nohats.com

Week before last, I was in NYC for a conference at the American Museum of Natural History. The conference was on “Sustaining Biological and Cultural Diversity in a Changing World” and brought together biologists, ecologists, anthropologists, geographers, and others. While there, I led a discussion on the study of institutional controls within organizations.

While in town, I had a chance to catch up with friends T. and E. and kids, who let me stay at their place, as well as folks at the Aikido dojo in Brooklyn. I practiced at the dojo on Wednesday night, and it is good to know that I haven’t completely fallen out of shape. All the same, I’m kicking the running up a notch now that warmer weather has arrived.

Speaking of warmer weather, E. and I spent some of last week in the garden planting, repotting, and moving things around for Spring–just in time for the most recent batch of cold weather. For my few readers who still don’t acknowledge human-induced global climate change, this cold snap doesn’t disprove anything: global climate change is measured in probabilistic terms, so a few cold days here and there don’t change the general trend. On a related note, Gourmet Magazine has an article on the Farm Bill that is interesting reading for anyone concerned with food and/or the environment. Check it out.

Enter the Nohats YouTube Contest!

For full details, see this page.

After uploading your entry to YouTube, please post the URL as a reply to this blog entry.

Since today is the last day of March and I have not posted in a while, I thought I probably should. Also various people have been bugging me about the lack of activity on this weblog. You know who you are.

I spent last week in scenic west Tennessee with E.; we were in the area for the annual Society for Applied Anthropology conference, which was in Memphis this year. J. from UGA and I co-hosted a lunchtime roundtable discussion on Barbecue, appropriately entitled “The Raw and the Slow-Cooked.” For those not in the know, this is a play on the title of a famous anthropological work by Claude Levi-Strauss. The session was held at the famous Rendezvous restaurant in Memphis, and was attended by notable anthropologists from around the country, as well as J.’s folks, my mom, and E. (who I suppose also counts as a notable anthropologist). On Saturday, while my folks were at the NCAA tournament in Houston, we hosted a wild party, complete with barbecue, beer, and live music. M. and C. and Ch. from Covington also showed up. For conference goers, this turned into an overnighter with a full breakfast in the morning before people returned to Athens.

On a related note, for those who have not heard, E. and I are expecting a baby in mid-September. For now, we are tentatively referring to her or him as “The Tzar,” who in this case is the chief of the prenatal colonial regime. More details on that news as it unfolds.

When I lived in Brooklyn, my friend P. and I developed the idea of the Winter Bar. There was also a parallel idea of the Summer Bar, but the Winter Bar is what sticks in my mind. Winters in New York can be brutal (by Georgia standards), and a Winter Bar serves a number of specific purposes. A Winter Bar should be within easy walking distance of home, since one may be returning late in cold, wet, and drunk conditions. A winter bar (or summer bar) should have a juke box with a good music selection. The drinks should be generously poured, and should include draught Guiness (the preferred winter beer) and shots of Jameson and Patron. In Brooklyn, our winter bar was the B61 Bar, on Columbia at DeGraw. The music ranged from the Dead Kennedys and The Smiths to Johnny Cash, and the drinks were always on the spot. And, if we went on a weeknight, it was always fairly empty.

I’ve been looking for a Winter Bar in Athens, and it is harder for a couple of reasons. One, driving is almost a requirement for getting to the bars, and limits consumption. Two, the dark, eclectic, good-beer-serving bar I like has been hard to find. Manhattan is a candidate, but it is more of a Summer Bar to me, despite their mulled wine. E. and I went to the Melting Point on Wednesday, and they had great live music–but the Winter Bar is not a club. Then, last night we went to a new bar–Trappeze–with a 14 page beer list. It is a strong candidate–I’ll do some more research soon and let you all know if this could be a winner.

I really do try to stay away from political posts on this site. That said, a few words; please feel free to circulate.

First of all, congratulations to Hillary Clinton for her turnaround victory in New Hampshire. She ran a good campaign, and certainly can’t be counted out. That said, I’m marginally ticked off at Senator Clinton. During her victory speech, she thanked all of her competing Democratic candidates, with the exception of Mike Gravel. Was this an oversight? Does she have a grudge against Gravel? And a better question: why do I seem to be the only one who noticed? I reviewed the speech on YouTube; she definitely snubbed Gravel. Ms. Clinton is certainly free to say whatever she wants in her speech, but when Gravel is complaining that the media is not including him in coverage, I find it troublesome that none of the pundits picked up on this slight. Someone needs to ask for an apology from the Clinton team.

I tried posting comments on CNN and MSNBC’s blogs, but my posts apparently didn’t get through. Based on the lack of coverage, I have come to the following conclusion: Gravel is a Superhero, with the power to cloud people’s minds and become invisible at will. Imagine what he could do as President! He could avert wars, settle disputes of all sizes, stop criminals, and usher in an era of peace and prosperity. And those are only the powers we know about! If he picked Dennis Kucinich, who has mastery of space-time in his pockets, as his sidekick (or Vice President) the pair could solve environmental problems, fix health care, and solve pretty much any other problem that might come up. I’m sure that Gravel has a weakness–like the color yellow or Kryptonite–but it should only take a small part of our GNP to keep him protected. Since he has the power to cloud our minds, we would have the satisfaction of thinking that we had done it ourselves. And to think–if Hillary Clinton had remembered to acknowledge him, we might never have known.

If you are reading this, you probably know that I have a weblog. I also have a Myspace page, another Myspace page that I maintain for the band, and a Facebook page. Lately, I’ve been getting lots more activity on my Facebook page in particular. Part of that is my fault–I saw that many of my friends were on Facebook, and I added them as friends through the Facebook system. Anyhow, now I have my email to check every day, plus my Facebook profile, plus my Myspace page, if I want to be thorough. Given all that, I’m taking a bit of a sabbatical from updating all those other pages. I’m not going to completely abstain from checking in there, but if you have a message for me don’t count on it reaching me any time soon (or getting a reply) if you send it through Facebook. Someone should invent a meta-networking site that condenses all of the other social network stuff into one page…

We now take time from our regular blog for a political message. I find it highly disturbing that the media is restricting the field of candidates in the presidential debates to candidates who are above a certain threshold of support in polls. Let me break it down: candidates are in the race because they have met legal criteria for getting on the ballot. The media spend a huge amount of time talking about a handful of candidates–calling them frontrunners–and a negligible amount of time talking about other candidates–calling them marginal and implying through what limited coverage they give that those “marginal” candidates are not really in the race. Then, the media conduct polls asking the public which candidates are the frontrunners–and when those polls confirm what the media has been telling everyone to believe, they refuse to allow “marginal” candidates to participate in debates. I mean, the polls prove that the candidates are marginal–right? Or maybe the polls are just a way of legitimizing the distorted coverage that the media provide. Maybe we should institute a policy that would require the media to give equal coverage to all candidates from the beginning.

Anyway, I’ve made my decision, and I’m throwing my early support to Mike Gravel. Seriously–I like what he has to say. Of course, I suspect that the only way that he will get elected is if the moon crashes into the Earth and he happens to be the only surviving candidate. Especially since he isn’t being allowed to speak in the debates.

E. and I celebrated turkey day in Athens with her folks, who drove down as a short vacation. We had a feast–E. and I shouldn’t have to cook again for a while. This year I decided to brine the turkey, following an example in a cooking magazine. I will always brine turkeys in the future if there is time; it was great! The brining liquid consisted of 10 dried ancho chilies, 35 cloves of garlic, two onions, and four apples ground in the food processor, mixed with a cup of salt, about half a cup of brown sugar, two quarts or so of apple cider, and enough water to cover the rest of the bird. The turkey soaked in this mix for about 15 hours, then baked in the oven for just over 2 hours at 450 degrees. E.’s folks cooked side dishes, and E. made both an apple crisp and a pecan pie.

In addition to eating, we had to do some emergency medical care for Fuzzy Duck, who was visiting us for the holiday, but that is a long story–all of which you can read online.

In a previous post, I mentioned that the Rough Bark Candyroasters (the anthropology department band) were in a transition period. All of the band members except me have left town, so practices had become both much more spontaneous and much less productive. Since then the band has reformed, and I have updated the band’s MySpace page. We played a short set at an event called “Pioneer Day”–folks applauded, so apparently we were a hit.

Anyhow, friends and family know that I have eclectic musical tastes. I like the Johnny Cash, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Sting, No Doubt, the Dead Kennedys, and so on. Anyhow, I was listening to Woody Guthrie’s Dust Bowl Ballads a few weeks ago, thinking about how it related to the drought in Georgia, and on a whim I posted something to craigslist, thinking that maybe some Athens musicians could play a few songs and raise awareness of the drought. (My band, the Rough Bark Candyroasters, is in a reformation period since everyone but me has moved out of Athens.)

The idea took off. We’ve had meetings downtown for the past few weeks including ecologists, musicians, members of conservation organizations, and others, and now it has turned into a full-fledged music festival. I think we can call it that, since there will be two stages of music at once. The Athens Dust Bowl Ga. Drought Awareness and Benefit Concert will be held in Athens at the 40 Watt and Flicker Theatre and Bar. We have 11 bands lined up to play covers of Woody Guthrie songs plus their own original music, and donations are going to help install low-flow showerheads in low income households in Athens. Of course, the higher income households may actually be using the most water, but they can buy their own showerheads. And the kicker: I’m still involved in helping to organize things, but there is no “organizer”–the whole thing is running as an autonomous collective!