Whether it’s people cheering for snow or the snots who look down at everyone else with “calm down…it’s just water” (including, incredibly, a friend of mine from Canada), it’s more than  just snow. Four or five inches means that it’s going to be a little messy for a while. More than 20 inches and you’re looking at a natural disaster. Massive power outages, crippled transportation, back roads that won’t be usable for weeks, and untold dollars of tax money for cleanup and lost business dollars. I’ve been amazed at how people have been reacting to this storm the same way they would to any old forecast of snow. It would be like reacting to an impending tropical storm by saying, “It’s supposed to rain the next couple of days”.

2. When people are going to be shut into their houses for the next couple of days, they can and should go shopping. It’s not panic; it’s common sense.

This is a favorite one for the snobs. “Calm down, everyone. You’re not going to starve.” No one thinks they’re going to starve, and very few people I saw at the grocery store were anywhere near panic. Sure, everyone was annoyed, because the store was packed, but it doesn’t mean that everyone in the store the day before a storm hits think that we’re on the doorstep of Katrina II. Hell, my shopping bag was filled with chips and salsa, BBQ and coleslaw and some chili seasoning so Katie could make chili for us. Why did I buy all of these things right before the storm? Because we weren’t going to be able to go to the store for at least a couple days. It’s not a difficult connection to make.

3. The “French Toast Effect” is a myth.

Another one that people like to trot out to feel superior: that everyone runs to the store in the store in a panic just to buy milk, eggs and bread. Wrong. People are going to the store anyway (see #2), and what do people tend to buy more often than not when they go to the store at any time? Milk. Eggs. Bread.

Fine dining is a lot like sushi: when you know that you only get a few bites of something, you make the effort to savor it. And when it’s as rare and dear as a dinner at Komi, you make every effort to concentrate on every bite. And one of the fascinating things about Komi is that they use many of the heavily salty, fatty and sweet tastes of modern food in focused and painstaking ways.  Most of the dishes were a heightened, perfect version of something we’d had many times before, but in ways that would ruin the familiar version forever.

It was an incredible meal, and one that I wanted to make sure I remembered. I wanted to take pictures of each course, but we were asked not to (understandable) and were given a list of the dishes we were given. We made an effort to write down as many details as we could recall. It was a meal that we’ll be talking about and remembering for a long time as the Best Meal Ever (tied for me with a perfect dinner in Chicago, but the time and company had as much to do with that as the meal).

The full meal goes like this…

First courses:

• Kampachi sashimi with chives.
• Fluke sashimi w/ cured olives. These first two dishes were tiny, and while both good and incredibly fresh, there wasn’t any huge taste to either of them. Which is maybe part of the plan.
• Steamed brioche with creme freche and salmon roe. A single bite that was the first taste explosion of the night. They called this “taromasalata”, and I guess it’s deconstructed taromasalata, because it was unlike any I’ve had before. Fantastic.
• Oysters with some kind of creamy sauce. The oysters were absolutely perfect, but the sauces themselves were really good, but not the best part of the meal.
• Scallops two ways: one was in a spoon with some sort of broth, and the other way had a slice of scallop with a black truffle and mustard.
• King salmon (belly?) with smoked pine nuts and something that we couldn’t identify, but was avocado-like. A tiny dish of about 4-5 bites that had impossibly great flavor. A highlight.
• Caesar salad. Or it was called Caesar Salad, but it was a single, breaded piece that tasted like Caesar salad. I don’t know how it worked, but it did.
• “Hoagie”: tiny bite-sized mortadella sandwich between two pieces of extremely soft bread. It seemed unfair to call this a hoagie, since it set me up to be disappointed by every hoagie I have from here on out.
• Octopus with peppers and crispy capers. Phenomenal. The octopus was impossibly tender, and like so many of the other dishes, will spoil me on the common versions forever after.
• Prosciutto with mini cubes of haloumi and picked melon. At this point, Katie said, “This is so good, I think I’m going to cry.” This was when it started getting really amazing. Every taste of this was perfect.
• Huge, steamed dates with mascarpone and coarse salt. I can’t emphasize this enough: Heaven. This was one of the greatest things I’ve ever tasted in my life. No lie, I actually teared up at one point and came very close to blacking out from euphoria.

Two pastas:

• “Boulettas”: gnocci-like pasta with chantarelle mushrooms and blueberries. Very smooth and creamy and got better with each bite.
• Pappardelle with rabbit and black olive puree. It actually was a lot like lasagne, but there was a slight curry taste. Really interesting and delicious (of course), but not my favorite.

Main course:

• Suckling pig with large squares of the crispy skin with homemade, pillow-like pita and served with five sauces: salt with some other herb that we didn’t catch and couldn’t identify, a delicious habanero sauce, a pureed eggplant (like baba ganoush), pickled cabbage (fantastic), tzaziki with mint. The pita was so soft we wanted to use it as pillows…pillows that we could take a bite of.

Pre-dessert:

• Toma Brusca cheese, a little blob of honey, raisins on the vine, and homemade bread, which was fantastic. The cheese was indescribably delicious, and bites made up of all four things were perfect. Even the bread by itself was amazingly flavorful.
• Frozen Greek coffee with sundried cherries
• Birthday treat: something frozen with candied pumpkin on shortbread. It was nice that they brought out a little something extra for my birthday. They even had a little card signed by the whole staff!  A little ridiculous, but still kind of nice.

Dessert:

• Mint semifreddo: the best ice cream cake ever: curried caramel sauce, mint ice cream, cookie base. The curried sauce was a fascinating delicious taste.
• Loukoumades: Greek doughnuts served with a spicy chocolate milkshake. The spiciness of the milkshake was really fun.  The Loukoumades were really tasty, and not as dripping with honey like I’ve had them at other places.
• Lemon lollipops that came with the bill. Perfect sweet and sour combination to end the meal.

Wines:

• Two semi-bitter starter wines, one that was bubbly, one not. Perfect appertifs.
• Two different red wines paired with the pasta dishes, both from Greece. The one that came with Katie’s dish had one of the best smells I’ve ever come across in a wine.
• A pinot noir with the pig. A perfect wine.
• Easily the BEST dessert wine I’ve ever had, and one of the best tastes of anything I’ve ever had. From Samos, said on the label “nectar”. Amazing. I would love to find out what this wine is…it’s incredible.

This level of dining is worth the money every now and then for the memories you get from it. I like vacationing and travel, but it’s almost more worth it to me to spend that money (or, to be honest, a lot less money) on something like that if you know it’s going to be as perfect and memorable as this meal was.

The main argument in favor is, of course, Google. They’ve made tons of money on advertising alone, leaving them open to offer free services whether others are charging thousands or even tens of thousands of dollars.

But Google’s an anomaly, and all other talk is really just wishful thinking. Computer geeks are comfortable with Bittorrent or learning how to look for reputable sources for free stuff, both things that average users don’t know the first thing about. Music geeks devote the time to devouring music, something most casual fans won’t do.  And so to these people, because free is comfortable and convenient for them, it seems inevitable, but many users need a reputable source for their software and music and movies, and so are willing to pay.  And willing to pay means likely to charge.

What Arrington and Anderson really miss, though, is free’s effect on creativity. Anyone who’s ever used open source software or free widgets or applications knows that these things require one very important thing: enthusiasm. The second the developer loses interest in updating or improving it, it dies, and there’s absolutely no obligation or incentive to keep up production. There’s no reason to think that exactly the same thing won’t happen with music. Yes, free gives us quality in the short term, but in the long term, it gets rid of an important incentive to find reasons to continue when the enthusiasm dies down.

There’s many times when I think that our world is changing in ways we can’t grasp, and I think there’s lots of ways where we’ll need to completely rethink our approaches to making money and marketing. But I think that to think that products will eventually free is too convenient and too easy to really be true, or even desirable.

This is a big mistake. The fact that they follow Beck (using Beck here only as a four-letter stand-in for any one of the thoughtless conservative leaders) has nothing to do with intelligence. He’s not convincing unbelievers: he’s preaching to the choir. Every one of the millions of his followers isn’t looking for answers, but for justification. They feel that their way of living and thinking is the right way to be, they want to believe that everyone else is completely wrong, and so they look to the people who will tell them exactly that: your way, your kind and your people are right, and everyone else is wrong and standing in your way.

Likewise, I don’t think that racism is guiding the thought or opinions. Of course, racism is as much of a part of American “conservativism” as it always has been, but that’s not the decider. Those furious people on the Mall and in town halls are bitter. They consider themselves conservatives and Republicans, and voted Republican and a Democrat was elected and Democrats made gains in congress. They’re going to find something wrong with everything that Obama does and says. This anger isn’t based on policy at all; it’s simply contrariness.

Blaming things on stupidity is too easy. Stupidity is the inability to grasp a clear truth or path after considering all options. That’s not (usually) what’s at play here, and attributing it to stupidity is an impediment to debate, and God knows we don’t need any more of those.

ahem

WWII veteran and author Paul Fussell has an oft-quoted list of states of mind that soldiers go through as they spend more time in combat; a “slow dawning and dreadful realization” of the inevitability of death. Simplified (specifics here), they are:

1. It can’t happen to me
2. It can happen to me and I’d better be more careful
3. It is going to happen to me, and only my not being there is going to prevent it

Kept in the context of war, it illuminates the effects that combat has on a person, and how they can go from gung ho to guarded to broken. This is the ultimate point of both the book and miniseries of Band of Brothers.

But I’ve started thinking of those three points in terms of even the sheltered lives that most of us lead far from the horrors of war, and how we slowly go through these steps as our lives move on. They’re often over-simplified as things like “folly of youth” and “wisdom of age”, but really it’s a kind of combat that leads to the worried caution that increases with age. It’s because of this that people get more scared as they get older: because they’ve seen it happen again and again, and it seems more and more inevitable.

I say this to remind myself to not let the stories of horrible things make me worry more. God knows I don’t need to worry more than I already do, but I can’t let stories add on to my guardedness. I was never exactly the soldier charging the front lines with reckless abandon, but I don’t want to be the one cowering the back either.

This happens among those of us working with the web as well. At my workplace–a really insular place–the older people love telling stories of how their kids use Facebook instead of email, which is supposed to signal the impending death of email.

What both these people and the tech writers always miss is that people of any group are going to use the modes of communication that will put them in touch with the people they need to be in touch with. Okay, maybe a 16-year-old will get in touch with their friends through Facebook because their friends are all on Facebook, but put them in an office for a summer internship and tell them to get in touch with the boss. They’ll be using email for that.

If I want to share a thought or article, there’s multiple places I can do it (Twitter, Facebook, Google Reader, this blog), and where I share the thought (or article) depends entirely on who I want to see on, not on the platform I feel is the coolest or the most relevant to the kids. And all those people who try to claim that they’ve hopped off of Twitter/Facebook/whatever simply because it’s no longer cool are wrong: they hop off because it’s no longer useful to them. It’s no more complex than that.

My disappointment wasn’t in the near-anachronistic racism that I learned long ago to roll my eyes at and even use as a party  story (“They said that?! Really?! No!”). And only part of my disappointment was that, once again, self-described conservatives that I know—not people screaming in TV news soundbites—reveal themselves to be the bigots I would be afraid to call them for fear of stereotyping too hard.

My real disappointment is that lack of true, thinking sparring partners. I know all of two conservatives (my dad and a college friend) who give actual decent arguments, and everyone else I know or meet who self-defines themselves as a conservative is philosophically null. This bothers me not just because of the too-grownup realization that most of even the most passionate people’s opinions are nowhere close to reasoned, but because I’ve become a little bit desperate for a thoughtful conservative take.

No matter how flawed Obama and the Democrat’s plans are, there’s no getting around the fact that political discourse in this country is no more than the Democrats/Liberals coming up with a plan and the Conservatives/Republicans saying that’s it’s bad for America. Simply: the liberals are leading for no other reason than the conservatives are doing nothing but following behind, playing “opposite day” with whatever the liberals say and calling it a political stance. No matter what happens, we desperately need someone would can argue the counter, but right now, we have little resembling that from the conservatives. Instead, we just have hate and thoughtless contrariness.

My story isn’t a unique one. Between me and the people I know giving up stories of close friends and relatives behaving exactly as sort of deeply ignorant, racist and disrespectful people that make the craziest of town hall yellers look like the norm instead of the fringe.

That there’s no actual ideas or real rhetoric coming from conservatives is bad enough. But when they step right into a steaming pile of stereotype, it dirties up even the faintest glimmer of logic and reason that they have to offer.

It’s not just that I’ve spent the last twenty years in places where there were few other Astros fans. It’s that, outside of Houston, being an Astros fan is considered freakish. The normal reaction to telling people that I root for the Astros is, “Wow. I’ve never met a real Astros fan before.” It’s not even that people hate them: they don’t even consider them. There’s no romance to being an Astros fan, not even a storied losing streak or curse. I’ve had people refer to them as a “new” team before, only to be surprised to be told they’ve been around for almost 50 years.

But it’s all this stuff that makes me love being an Astros fan: there’s absolutely no reason to be an Astros fan unless circumstances handed that fandom to you. There’s nothing for some kid to grab 1500 miles away from Houston to grab onto and be a random fan. People make fun of my fandom, tease the “choo choo train” in the stadium (um, it’s a nod to the old train station that’s part of the park), make fun of the uniforms, but it only makes me prouder. There is absolutely no reason that I would be a fan of that team unless circumstances had been dealt out just right. I know that my fandom is real.

Back in DC now, I can go back to being excited whenever I see people in caps with the incomplete star, and I can ask people that I see rooting for the Texans or Astros in bars which part of Houston they’re from, knowing that no one would be a fan unless they have a strong connection to the city. It’ll be fun, but it was nothing like being in a stadium full of people that never gave a second thought to their fandom, because it’s just normal.

I really think that the difference between those two types of people comes down to the kind of self-consciousness that fuels a large amount of the best writing and even a lot of the best art at all: recognition of audience. You realize that even if what you have to say is completely self-serving or mundane, there’s someone on the other end of that, and they would like to get something out of it, whether that something is entertainment, enlightenment or even just simple communication of what you’re actually doing (unlike the ubiquitous “is sad” status).

In other words, the good status writers consider how it’s going to be received and the bad status writers just assume everyone will be interested no matter what they write.

First off, it’s a good and necessary reminder that comparison of presidential administrations to the Nazis is nothing new, and that irritating, thoughtless liberals did it from the beginning of the Bush administration to the end. As a slight side note, I’ll say that the fact that the Nazi comparison has become completely useless is kind of a shame, since both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan are hard but valuable lessons not in evil, but in the horrible things that an unquestioning public can be led to believe is necessary and right. But the lesson has been rendered nearly obsolete by overuse.

The difference that the blog misses, though, is that all of those pictures were taken at liberal protests. I mean, we’re talking people who still haven’t come up with anything better than “Hey hey, ho ho”. These are not deep thinkers. Which, granted, is like the town hall crazies. But neither of those people are comparable to people with audiences of millions like Hannity, Limbaugh and O’Reilly.  It’s when those guys start in on that stuff that it really gets disturbing.

Mostly, though, that post calls attention to false arguments that almost everyone uses; arguments that I’ve found myself doing as much as anyone and have started personal campaigns to not do them anymore.

1. Using hypotheticals as actuals
2. Using selective memory as examples
3. Assuming that your own experience is all the experience there is to have

The first one is fairly obvious, but it’s one that I’ve heard on all sides of the argument lately, something that goes a little like this: “You know that if this was {someone else} that {opposite reaction}.” This argument isn’t exactly in that blog post, but it’s in the entire tone: the old “liberal media” conspiracy theory that says that if this was conservatives doing it, you know that it would be totally different. With that same false argument, I could say that if the liberal protesters didn’t get mainstream media coverage, then it was because the conservative media was covering up that there was any dissent to protect the war. Which is just as ridiculous.

The second and third examples are all over the place in that post. The entire thing says that, in the eight years that Bush was in office, the media never talked about Nazi/Bush comparisons, but that now they’re jumping all over it.  It’s totally false in that the writer is assuming that his memory of protest coverage is exactly what happened, and even if his memory is fantastic, did he really watch all coverage of all of those events? If it’s a logical argument, then the only thing I would have to do to counter it is say, “Well, I remember plenty of media coverage that showed these sorts of signs at anti-Bush rallies”.  It’s nothing but yes it is/no it isn’t, which is exactly what passes for debate these days.

As argument becomes less and less ideological and more culture and choosing sides, I’ve become more anxious about how little effort there seems to be at actually getting to the bottom of things.  It’s hard not to slip into these sorts of false arguments. It’s tempting to make points that are impossible to counter and even more so to try and cut through the yelling with extreme examples that bring immediate emotions. But I really think that we need to start looking not just at what we’re arguing, but how we’re arguing it.