Current Events

For dinner this evening I ate a pastrami sandwich. It wasn't on rye, but it did have Swiss cheese. I don't know why I ordered such a large one, I was full with just half of it. Afterwards I wondered, just what exactly did I eat? I mean, was it beef, pork, veal. . . Kitty didn't know either, so it was a trip to the Internet.

Pastrami is an eastern European recipe. Originally it probably was veal, but today could as easily be pork or beef. In the United States, it's almost always beef, though recently a turkey pastrami has been marketed.

Given it's March, Kitty's favorite month, Kitty wondered about the difference between corned beef and pastrami. The following excerpts are from the Wikipedia articles. See if you can identify which is which.

is a popular deli meat made from (chiefly red) meat. The raw meat is salted (infused in a thick brine), then dried, seasoned with various herbs and spices (such as garlic, black pepper, marjoram, basil) and smoked. In the United Kingdom and United States beef is used and the meat is boiled after the salting stage.

is beef that is first pickled in brine and then cooked by boiling. Usually, cuts of meat are used that feature long muscle grain, such as the brisket.

Pretty similar processes, the single difference is that one is dried and smoked, but that's not always the way it's produced in the United States. The corned beef article states that a smoked corned beef is called a pastrami!

Of interest in the article about corned beef was the description of the origin of the name. "Corn" refers to a coarse salt used in the brine. The salt comes from a process developed around 700 A.D., a process that greatly increased the amount of salt that could rapidly be produced.

And just to be thorough. . . Pastrami is derivative from a Romanian verb meaing "to preserve, to keep." The word pastrami has been traced to a Jewish store in New York City in 1887.

So now we know, and can wonder about something else tomorrow.

I'm reading a little of Horace Greeley's book "An Overland Journey from New York to San Francisco in the Summer of 1859" every time I visit the Johnson County Public Library. The book consists of letters he wrote to friends back East as he travelled across the country. My reading today was from letters he wrote from Kansas. I was struck by this passage.

Topeka was one of the strongholds of the free-state cause throughout the dark days of Kansas. Here assembled the first convention chosen by the people to frame a state constitution as a rallying point for defense and mutual protection against the border-ruffian usurpation of 1855; here the free-state legislature, peacefully assembled in 1856 to devise and adopt measures looking to a redress of the unparalledled wrongs and outrages under which Kansas was then writhing, was dispersed by federal bayonets and cannon; here the guns of the U.S. troops were pointed agains a mass meeting of the people of Kansas, assembled in the open air to devise and adopt measures for the redress of the intolerable grievances, and that meeting compelled to disperse under penalty of military execution. And here I renew my vows of hostility to that federal standing army until it shall have been disbanded. It is utterly at war with the genius and perilous to the existence of Republican institutions. The regular soldier is of necessity the blind, passive, mechanical instrument of power. If ordered to shoot his own father, he must obey or be shot himself.

Of course what I thought of was President Bush's suggestion we modify the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 to be able to use the US military to provide disaster relief here in the United States. This Washington University Law Quarterly article from the summer of 1997 is a good review of the Act.

And so I'm left with the contrast between Horace Greeley's indignation concerning the use of US troops before the Civil War, and the passage of the PCA in 1878, after the country had endured a military occupation for 13 years, and the modern era's slow forgetting of what earlier generations painfully learned.

I found this picture on NASA's Astronomical Picture of the Day website. One of the best things about this site is the explanatory material that accompanies each picture. Here's the lowdown on this picture:
Explanation: So far, the Aurora Borealis or Northern Lights have made some remarkable visits to September's skies. The reason, of course, is the not-so-quiet Sun. In particular, a large solar active region now crossing the Sun's disk has produced multiple, intense flares and a large coronal mass ejection (CME) that triggered wide spread auroral activity just last weekend. This colorful example of spectacular curtains of aurora was captured with a fish-eye lens in skies over Quebec, Canada on September 11. Also featured is the planet Mars, the brightest object above and left of center. Seen near Mars (just below and to the right) is the tightly knit Pleiades star cluster. Although they can appear to be quite close, the northern lights actually originate at extreme altitudes, 100 kilometers or so above the Earth's surface.

Check out this web site: Votergate.

Even without considering the voter frauds that have and will occur, I think there's a dirty little secret nobody really wants to say outloud that it's impossible to accurately count votes. And it seems impossible to build a system that can be audited. How else can you explain the different results that come from successive recounts.

Over the past several days there has been considerable discussion and work related to our Houston office and its continued operations. At the end of an email this morning a writer appended this comment:

By the way, panic has taken over Houston - grocery stores have been stripped clean and almost all gas stations are out of gas, traffic is in gridlock in many places. Unbelievable.

When huricane Katrina slashed the Gulf coast across Mississippi, Alabama, and Louisianna the world was presented with the sorry sight of people being their most vicious and miserable. Some of this terrible behaviour might have been explained by how unprepared and surprised everyone was for the extent of the devastation. But we've had two weeks to think and prepare for such extreme disasters, and yet we haven't learned much.