Selling body parts

There are 74,000 people on the waiting list for a new kidney, and in 2006 about 4,400 died before they could get a kidney. Yet in the U.S., it is illegal to pay someone money for their kidney. What do you think -- should it be legal?

Cockney Rhyming Slang

When I was in England, I was surprised by how numerous the different words they use for regular things are. Perhaps most fun among the differences is cockney rhyming slang, a mainstream part of language in England that is virtually unknown here. People will use a rhyme for a word instead of the word itself -- usually a shortened version of the rhyming word. For example, people will often say "use your loaf", because "loaf of bread" rhymes with "head". They will go up the apples ("apples and pears" rhymes with "stairs") with shoes on their plates ("plates of meat" rhymes with "feet"), they will have a butcher's ("butcher's hook" rhymes with "look") and they will tell porkies ("pork pies" rhymes with "lies"). We Americans are called septics ("septic tank" rhymes with "yank"). The number of such slang terms is enormous.

Some cockney rhyming slang has entered the American lexicon. When people refer to money as "bread", they probably don't realize it comes via "bread and honey". Or that "put up your Dukes" rhymes "Duke of York" with "fork" (your fists being forks by shape).

In some cases, the rhyming slang becomes common enough that it, in turn, gets rhymed. A particularly notable triple-rhyme is the term "plaster" meaning "arse". That's because "plaster of Paris" rhymes with "Aris". And "Aristotle" rhymes with "bottle". And "bottle and glass" rhymes with "arse" if you have a British accent. So the English can kick someone in the bottle, or in the Aris, or in the plaster, it all means the same thing now!

Gotta go, I'm wanted on the dog and bone... er, that's the phone! Later.

Tori

Equatorial Guinea

What's the richest country in Africa? That's right, it's Equatorial Guinea. Thanks to its oil wealth, its per capita GDP is $50,200 -- that's right, higher than the US, and in fact second highest in the world! Surprised that you haven't heard of this island of wealth before? Don't be. The people are dirt poor, mostly living off of subsistence farming and fishing, and woefully underdeveloped. All that money, enough to give every man, woman, and child among the highest standards of living in the world, all go to the authoritarian ruler.

You might just shrug this off as another depressing country in Africa, but there's a lesson here for us. GDP is not a good indicator of living standards, because it does not tell you how wealth is distributed. So often people say our economy is doing well, based purely on GDP, when in fact it's doing well for a very small portion of the population while the large majority stagnates. This has in fact been happening here in the US during the last decade. So, something to consider. (I discussed a similar issue in an earlier post.)

(Other tidbits: Equatorial Guinea is the least populated country in Africa, at half a million people. Though nearby, the equator does not fall on the country itself.)

豆花 (douhua): Found! (confirmed)

In an addendum to my previous post, I went and had the douhua, asked for all 5 toppings (peanut, red bean, tapioca pearl, lychee, and my favorite, taro balls!). It was good. That makes it official, this place exists in New York.

Also, I am quoted in three articles. A weak and mangled quote in The Daily Iowan, and global warming stuff in The Christian Science Monitor and The Mauritius L'express.

Also, I'm sick, languishing in bed. I expect sympathy. Nay, I demand it. Give it here.

Think Coffee

I am on the hunt for a cafe in which you can chill on couches. I miss DC's Tryst, and the only thing I've ever found in NYC is DTUT, which recently closed. (Places like Esperanto Cafe, with just one sofa, are hopeless, they are always taken.) So, if you know any good places, let me know.

Went to Think Coffee this weekend (on Mercer between 3rd and 4th). It is pretty spacious, the coffee with barista feel and the crowd with a college vibe, and the place sports three couches (just enough that you might actually get a spot) as well as free wireless and board games, all practically inviting you to sit there all day. With its airy ceilings and bright lighting, it doesn't have the cozy intimacy that DTUT (or Tryst) had, but I like the fact that their coffee is fair trade, organic, shade grown, and that they give 10% of profits to charity. Yay!

(Appreciate my reviews? Yawn and skip over them? Let me know, so that this blog can best serve its readers!)

豆花 (douhua): Found!

We have a winner! I have, since coming to New York, complained that one of the things we're missing here is 豆花 (douhua) with toppings, and even put out a challenge to anyone who could find one. While would-be winners have sent me on various wild goose chases, the miraculous Pei-Cen seems to have found a real place, and provided photographic proof!


Of course, the win isn't confirmed until I have the stuff sliding down my gullet, but for any of you who have also looked for this holy grail, it's at 41-39 Kissena Blvd right off Main Street in Flushing.

Yay Pei-Cen! Came through for me a second time!

(All you knights still questing, the search for 潤餅 (ruanbing) is still unrequited.)

Yum, Mercury!

Another one for the sushi crowd. According to the New York Times:

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency. ... Although the samples were gathered in New York City, experts believe similar results would be observed elsewhere.[Source: NY Times]

(Yes, Nobu has particularly high levels.) So, if you're getting sushi, go for some cruelty-free avocado or shiitake or fried sweet potato ones and avoid the, you know, brain damage.

No primary winners

Are you following the primary elections? One thing that annoys me is the media's insistence on declaring a winner of each. This does not makes sense, it is all smoke and mirrors.

Unlike the run for the presidency, which is winner take all, and even winning by one vote means you get all the state's delegates at the electoral college, the primary system is not like that. Candidates get delegates roughly in proportion to how well they do. This means that a "win" doesn't really matter, it's how many delegates you get, and a an advantage of a few percentage points matters little. For example, Clinton has been declared winner in three of the four states that had elections so far, but she has won the most delegates in none of them!

More important still, in a race with a bunch of candidates, a "win" may mean only that your opposition was split between several candidates, which can easily combine to defeat you in the end. For example, in South Carolina McCain beat Huckabee and Thompson, who split the far-right evangelical vote. But had only one of the two been running, either one would have beat McCain handily. This means that the winner was the least popular of the three overall in the state, but still won, which is clearly unfair. It also means that the evangelical delegates might coalesce around one of the two and defeat McCain anyway in the convention. (Not in South Carolina, which unfairly gives almost all its delegates to McCain, but the point is that you can "win" in every state but still lose the nomination.)

This may seem like complicated nothingness, but it really matters. If the media declares someone the winner and other people the losers, it makes people think they shouldn't waste their vote on a candidate with no chance. The media's interpretation affects the election, which should make them very circumspect about how they present things. But of course, it doesn't. It sells more papers to make this a football match, announcing winners and talking about people taking a beating. Don't buy into the nonsense.

Giuliani: A Nasty Man

You may have heard that Rudy Giuliani was a bully, but the depths of his Putin-esque ruthless vindictiveness was quite amazing, as this article in the New York Times gives example after example of lives ruined for criticizing him as mayor, and of people who wouldn't dare criticize him out of fear. Anyone considering him as president should be aware of his tyrannical style, and read the article.

Happy Tu B'Shvat!

This evening is Tu B'Shvat, the "birthday of the trees". Don't forget!

(Oh, and happy Martin Luther King, Jr. Day too. Go civil rights!)

Girl on girl action

What percentage of women would you guess have had a homosexual experience? Before you read on, take a guess, so you can compare to mine. Got it? (While you're at it, guess for men as well -- is it a higher or lower percent?)

When someone told me their estimate -- that most women have at least experimented, I was so skeptical and shocked that I had to ask around. My survey of four other female friends gave guesses of 40%, 40%, 25%, and 70-80%. So I was flabbergasted. They also all thought it would be higher for women than for men, because there's more of a stigma on male homosexuality (one said, "while for women, it's almost cool!")

The interesting thing is not just how widespread this impression is, but how very wrong it is. Here are numbers from studies -- which by the way all agree that rates are higher for men than for women!

1990 study published in Nature by a British team: 4% of women said they had "some" homosexual experience.

1993 Janus survey: 17% of women had had at least one homosexual experience.

1993 Harvard School of Public Health: 3.6% percent of women reported a same-sex partner in the previous five years.

1994 National Opinion Research Center study: 4% of women reported engaging in at least some homosexual behavior since puberty.

1994 Laumann survey: 2.2% of women had sex with a woman over a five-year period; if the time period is extended to include their entire lives, this increases to 3.8%.

2000 study in Britain: 9.7% of women reported having had at least one sexual experience with a member of the same sex.

[Sources: 1,2]

Clearly results vary, but just as clearly, rates are nowhere near as high as people seem to think. Experimenting with homosexuality is clearly freakish behavior (not that there's anything necessarily wrong with that -- that's a separate question entirely). (Note that rates of people who have had ongoing homosexual relationships, or self-describe themselves as gay or bi, are much lower than these numbers.) Apparently popular culture is giving people a truly distorted impression. Either that, or the people I know are wildly unrepresentative.

How about you, how did your guess compare?

The Edge with Jake Sasseman

I was interviewed on global warming for the late night show The Edge with Jake Sasseville that will come after Jimmy Kimmel starting in February (on ABC everywhere except New York, where it'll be on Channel 9). We were filming in the freezing cold in Tompkins Square Park. I don't know what I was expecting, but the questions were ridiculously simple: "What is global warming?" "What can we do about it?" How does someone become a TV star now? Before doing the interview, I talked to the writer, which just begs the question for me... what did he write? Those questions? The world of TV mystifies me. As did the fact that off camera people kept saying to me, in a surprised and impressed tone, "You're so knowledgable", which is a strange thing to say to someone brought on as an expert on the subject. Shouldn't they have been surprised if I wasn't knowledgeable? With stuff like that, and the fact that we were talking about global warming while filming in the freezing cold shivering and bundled in hats and gloves--literally pulling his hat down over his head while I was talking about warming temperatures--I almost expected there to be some joke, some reality-show twist, something like that, but that shoe never dropped.

There was a humorous moment when he asked if I thought Al Gore deserved to have been chosen as Time's Man of the Year, and when I said he did a lot of important work, Jake turned it around and said, "So you think they shouldn't have chosen Putin?" That made me smile at his trick question. But he said he wasn't going to use that.

Still, I wonder what they'll end up doing with it. It won't air until April.

Later in the day me and my girlfriend had dinner with Kei her boyfriend Alan at Candle Cafe. Alan would be Tori's boyfriend's ex-girlfriend's ex-boyfriend's ex-girlfriend's boyfriend. Which is why this meeting had to happen. I don't know how their food was, but my cabernet grilled seitan was amazing. Would be nice if all meat-eaters could try New York City vegan food to know what they're missing. All vegans too, actually.

Zen Burger and Zenith

Two restaurant reviews:

First, Zen Burger, a vegetarian version of McDonald's that aims to go nationwide. I appreciated the retro decor, at least compared to regular fast-food-joint style. However, they only had one vegan choice, and it was one of the worst veggie burgers I've had. Their soup was also really weak. This is such a great idea, that I am so disappointed people will think this is what being a vegetarian means! Sadly, I will not be going back.

Second, Zenith is a restaurant I ate at ten years ago, in 1998, when I visited New York during my grad school days. That trip has a lot of nostalgia for me, because I completely fell in love with the city and said at the time that I'd want to live here. That never went away, and eventually, well, here I am! During that trip we stumbled upon this vegetarian restaurant. The food was only okay, so I never went back after I moved here. However, last night I gave it another try. The decor is completely different (changed for the better), and it has been combined with an Asahi sushi non-vegetarian thing. The Crepes Esperantes that I remember having last time were still on the menu. Still, this time the food was good! I ordered the pumpkin ravioli, and gave another person's make-your-own-dish a try too, and both were quite good. This place exceeded my expectations, and I will be back!

Control of the debate, and Boltzman brains

Kucinich was not allowed in the Nevada debate. Apparently NBC executives, arguing in court that as a private company they can do whatever they want and it's free speech, have decided for the people of Nevada which candidates they can and can't get the opportunity to hear. Why have elections, when the candidates are preselected for you? Does this not trouble people, that you can only have a chance if you're preapproved by some non-democratically chosen bigwigs? If the argument is, Kucinich doesn't have a chance, then on what basis are the deciding so for the people? On the basis of polls, which are notoriously unreliable predictors of elections? Of course the polls aren't going to register support for a candidate that people haven't had the opportunity to hear from -- kind of a "chicken and egg" problem. [Rant ends here]

On a separate note, there's an interesting article in the New York Times on Boltzman brains--the likelihood that we are a momentary brain floating about in space. The article has to do with cosmology and the direction of time and such, but behind it is the simple concept that, if the universe lasts forever, then anything--no matter how ridiculously unlikely--has to happen eventually. The chances that random molecules floating about space will happen to come together, in one huge coincidence, into the form of your house with your body in it sitting at your table with your exact memories and thoughts, is ridiculously low, so low it would never happen in a billion trillion quintillion years. But given eternity, it will have to happen eventually. So, then, we will all be reincarnated, maybe we already are.

Chiho Aoshima

When I was in London, going up the escalator in the Tube, I saw a poster for an art exhibit with an example that was so captivating I tried to memorize the name of the artist to look up later. Alas, I could not remember the name two minutes. But thanks to Kei (and to blogging), I have found her: Chiho Aoshima. So, let me share, maybe you will like these too.

City Glow

Japanese Apricot

Miss Sunset
Admittedly, not all her art is so pretty -- some if it is quite grotesque -- but these are the kind I like. (Sorry, Kei, not a big fan of Murakami, remember seeing his stuff at MoMA and thinking, nice effort.)

Juno

I saw Juno. Loved it! Don't want to overhype, it's definitely a "small" movie, but the acting was great all around (and it was nice to see Jennifer Garner playing a non-superhero), and it made me happy.

My new word of the day is "saveloy", a bright red spiced sausage common in England which is made from all the animal parts no one otherwise eats (really, do not eat these, if only you knew!), and is also used as cockney rhyming slang for "boy" (not in the sense of a child, but in the sense of "one of the gang"), for example in the phrase "Oi Oi Saveloy".

New Year Fireworks at Taipei 101

Fireworks at the world's tallest building. Yay. (Don't ask me why the building says Taiwan in English.)

Marc and Macke

And, since I'm doing pictures, here's some German expressionism:

Franz Marc


August Macke


What's one of your favorite paintings (preferably not by an A-lister)?

Polls and Pundits

Did you hear about Clinton's surprise victory? A few days ago, she was a front-runner, then suddenly she's a comeback kid. Why do pundits nonstop try to guess who's ahead and who's behind? What's the point? Discuss the issues, the candidates, and after the election see who wins. But all this talk about campaign strategy, why would that interest anyone? The Post is full of articles about how people are responding to Clinton's emotional moment, or whether Huckabee will go negative, or how Obama is responding to a Congressman who used his middle name, and of course the guessing, polling, predicting who will win. All nonsense, meaningless gibberish, reading of tea leaves. The airwaves are full of this stuff. And I haven't a clue what any of their positions are on prison reform, instant runoff voting, trade disputes with the E.U., saving social security, or anything other than a tiny set of issues (health care, Iraq, immigration, gay marriage) on which they generally stake out poll-tested positions. It's so frustrating!

By the way, tried some recipes from Veganomicon. They were good, but not amazing.

Fish can reason

Fish are always neglected in the world of animal lovers. People just have less sympathy for them, I guess because they're not fuzzy and cuddley, and can't scream when hurt. You've probably heard the old myth that fish have 3-second memories (in fact, the can remember things for many months at least).

A study shows that they have reasoning abilities that humans are capable of only at 4 or 5 years of age. Cichlids were allowed to watch fights set up between different pairs of fish, and then were able to figure out which fish was the weaker in pairings that had not yet been matched up. [Source: LiveScience, msnbc]

I'd posted before about fish being taught to play fetch. The moral is, they're a lot more intelligent and capable than most people think.

What do you think, Levi? ;)

S'mores

In the dead of winter, there's nothing like making s'mores.

Speaking of food, Zen Burger is now open, by the owners of Zen Palette, a McDonald's like fast food looking place that is 100% vegetarian, near Grand Central. I should try it.

Also, I learned about a restaurant called 4 Course Vegan, open only on Saturdays in a secret location in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, where for $40 a person, you can share a communal table for a four-course meal by chef Matteo that I'm told is excellent.

Reminds me of a place someone told me about that you can only know about if you know the phone number, which changes regularly, so that you can only find out if you know someone who knows. He'd been there once, but no longer has a way in.

Green tea cupcake

You may have heard me talking about making green tea cupcakes from the recipe book Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. This book's recipes are for the best cupcakes in the world, far surpassing any cupcake, vegan or not, I've ever tasted. I have blogged before about their amazing s'mores and tiramisu cupcakes. I bought all the ingredients for green tea cupcakes, and they've been waiting there for me to get to it. For months. I've been all talk.

Well, an amazing person went ahead and baked them for me. And they are a-maz-ing. Omg, they are sooo good. Because I didn't make them, I can't share them with you, but all I can say is, oh... oh....

And, aren't some people so nice that you just want to eat them up? I was touched.

I could talk about the Kashmir exhibit at the Asia Society & Museum, or that stupid movie National Treasure: Book of Secrets, but that's not interesting to y'all. I just couldn't leave out the cupcake though.

Placebos

It is well known that, 30% of the time, a placebo is just as effective as real treatment. We don't know how a sugar pill can cure diseases through the magic of psychology, but really, isn't the mechanism ancillary? The point that I have long made is that placebos do work, they do cure diseases, and that doctors should therefore consider using this placebo effect to treat people in cases when that is the most promising treatment -- for example, when real treatments don't exist or have dangerous side effects. There is some moral issue here is giving the patient "fake" medicine, but in my mind it's not really fake if it really works, and this has been shown in double-blind clinical trials.

Apparently doctors agree. A recent study of Chicago-area doctors found that 45% have prescribed placebos. What's more, the American Medical Association isn't against using placebos as long as the patient gives informed consent to the idea that they may be prescribed placebos. It seems my thinking has gone pretty mainstream. [Update: this is true of American doctors generally too. Source: NY Times 10/24/08]

My other issue is, why don't doctors use so-called "alternative" medicine, like acupuncture, that has been proven to work? Western medicine shouldn't be about a Western model, it should be about science: do whatever has been scientifically shown to work! Let the my-thinking-becomes-mainstream fairies get to work on this one too.

Happy 2008!

I've been busy entertaining others and myself this holiday season. For New Year's Eve, I went to Philadelphia to see their beautiful fireworks timed to music. I missed the fireworks,* missed meeting my friend Chialing,** missed another friend's party,*** and wandered through desolate streets of shuttered stores, closed restaurants, and darkened museums.**** Good times.

Philly is such a cute city full of great memories, that I had a good time anyway, and saw Washington Square Park, which I guess I hadn't visited before, at which I apparently stood on a mass grave of thousands of Revolutionary War soldiers. I also stayed with my old friend from college Ed, a.k.a. "You Don't Know Who I'm Talking About Do You" (see right), now sporting a "winter beard", who was a very nice and gracious host, and acted as guide showing us the Mummers Parade (yawn) and Elfreth Alley (old and so cute). All you should note is Philly's only good vegetarian chinese restaurant (the ones in Chinatown are horrible), and so pretty on the inside: Su Xing (on Sansom near 16th St). Also had yummy 豆花 (douhua) with peanut and sago, my personal Philly tradition.

What did you do for New Year's? Please share!

Before that, I visited Whole Foods Bowery, which I do just for fun to look around even if I'm not buying anything, that place is such a pleasure. This one has such amenities as a beer room and a climate-controlled fromagerie for cheese, neither of which interests me, but they're still cool. The upstairs area has tables, couches, an amphitheater-like area, a grill, a sushi counter with sushi on conveyor belts, a bridge leading to a book room, and so on.


* Lingered too long at Johnny Rockets. Damn you, delicious burger and dancing waiters!
** Damn you, holiday traffic and tied up phone lines!
*** Damn you, parties that end before 2am!
**** Damn you all, damn you to the firey bowels of hell!*****
***** A.k.a. Camden, NJ.