The Cloisters and Metropolitan

I have spent the last day looking at (mostly medieval) art with my new favorite museumgoing partner.  I'm in Teaneck, staying with the Feldmans, and Peninah and I took the bus across the Hudson to visit the Cloisters, New York's European monastery, imported piecemeal by John D. Rockefeller, Jr.  We had been up since before seven that morning, and arrived at the Cloisters at 10:00 am.  I haven't been to the Cloisters since I accompanied the rest of Mrs. P-B's Medieval History class, when I was a senior in High School, nearly four years ago (and the only time before that was also with Mrs. P-B, come to think of it, when I was a High School sophomore).  Very little has changed, but more significantly, Peninah is such a great traveling buddy, and knows New York City's public transportation system far better than I do.

We saw some amazing pieces in the Cloisters.  Although there were many pieces that I remember having seen before, such as Robert Campin's Merode triptych, the hunting-themed playing cards, Rogier van der Weyden's Nativity, the series of Unicorn tapestries, and the arcades and courtyards of the Cloister buildings themselves, all of these felt refreshingly new and interesting.  To some extent, I owe this to my energetic traveling companion, who pointed out to me at least one detail I had never before noticed about every piece that we discussed.  To some extent, I'd like to think, this was due to my deeper appreciation of art history, specifically knowledge of technique and style, and their relationship to geography and chronology, thanks to my exposure to Western art in European art museums and in Professor Lazzaro's class.  Regardless, it was good to revisit these pieces, as well as to notice pieces that I had never noticed or admired before.  For instance, I had never noticed the 12th-century pane of stained glass from Canterbury Cathedral, depicting the martyrdom (by fire) of Saint Lawrence.  Although the Cloisters have some pretty amazing pieces, I had never realized that they had stained glass surviving from the largest cathedral in England!  Likewise, I don't think that I had ever noticed the fully-illuminated copy of Saint Augustine's City of God (I hadn't read the Confessions the last time I visited, and may not have recognized the book's historical significance).  Likewise, I had never noticed the Cloister's pilgrimage badges before, again, because I don't think that I knew what pilgrimage badges were (in my mind, devised by the same kind of mind that came up with tiny Eiffel Tower keychains).  I know for certain that I never would have spent as much time scrutinizing the long genealogical tree of Jesus, dating from 13th-century England, had Peninah and I not tried to figure out all of the links in the chain.  Unfortunately, our games of name-that-apostle showed that neither of us really can interpret most the distinguishing symbols added by the artist, beyond maybe the keys always held by Saint Peter.  You see a row of twelve guys, and all of them are holding books, and most of them have beards -- how on earth do you tell one from the other?  Art historians can, but I know that I certainly can't.  I learned in the course of this, and in attempts to identify Biblical scenes in tapestries that Peninah is far better at reading artwork than I am.  One art style that we both could recognize was the glazed Andalusian pottery: the Muslim influence is very obvious in medieval Spanish Christian art.  The Cloisters were full, if not crowded, mostly by Europeans, if the languages that I overheard were any indication of nationality.  I guess that Europeans visit the great City of New York at about this time of year, and find that the most cultured part of town is imported from home.  That's just my guess.

Despite some subway (I'm not allowed to call it "The Metro") issues that arose involving broken ticket machines, we made it to the strip of Museums on the East Side.  Although we had already paid admission to the cloisters, which got us in to the Metropolitan Museum for free, we still needed to wait in what was a very, very long line of tourists, just to enter.  Luckily, the line went very quickly, and it turned out that the amount of time it takes to wait in line to visit the Metropolitan Museum is almost exactly the amount of time that it takes to eat a sandwich, luckily for us.  Checking our bags would have been nuts, so we headed straight towards the galleries of European paintings, at my request.  We saw some Georges de la Tour, some Goya, and some Caravaggesque paintings, before we hit all of the Dutch landscapes.  While Peninah sat for a moment to look at a Dutch countryside, I darted off to look at a Vermeer painting that I hadnoticed, that I didn't recognize, "A Maid Asleep," circa 1670-1674. I was suddenly surrounded by a Japanese tour group, all clustered around the Vermeer painting, and I eventually extricated myself to find Peninah, passing some Rembrandt self-portraits on the way.  We came out to the balcony to find the display of musical instruments that Peninah wanted to see, including some horns with unpronounceable names and indescribably contorted shapes.  She has the pictures on her phone, if you're ever interested.  Across the courtyard was a fantastic display of 19th-century American glasswork and ceramics.  It was mostly functional tableware: bottles, flasks, vases, cruets, that kind of thing.  The difference between antebellum and postwar work was obvious: art became significantly more decorative and skillfully-wrought after 1865.  Peninah was particularly impressed by a lemonade glass, I believe from the 1870s or 1880s, and neither of us could exactly tell what a "celery vase" was, although we saw several.  There were a lot of ugly, ostentatious pieces, many of them from Tiffany's.  My new word of the day was "opalescent."

We found ourselves in the American wing.  We ended up visiting some cramped period rooms (where we learned what differentiates a chocolate pot from a teapot), some of them courtesy of the Van Renselear family, and seeing a special exhibit on women's sports clothing from the interwar period, which I wish my Mother had been present in order to see.  We also discovered the concept of "open storage:" the Metropolitan allows museumgoers to visit its storerooms of furniture and paintings not on display.  Much of it is fairly nondescript, and I can easily understand why it isn't out.  In one row of otherwise plain furniture, were a very remarkable table and desk, which turned out to have been designed by Frank Lloyd Wright. 

We descended to the galleries of American paintings.  We saw the famous "Washington Crossing the Delaware," an awful lot of official portraits (including much more George Washington), pieces by John Singleton Copley, the Peale family, and Benjamin West.  Those guys.  There was a room full of art that was so ugly that Peninah couldn't bear to stand in it, and, to be honest, I agreed with her.  We had only about thirty minutes left before the museum closed, so we ran off to the opposite wing of the museum to find the Muslim art, from the Abbasid, Spanish Umayyad, and Seljuk periods, in Arab and Persian lands (we never got into the Turkish or later South Asian rooms).  Archaeologists from the Metropolitan had helped to excavate an Iranian site from the 12th century, find all sorts of beautiful art objects and jewelry in their digging.  It made me think: some of these things were surely lost, others left behind.  Why did nobody ever try to recover them?  Surely, if one was fleeing, or going into exile, the bulky bowls that we found whole and undamaged would have been too cumbersome.  But why weren't they looted, or stolen, or recovered?  One of the most interesting pieces we found was world's earliest nearly-complete chess set (it's missing a pawn), from 12th-century Nishapur, Iran.  I wondered how the archaeologists could be certain that the knights, rooks, and bishops were correctly identified (pawns are easy, and the two central pieces, now the King and Queen, but at other times the King and Vizier, closely resemble each other).

It was dark by the time we made it back to Teaneck, but we had had a wonderful (if tiring) day of museums, with no mishaps.  Good going, Peninah!

~JD

I made it to New Jersey!

Hi cool people!
If you're a fellow Cornellian, I hope that you're taking this opportunity to escape the snowscape that is now Ithaca.  Although Ithaca, New York serves as a kind of gravity well for me, I managed to make it all the way... to Teaneck, New Jersey.  No, Teaneck is not as far as Paris, Florence, Tzfat, or any of the other cities that I've visited since I began this blog (as a travel blog).  However, I'm here because it's the home of some very special people in my life, namely the Feldman family, who have been kind enough to host me.  Peninah, knowing that I would otherwise have little excuse to get out of Ithaca, invited me to Teaneck.  I left on the 7:20 am bus from Ithaca on Friday, read for most of the way, slept for a few parts of it, and arrived in late morning.  Shabbat falls very early here, so I helped peel and cut vegetables in the kitchen for a while, cleaned up as best as someone like me can do, walked the quarter-mile or so to the Beth Aaron synagogue with the Feldman family, and welcomed in Shabbat.  Since then, I've had my learning-time with Peninah, Alex, and their Father, and been kept well-fed (so don't worry, Mom).  Tonight, plans are still up in the air.  Tomorrow, we visit the Cloisters and, maybe the Metropolitan.
OK, I'll have more interesting things to post tomorrow, after some museumgoing with my favorite older sister of Lani's.
~JD

Lovecraft and Poe

Happy snowtime-in-Ithaca!
I haven't updated this blog in a while.  To be honest, I haven't been doing an awful lot, beyond catching up on my sleep and (to a lesser extent) my reading.  Not my thesis reading, mind you -- nothing that productive.
One particular book that's taken up a fair amount of my time is H.P. Lovecraft's Necronomicon.  Like several of the books that I borrowed from Olin library for pleasure reading, it's horror literature, a genre with which I have very limited experience.  Other than some of Edgar Allen Poe's stories, and Maupassant's "Le Horla" (all from the 19th century, I might add), I don't know horror.
Lovecraft writes mostly about the occult: descents into crypts, mysterious countryside killings, demon worshipers, that kind of thing.  From what I know, Lovecraft, in literature, connects early horror writers such as Poe and Maupassant to later horror writers, such as Stephen King, Dean Koontz, etc.
Already a Poe fan (though not exactly an expert), I'm glad to say that there are a fair amount of similarities between Poe's writing and Lovecraft's.  Although I realize that I risk teleology (i.e. trying to show some kind of progression from Poe's horror fiction to that of the late 20th century), as a literary exercise, I'm going to compare -- and contrast -- these two masters of horror.
First of all, although both authors are very literary, Lovecraft is more succinct.  Poe, sometimes to his credit, and sometimes not, can be very wordy.  "A Descent into the Maelstrom," for instance, lasts unbearably long.  Some of Lovecraft's stories, by contrast (and some of the good ones) seem shorter than Poe's poems.  "The Statement of Randolph Carter," for instance, is only a few pages long, but manages to tell a thrilling story in its limited space.  This, in many instances, is a major improvement: Poe is sometimes painfully literary, dwelling on such details as the precise dimensions of protagonists' reading preferences ("The Fall of the House of Usher" comes to mind).
Second of all, Poe's tales dwell far more on the psychological than do Lovecraft's.  The best examples of this are two of Poe's masterpieces, "The Telltale Heart" and "The Raven" (notably, both fairly hort).  All of the story's action occur in the protagonist's own mind.  Not to say that Lovecraft doesn't wind up his readers: in "The Lurking Fear" and "The Rats in the Walls," the mysteries of the killings and of the bizarre noises, respectively, keep the reader in suspense.  However, there's typically something far more substantial about Lovecraft's frights than Poe's.  Which brings us to another enormous difference between the two writers.
Lovecraft portrays actual monsters.  Organic, flesh-and-blood monsters running around, whose existence is not explainable through normal laws of nature.  "The Unnameable," for instance, makes this point explicit.  While the narrator's interlocutor scoffs at his belief in a horrific monster, and, moreover, the belief that the image of its face has remained suspended in certain windowpanes, the narrator (a horror writer) firmly does, and spends most of the story providing what he considers to be valid proof of the monster's existence.  The conversation reaches it climax at nightfall, when the monster they'd been discussing ambushes them -- and the two characters awaken in hospital beds.  The wound marks that cover their bodies could only have been the result of a real, horned, clawed monster, and the two characters bluff the hospital staff by telling them that they had been attacked by an enraged bull.  Meanwhile, the closest to any living nonhuman monsters I can think of in Poe's stories are the ape in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and the horse in "Metzengerstein."  The overwhelming majority of Poe's demons and monsters are all part of the human psyche ("The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Telltale Heart"), or the forces of nature themselves ("Into the Maelstrom" and "The Masque of the Red Death").
The point of Lovecraft's "The Unnameable", it seems to me, is that the narrator's horror stories (and, by extension, Lovecraft's own) are as piercing and frightening as they are, because they are based on reliable, historical fact.  This is something else that Poe's and Lovecraft's stories share in common: their attempt towards perfect, chilling reality.  Although I can't find the citation right now, Orwell wrote about Poe's stories (citing "The Black Cat" in particular) that, though some of the characters and their actions seem insane, their's is a self-contained madness, in which everything makes cohesive sense, suspending readers' sense of disbelief.  And the self-contained sense of each story hammers the  nerves of the reader, forcing him or her to imagine the most frightening of all possible scenarios, given the circumstances.
Which brings us to the fourth and final distinction.  Although both Poe and Lovecraft imagine some pretty terrible scenarios, they would respond somewhat differently if asked to name the most frightening thing imaginable.  Poe would respond either "live burial" ("Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Live Burial") or "death by wasting disease" (most poetry, "The Masque of the Red Death" as well as events in Poe's own family).  Lovecraft would respond "having one's face chewed off" ("The Lurking Fear") or "chewing off another's face" ("The Rats in the Walls").  This, in my opinion, is crucial, and explains why Lovecraft's stories are so much more frightening than Poe's: although both authors perfectly depict frightening scenarios, the eighty or so years that separated the two makes all the difference in terms of zeitgeist, and there is simply a greater disparity between our own fears and Poe's, and our own fears and Lovecraft's.  Lovecraft's "The Colour from Out of Space" (which resembles Maupassant's "Le Horla" in some respects) terrifies me more than anything else I have ever read, and I doubt that Poe could ever have devised anything as weird and creepy.  Do not mistake me -- Poe ages well, but he still ages.  "MS. Found in a Bottle," for instance, which helped to make Poe's reputation, is a dull read.  Even "The Masque of the Read Death," one of my favorites, has put an 11-year-old to sleep when I tried to read it to him once -- not only because of its lengthy descriptive passages, but because 21st-century Americans fear plagues far less than did 19th-century Americans.
Read both authors' works -- don't pass up either one.  If you don't want to sleep, choose Lovecraft, but if you relish good writing style, choose Poe.
~JD
"Only a real artist knows the actual anatomy of the terrible or the physiology of fear -- the exact sort of lines and proportions that connect up with latent instincts or hereditary memories of fright, and the proper colour contrasts and lighting effects to stir the dormant sense of strangeness" (Lovecraft, "Pickmans's Model," Necronomicon, p. 191).

The Hobbit is a Movie!

We interrupt the regular schedule of this blog to make a brief announcement regarding the quality of the recent live-action adaptation of J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit.
An Unexpected Journey is the first of what will be three movies based on what might be my favorite novel of all time.  For those of you who haven't already this story: I was a sick little kid with asthma, and when I was hooked up to my nebulizer, the only thing that I could do was listen to my Mother read to me, until I became old enough to be able to read myself.  My book of choice was The Hobbit.  When I became old enough, I read it over and over, and pored over the map at the beginning for hours.  Yes, I mean hours.
I have been waiting for Peter Jackson to make a movie of The Hobbit since around the time his adaptation of The Fellowship of the Ring came out.  In other words, twelve years, give or take a few months.
I was naturally super-excited when 'Sools decided to make a CJL trip to see The Hobbit an event, mostly because I know that he of all people is a highly competent organizer, and that I could trust him to make certain that everything was well-coordinated.  It was.  Except for when my ticket fell out of my pocket between Victor's car and the movie theater, and I by sheer chance managed to locate it, lying on the asphalt of the movie theater parking lot.
So how was the movie?
An Unexpected Journey is an excellent portrayal of the beginning of The Hobbit.  Not only that, it adds two major side-plots, one hinted at in the Tolkien saga, the other one, to my knowledge, not appearing in any part of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, or (obviously) The Silmarillion that I remember.  (However, they could be part of an appendix, part of Tolkien's extensive notes, etc.).  In my opinion these side-plots do not detract at all from the main story, but help keep the viewer engaged.  One of them, I know, stars a hero more or less neglected in the tales of Middle Earth -- the other introduces what I believe to be an original villain.
To a Hobbit fan such as myself, it was wonderful to see so many of the familiar scenes enacted on a big screen, with all of the special effects budget that they so richly deserved.  To begin with one minor scene (in both the book and the movie; not a big spoiler), I do not think that the moviemakers could have depicted the Stone Giants of the Misty Mountains any better.  The book is vague about their exact appearance, and their motives for rock-throwing.  The movie depicts them in the liminal space between manifestations of the raw forces of nature, and sentient beings.  There is no doubt that there really are giants throwing rocks at each other -- yet the giants emerge from the mountains themselves, and, to be honest, reminded me of nothing so much as earth elementals from Dungeons and Dragons by their appearance.  Also excellent was the way the movie fleshed out the Dwarves' personalities.  Tolkien really only mentions the specific personalities of a few of the Dwarves (Thorin, Balin, Bombur, etc.), and a few of the Dwarves do not even have occasional character traits attributed to them -- I do not think that there is anything significant ever mentioned about Bifur, for example.  The moviemakers, knowing that of the fifteen main characters, twelve of them cannot be mere stereotypes, make an effort to give all of the Dwarves personal quirks and tags.  My Mother will need to give more input on this issue, but I certainly feel as if there was a very deliberate effort to clothe all of the Dwarves distinctly, to avoid their appearing like clones.
There were absolutely scenes from the movie that could not have existed without these side-plots.  For example, in the book, no worgs pursue the company until after they leave the Misty Mountains.  However, their earlier appearance, explicable by one of the added side-plots I have mentioned, helps keep the pressure up on the company (as well as the audience), and makes what could have been a montage of aerial shots of the Dwarves, Bilbo, and Gandalf hiking through the craggy New Zealand countryside into a gripping game of cat-and-mouse.  However, such additional action details (usually, the moviemakers' changes add rather than subtract action) always remain true to the story: just because Bilbo has a little bit more time with Sting in his hand in the movie than in the book does not transform him into Sir Bilbo the Fearless, or Ninja Baggins.  I approve: movies are paced differently than books, and a perfect adaptation of a book script into a motion picture, even if the book was originally a comic books (I have Watchmen in mind right now) can draw fire from movie critics without emotional ties to the original book.  There's also one scene sure to thrill Tolkien fans who don't mind a little bit of liberty taken with what might have happened behind the scenes at linchpin moments of The Hobbit -- and it's just too juicy a morsel to give away.  I heartily approve, though, and hope that, when you see this scene (believe me, you'll know it when you see it), you'll agree with me.
Of course, there are dozens of missing or altered details.  I really don't care, but for those sticklers out there, here's a short list of aspects of "An Unexpected Party" (Chapter 1 of The Hobbit) that do not appear in An Unexpected Journey.
- Bilbo does not go on and on about all of the Hobbit legends about Gandalf, and his interest in an adventure is much subtler.
- Took family history.
- Reference to second breakfast, elevensies, etc.
- Dwarven hood colors (but, as I mentioned before, this is better for the movie).
- The elvish word "burglar" can also be interpreted "expert treasure-hunter."
- (Most) Dwarf beverage preferences.
- No green smoke rings from Gandalf.
- "Struck by lightning, struck by lightning!"
- The note left on the mantlepiece, which Gandalf brings to Bilbo's attention.
Do not mistake me.  There were excellent lines and references, often cut and pasted directly from the book, not at all lost on me, such as the Legend of Bullroarer Took, adapted brilliantly into the movie script, so that it did not at all feel like a non-sequitur .  Though I did not have a copy of The Hobbit in front of me, I'd bet a drink at the Green Dragon that Gandalf's reminder to Bilbo of his ancestry is lifted word-for-word from The Hobbit. 
I obligatorily need to mention how much I loved the way in which the movie portrayed the famous riddle game.  "Riddles in the Dark" is probably my favorite chapter of The Hobbit, and I highly commend whoever was responsible for the script, storyboard, and precise editing of the movie's depiction of the epic confrontation between Bilbo and Gollum.  The psychology of the whole scene is magnificent, and not just Gollum's schizophrenia and Bilbo's very real fear, but every single line that the two of them exchange.  It is probably the best scene in the entire movie, and will be very difficult for Peter Jackson to top in parts II and III of The Hobbit.
If I could have asked for any differences in the movie, in terms of its general production, I would have requested better music.  The musical score was rather uninspiring, except when the tunes were drawn directly form the Lord of the Rings movies.  I sometimes wonder if the Mordor theme from LOTR will become like the Empire's theme from Star Wars -- I can't hum a single bar of the music I heard last night, though.
An Unexpected Journey makes viewers smile, laugh, and grip their seats in suspense and and anticipation.  It shocks, interests, frightens, and winds up.  Highly recommended; in theaters if you can, on home video if you can bear the wait.
Oh, and did I mention?  I had the opportunity to watch this movie with a lot of highly-attractive people beside and behind me.  That might have been one of the best parts; thank you all for being my friends!

~JD

"You fool, Warren is DEAD!" ("The Statement of Randolph Carter," The Necronomicon, H.P. Lovecraft).

My Favorite App

I just got out of my Art History final, and what with Reubens and Bernini are leaking out of my ears, I don't really feel like any major intellectual undertaking tonight.  So rather than writing my agriculture papers, working on my Chanukah shiur, filling out job applications, translating Vajda, etc., I'm just going to write about my new favorite smartphone app, Fooducate.

Fooducate is a free app that allows the user to scan the barcodes on food packages with the phone's camera, and then locates the product in a surprisingly extensive online database.  The app then tells you a bit about any health risks associated with the product's ingredients, assigns an overall grade from A to D-, and suggests various alternatives.  The algorithm which assigns grades, although it simplifies all of the nutritional contents of a product to fit a single scale, is, as far as I can tell, fairly reliable, having been devised by a team of dieticians, scientists, and computer programmers.  To the right is an example of what the nutritional information looks like.  Do you see the four tabs?  Clicking on each of them will reveal more information
I've taken it shopping with me a couple of times, but both times I was in a hurry, so only once has it actually prevented me from placing a particular product in my grocery basket.  However, I've scanned all of the packages in my room, and, when I go to Wegmans tomorrow night with Victor, plan to deviate significantly from my usual buying tendencies, thanks to things I've learned about specific products, as well as about certain ingredients.  Here are the top twelve things I've learned:

12) Natural- It means nothing: it's an unregulated term, and not part of any USDA or FDA code, to my knowledge.  I already knew that; but what's much, much scarier is that advertisers are aware of this -- and are also aware that most consumers are unaware.  For this reason, one-fourth of new products launched in 2010 included the word "natural" in the product name.  Put a mental block on this word, and never take it as anything more than the advertising ploy that it is.

11) Yogurt - Back in AP Stats, one of my classmates wrote a project on yogurt nutrition, arguing that yogurts are mostly high-sugar desserts.  This was certainly how French people treat most yogurt, gastronomically (fromage blanc is closer to what we think of as yogurt).  I assumed that the kinds of organic nonfat yogurt that I consume, lacking flavorings or sweeteners, were exempt from this kind category.  It looks as if I was... correct.  Almost too good to be true, but Stonyfield Farm organic plain nonfat yogurt receives the highest of ratings, A.  Just see for yourself.

10) Apple Sauce - Not so good news about this category.  It looks as if even the organic applesauces that I consume don't score higher than B+ or so.  Mainstream Motts is in the C category.  I blame the high-fructose corn syrup.

9) "Dirty Dozen" and "Clean Fifteen" - Producers apply more pesticides to certain crops, and relatively little to others; these two categories are known as the "Dirty Dozen" (a growing list, but it used to include twelve, but now comprises sixteen different crops) and the "Clean Fifteen," (now eighteen) respectively.   Alphabetically, the "Clean Fifteen" are asparagus, avocados, bananas, broccoli, cabbage, cauliflower, corn, eggplants, garlic, kiwis, mangoes, onions, papayas, pineapples, peas, sweet potatoes, tomatoes, and watermelon.  The "Dirty Dozen" are apples, bell peppers, blueberries, carrots, cherries, celery, grapes, kale, lettuce, nectarines, peaches, pears, potatoes, raspberries, spinach, and strawberries.

8) Hidden Trans Fat - Well, you know how trans fats are something you should be worried about consuming, and that producers are obligated to state trans fat content?  Guess what -- some foods have trans fats even if their nutrition facts don't list any.  I quote the Fooducate website: "If the amount of trans-fat in a product is less than half a gram per serving, manufacturers can round it down to 0.  But even 0.49 grams of trans-fat is bad for you. And don't even get us started on the actual consumption versus the tiny serving size.  So how do you know if a product does have trans fat in it?  Look for 'partially hydrogenated' oils and fats in the ingredient list."  Beware...

Are you getting enough Vitamin D?  Click here!

7) Vitamin D in milk -You know how most milk products state that they include Vitamin D?  Partially because Vitamin D is necessary for calcium absorption, and milk is high in calcium, many milk manufacturers add Vitamin D to the milk, so that the calcium won't just flush through consumers' systems.  It looks as if milk additives probably aren't the most reliable way to ensure that you're getting enough Vitamin D, especially if you're like me, and drink skim milk.  If you're worried about your Vitamin D levels, consult a dietician.

6) Artificial sweeteners - It's what my Mother always told me, but it looks as if she's right.  Stay away from saccharine and aspartame.  Artificial sweeteners might actually cause more weight gain than ordinary sugar.

5) Clif Bars -- C category, I'm afraid.  I typically consume builders' bars right after my runs.  However, despite high protein and micronutrient content, clif builders' bars are highly processed, and very high in saturated fat.  I'll still have them after my runs, but try harder to limit my intake beyond post-run high-protein meals.

4) Granola -- The granola that I've been consuming is disgusting!  Really!  Just take a look!  I am never, ever, buying this again.  I'm also noting this for the sake of a pair of sisters I know who rather like Wegmans-brand granola.  My suggestion?  Stay far away from it.

3) Canola Oil -- It looks as if a certain gingie was right about why I can't find rapeseed oil on this side of the Atlantic: "canola oil" is really just rapeseed oil!  Canola, a form of oil developed in Canada, is actually a quasi-acronym, standing for CANada Oil Low Acid.  It used to be used as an industrial lubricant (like palm oil), and for this reason, in addition to the fact that purchasing rapeseed oil might upset some consumers.  Although this brings up an interesting question: are young male consumers significantly more likely to purchase extra-virgin olive oil than the typical consumer?

2) Oreos -- It turns out that if you really want some storebought cookies, you should -- choose Oreos.  In addition to the fact that, if you know Prof. Joe Regenstein, who was involved with the project to make oreo production OU kosher, and seeing Oreos therefore instinctively makes you happy, Oreos are among the best choices for cookies, and, if consumed moderately, can be part of a healthy diet.  This is partially because the expected serving size is reasonable -- three Oreos -- whereas other cookie companies, such as Chips Ahoy, deliberately set their serving sizes below the expectations for standard snack sizes (about thirty grams).  Here, I'll quote Fooducate again: "Unlike other industrial cookies, classic Oreo cookies do not have artificial colors or partially hydrogenated oils. And while Oreos are high in sugar, one serving of Oreos (3 cookies) has less sugar than a single serving of most juices.  Bottom line: If you can manage to keep this to a once-in-a-while treat and stick to the 3 cookies serving size, don't be so hard on yourself for breaking out of what is a normally healthy diet.  Stick to classic Oreos to avoid artificial colors and avoid extra stuffing versions that pile on unneeded sugar."  Happy to hear that, Margo?

1) I am never, ever, ever again going to buy those  pumpkin spice bagels.  Ever, ever again.  Sarah, I'm sorry that I ever fed these things to you!  I promise to keep on giving you eggs, though.

OK, good luck on Finals, everyone.  Now get back to work!

~JD

Response to Rising Violence in Israel and Gaza

Following Havdallah this evening, I switched on my computer in order to read the latest news regarding Israel.  I brought my laptop downstairs to the library and, with Judy's help, reported the latest news aloud to the group of my housemates who were playing Halo.  For those of you unfamiliar with the situation, on Wednesday, Hamas fired rockets from Gaza, which set off sirens even in Tel Aviv, Israel retaliated by bombing rocket launcher sites, and killing Ahmed al-Jaabari, head of Hamas's Izz ad-Din al-Qassam military wing. (Israeli Defence Minister Ehud Barak said that targeting Tel Aviv would "exact a price that the other side will have to pay.")  The Israeli attack killed five other Palestinians (including a seven-year-old girl) and injured approximately forty others.  For a brief overview of Israel's and Hamas's operations as of Thursday evening, I turn to the Associated Press: "The Israeli army said 300 targets were hit in Gaza, including more than 130 militant rocket launchers. It said more than 270 rockets had struck Israel since the start of the operation, with its Iron Dome interceptor system shooting down more than 130 rockets bound for residential areas.  Expecting days or more of fighting and almost inevitable civilian casualties, Israeli warplanes dropped leaflets in Gaza advising residents to stay away from Hamas and other militants."
Over Shabbat, a Palestinian-fired rocket set off sirens near Jerusalem, although nobody was injured; this is the first time since 1970 that any Palestinian rocket has fallen near Israel's political capital.  (That is worth repeating: in the year that the last time a rocket landed near Jerusalem, the United States was engaged in the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon was president, my parents were younger than I am now, the Beatles disbanded, Ray Davies wrote "Lola.")  Although rocket attacks may have become familiar to residents of towns like Sderot may have become accustomed to, they don't usually disturb residents of Israel's political capital -- Jerusalem typically has other problems to deal with.  According to one report, Hamas claims to have been aiming to hit the Knesset.  Since the violence began on Wednesday, 492 Palestinian missiles have struck Israel, while the Iron Dome defense system shot down another 245 (about 1/3 of incoming rockets, in other words).  Not all of these Palestinians missiles are from Hamas itself: some are shot by various militant Palestinian Salafist groups. Many of the long-range strikes are carried out using Iran-designed and -funded Fajr-5 missiles, which have a strike range of 75km (see figure above, courtesy of the IDF).  There are several false reports circulating regarding some of these missile hits, including that rockets have struck three IDF bases.  To my knowledge, this is incorrect.

Israel Air Strike in Gaza City, 17 November 2012.

More than 200 Israeli airstrikes struck Gaza Saturday, with a total death count of just under about 43 or so Palestinians, just over half of them militants, with many more casualties.  Property destruction has also been significant: among the buildings destroyed are the Palestinian Prime Minister's office, and a police compound.  The Palestinian Interior Ministry was also a target, but, as far as I know, it was not destroyed.
Representatives from both Egypt and Tunisia have sent representatives to Gaza in signs of Arab solidarity, and Arab countries are planning to convene in Cairo.  Meanwhile, President Barack Obama and Germany's Angela Merkel have affirmed their support for Israel, and have condoned its actions.  "It is Hamas in Gaza that is responsible for the outbreak of the violence"  In Turkey, Prime Minister Erdogan criticizes Israel for having used disproportionate force; I can't find news on the subject from France any earlier than this video from Le Monde, which I think is from Thursday, in which Hollande says that he has taken "Toutes les initiatives pour eviter ce dechainement de violence [All measures to avoid this unleashing of violence]," saying that he had telephoned both Netanyahu and told him that, although he recognized Israel's need to defend itself, advised him not to provoke what could become a growing cycle of violence.  Hollande also spoke to Morsi, telling him to use all possible influence to prevent any further "operations;" without taking clear sides, he seems to want everyone to stop shooting, in the hopes that this will prevent something truly tragic, i.e. war, from breaking out.  (Meanwhile, the French Foreign Minister seems more openly sympathetic with the Palestinian cause, stating that "it would be a catastrophe if there is an escalation in the region. Israel has the right to security but it won't achieve it through violence. The Palestinians also have the right to a state.")
Contrary to Hollande's hopes, all signs indicate that the IDF is preparing for a ground operation.
Seeing this possibility, some commentators have pointed out the similarities to the Gaza War of 2008-9.  Some of you may have read the New York Times article criticizing Israel for not changing its diplomatic and military strategies from 2008 to take into account the political developments in the Arab World, namely the Arab Spring.  The article depicts Israel's approach to all situations as heavy-handed militarism. So does this article, blaming both Israel and the United States for ignorance of a changing situation.

A Hamas officer guarding the smoking ruins
of the former Palestinian Prime Minister's office in Gaza.

Let's review an important figure from the last war: 1,400 dead Palestinians, and 13 dead Israelis, over a period of three weeks.  We all know that no matter how high the body count rises on either side of this conflict, there will still not be peace, and rockets will still fly every week, maybe every day, over the border into Israel.  The Israeli Army is too well-trained and effective for the Palestinians to win in open combat, and Hamas's rocket-launching sites are too spread out for Israel to end rocket fire with anything short of the operations we've seen unfolding this week.  According to a former Israeli official who had been involved in the Gaza War, Hamas "will not stop until enough Israelis are killed or injured to create a sense of equality or balance.  If a rocket falls in the middle of Tel Aviv, that will be a major success. But this government will go back at them hard. I don’t see this ending in the next day or two.”  I think that we may very easily see another war, but not one that end with Israel significantly more secure; any operation, no matter how effective, will probably just reset the clock for a few years.  Ho Chi Minh, commenting to the United States on the futility of its operations in Vietnam, famously said "you can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours.  But even at these odds, you will lose and we will win."  Entirely different situation, but similar concept: no matter what the ratio of casualties is (and I do not foresee any military operation Israeli casualties outnumbering non-Israeli casualties), it cannot put an end to the political conflict.

The Iron Dome defense system in action, shooting down
a Palestinian rocket on Saturday.

As for me, my most pressing concern is the safety of all of my friends in Israel, especially those currently serving in the IDF, or likely to be called up on reserve.  My next concern is for all of the Israeli and Palestinian civilians who constantly live in fear of their own lives, and those of their loved ones.  Israel has been hit by nearly 500 rockets in the past days, several of which have threatened its (rough) equivalents of Washington, D.C. (Jerusalem) and New York City (Tel Aviv).

In all of this,  I cannot help but take a pro-Israel stance.  I would very much like to believe that this is a result of my rational understanding of the facts.  It could be the result of what is undeniably my strong emotional attachment to Israel and Israelis.  It seems to me that Israel has a right to defend itself, if that means bombing rocket factories in Gaza, setting up checkpoints in the West Bank, and destroying Iranian nuclear facilities.  What is upsetting is that so many Palestinian civilians have died in the process; many more will likely die in the next days, weeks, months, years, and, my pessimism tempts me to say, decades.  (As the picture to the right indicates, even a Palestinian partisan would have difficulty attributing the collateral death of civilians in the destruction of missile launch sites to Israeli aggression/vengefulness/carelessness.)   I do not think that we will see an end to this conflict soon.  Short of a Messianic arrival (it doesn't matter in accordance to whose beliefs), I can't envision a lasting peace emerging any time soon.
Another brief word about assassinations and the political nature of scientific institutions.  Many criticize Mossad for its assassinations of Iranian nuclear physicists, many of them involving motorcycles and sticky bombs.  Some of these scientists were professors who taught courses at Iranian Universities.  As the son of a scientist, and the student (and friend?) of many others, it is distressing to think that an academic could not drive to work without fearing that his car will be sabotaged before he can reach his classroom.  Let me say this now, loud and clear: scientists, like it or not, are political entities, just like the rest of us, whether we are students, soldiers, actuaries, educators, lobbyists, accountants, investors, union organizers, salespeople, or artists (yes, that's right -- all art is political, and even the very belief that art should be for art's sake alone is itself a political statement).  Membership in the scientific community, from oldest times, involves politics, and I don't just mean intra-departmental squabbles.  To name just a few famous examples, Aristotle proved with his ethical calculus that Alexander deserved to be ruler of a massive empire; Galileo named four of Jupiter's moons after his patrons, the Medicis; Darwin was an abolitionist, and worked tirelessly to emphasize the unity of the human species.  All of these scientists proved that their research, however much it contributed to human knowledge, did not exist in a political vacuum; rather it, was shaped for (and funded by) political actors and movements of their own times.  Scientific training does not qualify one for exemption from the goals and results of one's work, especially if those results are easily foreseeable. To quote a great writer reflecting on scientists' complicity in nuclear weapons research: "the fact is that a mere training in one or more of the exact sciences, even combined with very high gifts, is no guarantee of a humane or skeptical [sic] outlook. The physicists... all feverishly and secretly working away at the atomic bomb, are a demonstration of this."  So wrote George Orwell in 1945, reflecting on the nuclear politics of his own time.  The same could be said today: anyone who knows that his life's work could be used to carry out his nation's overt goal to wipe another country off of the face of the map makes a very clear political choice, and cannot claim any sort of "intellectual exemption" for his actions.
I strongly suspect that all of my friends and relations who read this will be at least slightly offended.  Sam Law will probably think that I am a brainwashed belligerent Zionist who supports a system of military occupation and state-sanctioned terror.  Lazar will likely criticize me for erring too far on the side of supporting Palestinian terrorists.  To be honest, I don't care.This post is dedicated to all of those dedicated members of the IDF out there.  Good luck out there.
~JD