing in front of the computer all day long does not bother me at all. It helps to shift your weight about and stand on one leg now and then. I sometimes go through some Yoga positions, e.g Tree Pose, while reading a long article.”

☞ Like Jeff, Tom also mentioned the “bar rail” – and installed one he made from some two-inch Home Depot PVC tubing he had left over from a project. “The bar rail seems counterintuitive,” he writes, “but it is surprisingly effective.”

And he goes on:

“If you go barefoot around the house like I do, you might want to put a soft pad in the area where you stand because bare feet on a hard floor for long periods can be uncomfortable. My pad is an old exercise pad folded over twice so that there are four layers under me. The give of the pad may make you unconsciously keep adjusting your leg and back muscles and that may help avoid fatiguing them. Clark’s problem may be related to the table height. I noticed that his IKEA model had a maximum height of 38 5/8″. I adjusted the height of my table to 40 5/8″ so that my forearms were level with the keyboard – I’m 5′ 10″. If my table were 2″ lower like his, I might be bending forward some to accommodate the lower table height and that would strain the back muscles. He might consider putting a book or two under his monitor/keyboard to raise it and also to tilt the monitor upwards.”

Tom offers these suggestions from an exercise physiologist for people who sit all day.

Michael Choquette: “I don’t think there is any single proper way to stand at a stand-up desk for the same reason that an entire day of sitting is bad: a body doesn’t like to be forced into any single alignment for hours on end. I stand: at attention; at ease; on one foot (for ankle strength); and, to shake things, up occasionally I pace around while composing emails or writing code. I have been using an upright employer-provided desk at work for three years. My desk accommodates sitting as well as standing by way of an electric motor that raises and lowers the top and also displays the current height to the tenth of an inch. With that display, I always know exactly where I stand. (Sorry.) I have the desk because my orthopedist said my severe leg and low back pain from years of desk sitting would go away if I didn’t sit so much. (He was right.) I don’t think many people can afford the setup I have, and I am fortunate to have it at work. I am not tall, only 5’8”, and for full comfort and straight back while standing at my desk, I set the table height at 40 inches. This is the table height that works best for both my keyboarding and monitor viewing. Now, to Clark’s specifics: According to the Ikea web site, the maximum height of the Fredrik desk is only 38-5/8 inches. I would think this height would be good for only those who are shorter than me. This could be Clark’s problem – the Fredrik is simply not at the height he requires. Something else to consider: 8 hours of standing might be okay for some, but I find that mixing up the standing and the sitting throughout the day works best. Fredrik does not provide this flexibility.”

EAT LESS MEAT

Manish Bhatia: “I read a lot about the actions that we all need to take to reduce the impact of global warming (and avoid it – if we are not already too late!). You have advocated efficient light bulbs, solar energy, hypermiling, and myriad other things. The one thing I don’t remember you advocating is going vegetarian. There are countless articles on the internet about the high carbon footprint related to eating meat (like this one). Hope to hear you talk about this too.”

☞ Here, here! It’s amazing the impact of a hamburger on our environment.

(And so, with Memorial Day barbecues around the corner, I suppose I should reprise the Andy Burger, with serious apologies for naming it after myself. A quick search of the archives did not return any hits, but I’m almost sure I’ve told you before, because it’s such a staple. In any event, here it is. You walk up to the burger-flipper, who I assume is your brother-in-law, and ask him to toast your bun on the grill, so it picks up some of the taste and smell and greasy residue of the prior burgers – and hold the burger. You then add lettuce and tomato, pickle chips if available, and tons of ketchup – and that’s it. Mmmm, mmmm! It contains no burger, yet has the burger smell and taste from the grill, and all the taste of the ketchup, which is, let’s be honest, the whole point of the burger in the first place.)

THE SIXTH OF MARC’S 12 MOST USEFUL THINGS

So far, I’ve given you the first through fifth (well, Marc has given them to us). And at the end of this series, I’ll give you the link to all 12. But for now . . .

6. Transform voicemail.
PhoneTag will send you very accurate transcriptions of all your voicemails. At $30 per month it is more expensive than the free Google Voice (which also does transcriptions), but it’s far more accurate since it uses human transcribers. PhoneTag saves me a lot of time; it is handy in situations when you can’t check your voicemail (for instance, when you’re in a meeting). Thanks to PhoneTag, I always know right away whether a call is important or not. It creates more peace of mind, which is priceless. PhoneTag, $29.95 per month for unlimited messages.

Last week I missed a day, ostensibly to eggnog.

Richard Theriault: “Eggnog is the best of reasons. None other is required. William Rainey Harper, first president of the University of Chicago, drank a quart of it every day with his lunch (and though it was a Baptist school, it did contain rum or brandy; I have the recipe). It did not cause him to miss his lectures but he was inured, unlike you, who are exposed only to seasonal excess.”

From Richard’s alumni magazine:

Eggnog was considered a “strengthening” drink at the turn of the 20th century. According to Young Man in a Hurry, Milton Mayer’s biography of William Rainey Harper, eggnog fueled the “busiest man in America.”

As dean of Yale Divinity School, Harper’s typical day went this way: “His schedule took him to his first class at 7:30 in the morning. He taught until 11:00, and went to his office to work on his mail, discuss perhaps a dozen matters with each of his five assistants, and drink a quart of eggnog at his desk. Catching the 1:00 o’clock train to New York or Boston, he would deliver a lecture in the afternoon and another in the evening. The midnight train took him back to New Haven and his study.”

When he became president of the University of Chicago in 1890, Harper’s to-do list lengthened—but his lunch of eggnog remained in force.

INGREDIENTS
1 egg
¾ tbsp sugar
A few grains salt
1½ tbsps sherry or 1 tbsp brandy or rum
2/3 cup cold milk
A few gratings nutmeg

DIRECTIONS
Beat egg slightly. Add sugar, salt, and, slowly, liquor; then add, gradually, milk.
The nutmeg may be used with or instead of the liquor as flavoring.
Serves one.

INCY

Suggested June 11 at $3.40, sold July 28 near $6 (though guru still liked it), suggested again at $5.62 in a basket of three stocks October 29, and now just sold half Christmas Eve at $9.26 (guru likes it for the long term; thinks it might give back some gains in a bad market).  The other two items in the basket are up only slightly, but guru still likes them, too.  Remember: these are bets to be made only with money you can truly afford to lose.  Because – as long-time readers know all too well – we may.

VSP

It’s a little late in the year to be reminding you of this, but if you bought a stock at various prices – as I’ve bought INCY, for example – then you own a variety of “tax lots.”

When you go to sell, each gets its own tax treatment as to gain or loss and holding period.

If you sell all your shares, you just recognize the appropriate gain or loss on each separate tax lot.  But if you sell just some of your shares, it becomes a matter of some interest just which shares they were.

In the real world, of course, it makes no difference – it’s like asking which water you drank from a glass, the water that came out of the tap first or the water that came out a second or two later as the glass was filling up.  It’s all the same.  Water.  INCY shares are INCY shares.  But for tax purposes it does matter, and if you don’t specify, the IRS will assume the shares you bought first are the ones you’re selling.  That’s why it can make sense to specify.

So far, all my INCY is short-term.  But come April 25, the first shares I bought, at $2.09, will go long-term.  So last Thursday, I didn’t want to sell my $2.09 INCY shares and be liable for tax on a big gain (especially as, in just a few months, that gain will qualify for lighter, long-term gain tax treatment) – I wanted to sell the shares I bought at $6.90 just a few weeks ago and be liable for tax on a small gain.

Different brokers have different systems of “specifying” the tax lot you are selling.  In the days of rotary phones, you would call your broker and just say, “Hey, please sell 200 shares ‘versus purchase October 12, 1975’ and your printed confirmation slip would arrive in the mail noting ‘VSP 10/12/75’ in case the IRS ever wanted to see it.  Many full-service brokers still work that way.  Others, like Fidelity, automate the process (so it’s easier and much cheaper).  Ameritrade lets you make the trade on-line and then either call a human to specify the lots you sold or email your instructions through their on-line messaging page.

It’s not too late to realize some tax losses for 2009 to lower your income tax.  Then again, because so many folks have been selling for this purpose – driving some low-priced, thinly traded losers down even further – it might be smarter to wait.  We may see quite a bounce next week  once the tax-selling pressure is removed (and sometax-sellers, having taken their losses in November or December and waited the requisite 31 days to avoid the “wash-sale” rule enter buy orders to reestablish their positions).  This well known pattern – a New Year bounce in stocks killed the previous year – is the well-known “January effect.”  But because it is well known, a lot of people try to take advantage of it, beating the January crowd by buying beaten-down shares in late December.  Which could leave you at the station waiting for the January effect, not realizing that it came early and has already passed you by.  That it has already passed you – “Bye!”  That it has already passed you – don’t buy.  See what a challenging game this is?  Sometimes, for some stocks, the January effect works in January, sometimes in December, sometimes not a all.

VSOP

And we’re back to eggnog.

Summer is almost over, but it’s not too late to tell you about a recipe that my friend David came up with:

HONEST TEA-QUILA!

Start with a bottle of Honest Peach White Tea – remove half the tea, add crushed ice, a shot of tequila, a half shot of triple sec, a splash of Rose’s lime juice, and a squeeze lemon. Now replace the screw cap, shake it up, and drink.

ABSOLUT HONEST TEA!

We were in the midst of figuring out the best varie-tea to mix with Absolut – and, for that matter, which Absolut – but we did not feel we could do our best work after consuming so much Honest Tea-Quila. Please take some time to experiment and submit a recipe or two of your own. If you don’t drink, or drink as little as I do, that’s okay – forget the vodka, just drink the tea. The purpose here, as long-time readers will know, is to sell more Honest Tea. Foosball tables do not come cheap. (After an Honest Tea-Quila, who can resist little plastic feet?)

BOREALIS – FOD

I know. Still, I thought this, from the FAA, was interesting. FOD is short for “Foreign Object Debris/Damage” – as in, say, a stray luggage container getting sucked into a jet engine, which can’t be good for the engine.

The operative paragraph is on page 9:

The presence of FOD on airport runways, taxiways, aprons and ramps poses a significant threat to the safety of air travel. FOD has the potential to damage aircraft during critical phases of flight, which can lead to catastrophic loss of life and the airframe, or increased maintenance and operating costs. Costs to the industry are now estimated to be in excess of $1-2 billion per year for direct costs and as much as $12 billion when indirect costs are considered. FOD hazards can be reduced, however, by the establishment of an effective FOD management program.

So . . . what if the jet engines weren’t started at the gate? What if the plane could taxi out like a golf cart and only start up shortly before take-off? This is of course what the WheelTug system, being developed by a subsidiary of Borealis, is designed to make possible. One more reason to remain guardedly hopeful Borealis may one day fly.

YUM

Dan Becker: “Regarding your Dashboard Cookie Recipe, here in Austin, Texas, our month of July had 26 out of 31 days with over 100 degrees Fahrenheit! So our local paper ran a recipe for sun-drying Juliet tomatoes. I tried it with grapes, and it worked well also. I guess any sort of fruit would work well. Just put it on the dashboard in the morning, and you have a healthy snack for the ride home in the evening.”

Greg Bandy: “See also Manifold Destiny: The One! The Only! Guide to Cooking on Your Car Engine!”

☞ Listen, if it’s going to be this hot, there’s no point making it hotter and wasting energy by firing up your oven. The Huns had a similar notion. They would place slabs of raw meat between their saddles and their horses’ bare backs and “cook” the meat in the course of a long ride. I know this because when I was 12 I wrote a book about Attila (properly pronounced AT-ill-a, by the way). It began, “Like demons out of hell they came [riding down upon the Romans] . . .” and ended when my parents decided completing it would take too much time away from my studies and hurt my chances of getting into a good college. “Oh, please,” I said, rolling my pre-teen eyes. “They’re going to reject me because my grades suffered, but I wrote a book?” We’ll never know who was right or whether I would have found a publisher (in hindsight, I think not); but I did learn a lot about barbarians.

HEALTH CARE – RECISSION

My guess is that this is overstated – “If you ever really need your health insurance policy, you have less than even odds that the insurance company will actually pay for your health care.” – but my guess is also that it’s closer to the truth than the insurance companies would have us think.

HEALTH CARE – FACT FROM FICTION

James Musters: “This newsletter does for health reporting what Dean Baker does for economic reporting, or Media Matters does for political reporting.”

HEALTH CARE – CYNICISM

Take 30 seconds to watch the opposition.

HEALTH CARE – GET INVOLVED

Find an event near you.

MYMDOS.COM

Hey – look at that. MYM for DOS, orphaned 15 years ago, has its own web page. With its own forum. You can only reach it though on a dial-up modem using 5-1/4 inch floppy disks. (Just kidding.) I have nothing to do with it, but am happy to see MYM still kicking.

ELLEN’S COMMENCEMENT SPEECH

So much fun I watched it twice.

COOKING LIKE A GUY™ WITH A HOT ROD

Denis Trover: “Out here on the desert even the women use the guys’ way to cook.”

☞ I love it. A carbecue!

The advice here is really helpful. E.g.:

Obviously, you don’t want to drive around the block 300 times just to cook dinner. That would be a waste of gas and time. Rather, if you’re already driving somewhere, find something to cook that fits into your travel plans . . .

And this, for one of those days when the car is parked in the blazing sun:

Prepare your favorite cookie dough recipe. Slice evenly and place on lightly oiled baking sheet. Place the baking sheet on top of your vehicle’s dashboard . . .

Pluses include: Dinner ready the minute you pull in your driveway; saves the gas or electricity that would have been needed to cook. Minuses: wastes a lot of aluminum foil; can’t have chocolate chip cookies and hot dogs at the same time unless willing to drive for hours with no a/c in the blazing sun.

I KEEP FORGETTING TO RECOMMEND THIS

AmazingMemorySecrets.com. Benjamin is a friend, and truly amazing. You can trust him. He may steal your watch (right off your wrist – that’s how I first met him) but he always gives it back. Want to remember people’s names? Where you left your keys? Check it out.

MR. MARKET MISCALCULATES – MACRO

No one writes about finance more insightfully – or elegantly – than Jim Grant. If you don’t subscribe to his Interest Rate Observer ($850 a year), you can get his collected wisdom here, in Mr. Market Miscalculates: The Bubble Years and Beyond, for $14.96 – or two samples free.

MR. MARKET MISCALCULATES – MICRO

When the market does get something wrong – and you can see it clearly at the time, without the benefit of hindsight – there is an opportunity. Of course, this doesn’t happen to most of us too often, if ever. And even when it does, the opportunity can be hard to seize.

Say it was clear to you at the time that much of the nation’s real estate market was wildly overheated. How would you profit from the market’s miscalculation? You could short (or buy puts on) the stocks of the nation’s home builders. But if you did it too soon and lost your nerve as the stocks rose even higher – and covered your shorts – or simply watched your puts expire worthless, your sharp insight would have been rewarded with a sharp loss.

So for most of us, it makes little sense to try to beat the market by choosing individual stocks (index funds make more sense) or to ‘time’ the market, attempting to jump in before it goes up and out before it goes down. Both are very hard to do successfully.

That said, there are a lot of very bright people whose professional lives revolve around finding ‘mispricings’ in the market and exploiting them, and – even if only as spectators – it’s interesting to see examples of their strategies. Like this one from my friend Chris Brown of fledgling Aristides Capital. Of the relative pricing of Ford Motor’s common stock () and its $3.25 convertible preferred. He writes:

‘F is at 2.83, the F.PRS is at 8.35. F.PRS converts to 2.8249 F shares at any time at the owner’s option. So, if you buy the F.PRS and short 2.8249 times as many of the Ford common, you are paying $0.36 for the entirety of the future dividend stream of the Ford preferred, which is $0.8125 per quarter, and is supposed to last at least 2-3 quarters.’

☞ In English: you want to be long and short the same amount of Ford so the price movement of the stock doesn’t matter. What you gain (or lose) owning the convertible you lose (or gain) by shorting the common. But! But! But! But! But! You get $32,500 a year in dividends on each 10,000 shares of the $3.25 convertible that you own (convertible into 28,249 common shares); while you pay zero in dividends shorting 28,249 shares of the common. So you get to keep $32,500 a year even if you don’t have any idea whether Ford stock is going up or down.

And the cost of doing this? Well, there are the commissions, but they should be small. And there is the cost of tying up your money. And in Chris’s case, there was a cost of 36 cents* per $3.25 convertible – $3,600 on 10,000 shares (if that’s how many he bought)

*When Chris took this position, shorting 2.8249 shares of Ford at $2.83 brought him $7.99. (Right? 2.8249 x $2.83 = $7.99.) Chipping in another 36 cents out of his own pocket, he had enough to buy one share of the convertible for $8.35. (Right? $7.99 + $0.36 = $8.35.)

So what’s the catch? Well, especially for average Joe’s like us, there are lots of catches. First, when I went to try this myself, I quickly discovered that my broker couldn’t borrow shares of Ford for me to short. Yours may or may not be able to. Second, even if I had been able to short F, by the time I tried, that modest 36-cent spread had widened, to a slightly less attractive 61 cents – because the price of the convertible I would have bought had not fallen as much as the price of the 2.8249 shares of the common I would have shorted. By the time you read this, the spread could be wider still (or narrower). Third, there would be commissions to pay, though at my broker they are trivial. But fourth – and mainly – what if Ford goes broke before it is able to make even one more $0.8125 quarterly dividend payment on the $3.25 convertible?

So there’s risk, but Chris thinks it’s a good risk to take. And that’s how (some) really smart investment professionals spend their days, trying to find little mispricings like that, where Mr. Market, through carelessness, has left a few crumbs on the table.

And now, at last:

EGGPLANT

You’ve heard of the three-minute egg? Behold the three-minute eggplant:

1. Buy an eggplant. They’re cheap. They’re large. And yet a big eggplant has only 125 calories, with the skin. (The skin is good. Eat the skin.)

2. Slice ‘the long way.’ Maybe five or six slices, each vaguely half an inch thick. (It doesn’t matter.)

1. Microwave for 3 or 4 minutes. It’s okay to put the slices on top of each other – microwaves can penetrate anything.

4. Let cool; salt and pepper to taste.

Yes, eggplant absorbs anything – it is the Zelig of vegetables – so you can goop it up with olive oil, cheese, tomato sauce, whatever. But why? Fresh from the microwave it is moist, mushy, and healthy. Where I’d experiment, beyond the salt and pepper, is in whatever other seasonings you might have around. And/or a soupçon of I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter Lite with each bite.

SARDINES

You don’t hear much about sardines anymore.

PRAYING FOR A PIPELINE

Listen to the Republican Vice Presidential nominee exhorting worshippers to pray for a pipeline. I have little standing in matters of faith, but it strikes me as oddly unChristian to mock community organizing amongst the downtrodden . . . and yet pray for the construction of an oil pipeline.

No?

Oddly unChristian, yet completely in line with today’s Republican Party. They mock Al Gore, they mock John Kerry (and his Silver Star and three Purple Hearts), and now they mock Barack Obama.

Only Sarah Palin – who lobbied for the Bridge to Nowhere, and raised taxes in Wasilla, and left her tiny town, which had been debt-free, $22 million in hock, and says she got a D in macro-economics at the University of Idaho – only she has what it takes to cope with our country’s enormous economic challenges and regain the respect of the world. She and her running mate, the hot-tempered ‘maverick,’ fifth from the bottom of his class of 899, whose campaign is run by lobbyists and who voted 95% of the time with George W. Bush.

To augment her prayer and facilitate the pipeline, Governor Palin has sued to strip the polar bear of its Threatened Species status (tell that to your 10-year-old and ask her how she wants you to vote in November), ignoring the scientists (here we go again) – or worse. ‘Essentially, she lied,’ said University of Alaska professor Rick Steiner, according to ABC News.

Both she and Senator McCain are fine Americans and remarkable people. But they are running this campaign out of the same mocking, dishonest Republican playbook (Obama is ready to lower almost everyone’s taxes, not raise them), in the urgent Republican hope of getting four more years.

SAVE MONEY, TIME, AND THE PLANET

The fastest way to grill, roast, bake, boil or broil something, of course, is to microwave it. This makes Charles a little crazy – he even roasts toast, which can’t be an efficient use of energy, though it’s darn good toast – but I am the kind of guy whose artichokes take six minutes instead of 45, and whose baked potatoes, back when I ate baked potatoes – likewise. (The truly fastest way to grill, roast, bake, boil or broil something, is not to cook it in the first place. Those readers trying to lose weight, save money, or accustomed to scraping extra mashed potatoes into the garbage, have doubtless considered this.)

But if you are one of those gourmets who insist on boiling things, I have a suggestion. Get one of these, if you don’t already have one – a kettle – and bring your water to a boil fast, without a lot of heat escaping, and with a whistle to alert you to when the water is boiling*, so you don’t keep it boiling longer than you have to, steaming up your kitchen, and, if you’ve lost track and become engrossed in a rerun of Law and Order, boiling all the water away, only to realize it when you begin to smell metallic fumes – which can’t be good for you, and which can set off your smoke detector and scare you half to death, and lead to your falling off whatever you’ve climbed on to try to silence the damn thing – and then, with your pot molten and bone dry, have to start the boiling process all over again. (Not that this has ever happened to me.)

Okay? Let me recap. You boil water in a kettle. And now the kettle is whistling. You return to the kitchen, deftly shift the kettle off the hot burner (which you leave burning), switching it for the dry pot of pasta or potatoes or shrimp or whatever you were going to boil . . . even as you pour two or three quarts of boiling water from the kettle into that pot, over the pasta, potatoes, or shrimp.

Tada!

You’ve saved time, money (by using less energy), and, in a tiny but real way, lived a little lighter on the land.

The engineers in the crowd will note that much the same result could have been achieved simply by using a lid. But (leaving aside whatever extra heat escapes from under the lid that a sealed kettle would retain), the problem with this is that, to know when the water has reached its boil – sans a kettle’s whistle – you have to stand there in the kitchen and watch the pot.

I will not insult this readership by supplying the next line.

*I think the model I linked you to has a whistle, but it doesn’t say.

COME MEET SARAH JESSICA PARKER IN CHARLES’ STUDIO TOMORROW

If you happen to live in the New York area and want to help Barack Obama, check this out. It could be fun.

But first . . .

From the Borowitz Report:

Nader Warns Bloomberg Not to Run
Only Room for One Egomaniac in Race, Activist Says

Not so fast.

That was the message delivered today to New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg by consumer activist Ralph Nader, who warned Mr. Bloomberg, ‘If some egomaniac is going to jump in and screw up this election, it’s going to be me.’

Mr. Nader established an exploratory committee for a presidential bid today to let Mr. Bloomberg know that there was ‘only room for one self-absorbed gas-bag in the 2008 race.’

At a press conference in Washington, Mr. Nader said that voters who are looking for someone to spoil the 2008 election should be suspicious of Mr. Bloomberg’s motives: ‘Michael Bloomberg has a track record of winning elections, not screwing them up.’

In contrast, Mr. Nader said, ‘I know how hard it is to wreck an election, and I am prepared to put in the long hours necessary to mess this one up big-time.’ . . .

And now

READ THIS

‘If Americans were to reduce meat consumption by just 20 percent it would be as if we all switched from a standard sedan to the ultra-efficient Prius.’ That and other assertions in this important New York Times story give us all the more reason to tilt our consumption back toward pasta, pizza, and eggplant parmesan.

(Okay, and egg white omelets, salads, tomato and mozzarella with basil and extra virgin olive oil, a little salt and pepper . . . mmm, mmm!)

It’s amazing the impact of a hamburger on our environment.

And it’s probably not that great for your arteries, either.

It’s time we all read this story and found our own happy medium. For some, this might mean replacing beef with chicken much of the time (it takes 7 pounds of grain to make a pound of beef, but only 3 pounds of grain to make a pound of chicken). For others, it might mean replacing chicken with ‘grain’ much of the time (it rather obviously takes just 1 pound of grain to make a pound of grain) – namely, all those dread carbohydrates like bread and pasta that I avoid. For still others, it might mean eating less (haven’t you been telling everybody you need to lose five pounds?).

Anyway, if you’re not already a vegan (and I’m not), this is one of the most interesting articles you’ll read all year. (For example: coming soon, it says: ‘meat without feet.’)

Seriously. Click this.