Asthma-Free Naturally

I mentioned having been intrigued by this
article a couple
of weeks ago. I decided that buying this
book by Patrick McKeown would make sense if I were really serious about doing
breathing exercises.

Like a lot of these self-help books, the “science” is probably
completely bogus, but the anecdotal evidence that the advice
helps is interesting if it’s advice about a problem you really
need to solve.

I had independently figured out that breathing through the nose
actually helped during an asthma attack. So I believe some of
the rest of the stuff about practicing breathing through the
nose and I have been doing some of the recommendations. I’m not
going as far as figuring out how to laugh with my mouth closed,
but I did order some surgical tape to try taping my mouth shut
while I’m sleeping. Instead of his nose unblocking exercise for
nasal congestion, which sounds uncomfortable, I’m continuing to
do the alternate nostril breathing I learned in Yoga class.

The advice about diet and exercise is fairly standard, and not
particularly well-written. For example, here’s the paragraph
about meat:

Fruit and vegetables are of primary importance. A
little meat is essential for good health, but for some people in
the Western world it has become an obsession.

I don’t know how many vegetarians the author would have known
in Ireland in 2008, but you certainly can’t talk to the population
of Cambridge, Massachusetts that way.

I have completely stopped taking my steroid inhaler, and am
controlling attacks by a combination of breathing exercises and
the albuterol (rescue) inhaler. I’m not saying it’s a complete
solution, and when I get over the undesirable side effects of
taking the maximum dose of steroid inhaler for so long after
that cold in October, I may well go back to using it a bit. But
it’s possible that these exercises will help reduce the need for
it.

So I’m making a qualified recommendation of this book. I don’t
really believe the thesis that asthma is a result of a shortage of
CO2, or that asthmatics take in 4-6 times as much air
as normal breathers. But some of the recommendations probably
help some people, and if you’re having trouble with your asthma,
it’s worth thinking about.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=1573243728&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Report on the November 24, 2009, meeting

Please remember that the next 3 Tuesdays do not have
dropin meetings. I hope to see you at the December 17 concert
or the December 20 party.

We played:

Schedule

The meetings between now and the
December 17 concert are restricted to performers in that
concert. Please come to the concert, at 2 PM at the Boston Public
Library in the Rabb Lecture Hall.

The Christmas Party will be at my place on
Sunday, December 20, starting at about 4 PM. I will have
invitations shortly.

Dropin meetings will resume on either Tuesday, December 22 or
Tuesday, December 29. Let me know if you’d especially like to
come on December 22. I’ll schedule it only if I hear from people
who’d like to come.

Mulled Cider

This is simple enough to be more of a procedure than a recipe,
but since I’ve seen people spend a lot more time and money for
less good results, I’m going to tell you about it anyway.

I do this pretty much any time in the winter that I’m having
people over. You have to be able to buy cider without
preservatives. For this purpose, pasteurization doesn’t matter,
but I’m sure the preservatives make a difference in the flavor,
and they aren’t at all necessary.

I always use the crock pot, because having the drinks out of my
(small) kitchen is a good idea if I’m also doing any kind of
cooking. But if you have the right traffic path, you can
certainly use a large pot on the stove.

Then you need something like a tea ball or a small cloth bag or
just a handkerchief or other cloth. Put all the whole
spices in your cabinet into the center of the handkerchief or
other receptacle and close it. (In the case of the
handkerchief, you tie the opposite corners together.)

I think you should buy cinnamon sticks for this purpose if you
don’t have them. Otherwise, use whatever you have. Some possibilities:

  • The little
    slivers of nutmeg that you can’t grate any more on the grater
    without grating your fingers, too.
  • Cloves
  • Whole allspice
  • Cardamom. (Take the seeds out of the pod, if you have the
    pods.)
  • Star Anise

Put the cider and the spice ball or bag into your chosen pot.
Bring to a boil and turn down to a very low simmer. If you do
this before the guests arrive, you can offer them hot cider when
they get there. They will appreciate this if it’s a cold day.
Otherwise, have it with dessert.

There are people who will sell you official cider mulling
spices, and if you don’t have any of the above items in your
cupboard and can’t think of anything you want to do with them
except make mulled cider, that makes sense. But if you put
cloves in ham or star anise in pork or fresh ground nutmeg in
anything, you don’t need the mulling spices too.

For some reason most of the recipes add sweetener, but I’ve
never seen any necessity for it. Maybe they used to make cider
with less sweet apples, and the recipe writer haven’t noticed
that plain cider is plenty sweet enough now.

If you’re thinking about one-ingredient hard cider, this is the
wrong way to go about it. After the boil and simmer, the cider
doesn’t ferment anything like as fast as the stuff straight from
the store does.

Food Stamps

There’s a long
article on the front page of the New York Times this morning
about the increasing use of food stamps.

It does mention that it’s been government policy over the last
three administrations to encourage the use of the program, but
completely leaves out (or maybe postpones for another article) the
changes in eligibility requirements that have enabled the
increased numbers of people to use it.

I think the article would lead a casual reader to believe that the
people in Orange County who are getting the food stamps now
could just as well have gotten them ten years ago, except that
they’d have been embarrassed to have their neighbors see them
using the stamps in the checkout line.

I don’t know anything about eligibility requirements in
California, but I looked at the Massachusetts ones 8 years ago
when I ran out of unemployment compensation and was going to
have to start dipping into savings.

At that time, in Massachusetts, you couldn’t get food stamps if
you had more than $600 in a bank account (including an IRA with
penalties for accessing it before you were 59 1/2), or a car
worth more than $2000. $600 is less than a month’s rent for
most people in Massachusetts, and a car worth less than $2000 is
probably going to lead you to miss work several days a year. The combination of the car worth less than $2000 and the less than a month’s rent in the bank is likely to tempt you to put off fixing your brakes when they break.

I was becoming increasingly alarmed as I read the article about
all the counties where nearly half the residents are eligible for
food stamps, so I googled for the current requirements in
Massachusetts.

It turns out that some time in the last eight years, they’ve
stopped asking you about assets at all unless you’re also
getting certain other means-tested benefits. So I would
probably have been eligible 8 years ago, and all those people getting the food stamps
may well have enough money to pay their rent and fix their brakes.

Outrageous

I was really blown away by this movie
when I saw it at the Orson Welles Theater in the late ’70’s.

It doesn’t hold up quite as well as I was hoping it would when
I put it in my Netflix queue. The schizophrenia story seems to
have been done many times, and although the acting is good, Liza’s
movie-star good looks aren’t really credible based on what I
know about schizophrenics in drug treatment.

But the female impersonator turns are still really fun to
watch. The scene where Craig Russell as Robin Turner impersonates Marilyn Monroe imitating numerous other
stars of the era auditioning to sing Diamonds are a Girl’s Best
Friend is worth watching even if you don’t feel like the
drama about a gay hairdresser and his schizophrenic female
roommate.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B0002OXV0K&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Thanksgiving report

I think people enjoyed themselves. The two women who live with
their daughters seemed to like talking to each other. The food
was unusually good. The wine was good — one of the guests
brought a bottle that I’d intended to try the next time I was
buying wine. The singing after supper was very good.

I didn’t manage to get major housecleaning energy until just
before lunchtime, so not quite everything got done. The major
problem this caused was that I was just getting ready to
recombobulate the kitchen when the first guests showed up, so we
had to run the meal with the counters more cluttered than they
should be. But I had emptied the dishwasher, so cleaning up
went pretty smoothly.

The living room and dining room are now back in their non-party
configuration and much cleaner and less cluttered than they were
yesterday morning. The kitchen still has a ways to go, but
since I don’t have to cook for several days, I can take my time
with it.

I hope your Thanksgiving was at least as good as mine.

Three Quarters Done, and Happy Thanksgiving

Yesterday was the three quarter mark on this year of blogging
every day. I’ve been meditating on how I’ll blog when I don’t
have to do it every day.

There will be fewer junk posts because it’s almost lunch time
and I have to write something.

There will also be no posts at all on days I don’t have time to
write one.

But I believe I read books and watch movies with more
concentration because I know I’ll want to write about it later,
and I’ll keep doing that. And I’ll keep writing about the toys
I want to complain about.

This is a short, easy one because I still have housecleaning to
do before I make the turkey and stuffing and cranberry sauce and
organize the drinks and appetizers. My guests are making most
of the side dishes, but there’s still a lot of work.

So Happy Thanksgiving, if you’re one of the people who
celebrates it today.

So I lied…

When I said it was the last
post about setting up the new home theater system.

I didn’t know how big of a pain setting up an entry-level
audiophile turntable was going to be.

tonearm with tracking weight and anti-skate mechanism

The directions were both badly written (e.g., referring to the
same piece of hardware as a “scale”, a “stub”, and a “prong”)
and badly illustrated (the only picture was a top view, so
identifying anything sticking up from the turntable was
difficult). They started from the point of view that you knew
what you were trying to do, which in my case was true only in a
very general sense. And there was at least one place where they
were actively wrong (telling you to turn the counterweight
counterclockwise when it should have been clockwise).

I found two things that helped a lot:

  • Putting a strong light on the area made it a lot easier to
    put the small loop in the very thin monofilament nylon thread
    that held the antiskating weight over the stub.
  • Reading this
    advice     was helpful in figuring out what the adjustments were
    doing.

In any case, once I finally got the Cartridge Downforce
Adjustment correct, the antiskating part worked much better than
I would have guessed from what that tonearm was trying to do
when it was flying all over the place with the wrong weight on
the end.

I’m writing this in the hope that if someone else tries to set
up a Pro-Ject Debut III turntable and gets as frustrated as I
was, google will show them this page and they will see that there is hope.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=B001FUIQN2&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood

I said when I reviewed
The
Year of the Flood that reading it made me want to
reread Oryx
and Crake. I have now done that. I enjoyed it more
this time. I suspect it might make sense to read The
Year of the Flood first if you haven’t read either of them
yet. They take place in the same time frame — two or three of the major
characters in Flood are minor characters in
Crake. But you really are more interested in Jimmy,
the narrator and main character in Crake, after
you’ve seen him (and Crake) throught the eyes of Ren, one of the
point of view characters in Flood.

The argument for reading Crake first is that
Flood takes the narrative one scene later, so if you
read Flood first, you know one piece more about how
Jimmy’s story resolves itself. I can really imagine a third (at least) book
in this world — I hope it happens.

Here’s an example of the same story told from two different
points of view in the two books. The characters are college roommates.

As Jimmy sees it in Oryx and Crake:

Bernice let him know how much she disapproved of his carnivorous ways by kidnapping his leather sandals and incinerating them on the lawn. When he protested that they hadn’t been real leather, she said they’d been posing as it, and as such deserved their fate. After he’d had a few girls up to his room — none of Bernice’s business, and they’d been quiet enough, apart from some pharmaceutically induced giggling and a lot of understandable moans — she’d manifested her views on consensual sex by making a bonfire of all Jimmy’s jockey shorts.

As Bernice tells the story in The Year of the Flood:

She’d had a roommate like that at first, plus he’d been an
animal-murderer because he’d worn leather sandals. Though
they’d been fleather. But they’d looked like leather. So she’d
burnt them. And thank God she didn’t have to share a bathroom
with him any more, because she could hear him doing sexual
things with girls practically every night, like some
degenerate bonobo/rabbit splice.

‘Jimmy,’ she said. ‘What a meat-breath!’

This is real science fiction written by a real novelist, who is
also a fine poet. I didn’t think Oryx and Crake
was among her best work when I read it 6 years ago, but I think
the two novels together are at least equal to The
Handmaid’s Tale, and certainly better in terms of
richness of the imagined future.

http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0385528779&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr
http://rcm.amazon.com/e/cm?t=laymusicorg-20&o=1&p=8&l=as1&asins=0385721676&fc1=000000&IS2=1&lt1=_blank&m=amazon&lc1=0000FF&bc1=000000&bg1=FFFFFF&f=ifr

Agent to the Stars, by John Scalzi

I was reminded that I hadn’t told you about Agent to the
Stars, which I read a few weeks ago, when I read John
Scalzi’s blog entry this morning.

The blog says that if you’re going to self-publish, please
don’t pay anyone to do it. You can get it online for free, and if
you need hardcopy, he recommends lulu.com, as do I.

As someone to get advice about self-publishing from, he’s one
of the obvious successes. He wrote Agent to the
Stars when he was a struggling young writer, and published
it online, suggesting that people send him a dollar if they liked
it. He wasn’t expecting to make much money that way, but he
stopped counting when he had $4,000, and the interest in the free
online book made it easier for him to sell his subsequent books to
“real” publishers.

Anyway, if you’re looking for a funny, lightweight science
fiction novel to read, I recommend this one. I can’t tell you
much about the plot, since there would be spoilers, but it’s very
well done. And you can download it for free if you have a way to
read books in html form that you enjoy.