Shrimponomics. Not only are we eating a lot of shrimp, but we're concocting a lot of explanations for why we're eating shrimp.
Before reading the piece, let me just say that I think people think they should eat more fish, but they don't like fish, so they enlarge the concept to "seafood" and eat the one thing they like that isn't as expensive as the one thing in the category that they really like (lobster).
Reading Stephen D. Levitt's analysis:
Interestingly, women in general were only half as likely to give supply explanations as were men....
Oh, damn. Caught being a woman again!
Levitt thinks the answer is on the supply side:
I’m not exactly sure, but here is what I can glean from the Internet. A key factor is that prices have dropped sharply. According to this academic article, the real price of shrimp fell by about 50 percent between 1980 and 2002. When quantity rises and prices are falling, that has to mean that producers have figured out cheaper and better ways to produce shrimp. This article in Slate argues that there has been a revolution in shrimp farming. Demand factors may also be at work, but they don’t seem to be at the heart of the story.
Why don't they seem to be at the heart? Because Levitt is a man?
From the transcript, here's Comey describing his conflicted, confusing feelings about that encounter on the evening of January 27, 2017:
JAMES COMEY: ... and so I said, "Sir, whatever you-- whatever you like." And he said, "Well, why don't we make it 6:30?" And I said, "Sure." And then I called Patrice, broke our date, and-- as luck had it, I had-- an encounter with Clapper, who had left the government but we were giving him a recognition as honorary F.B.I. agent. And I told him about this invitation and he told-- comforted me by saying, "Yeah, I've heard lots of other people are getting calls to come for dinner."
He comforted me...
And so then in my head I was-- "Okay, so it's a group thing. He must be having a group thing tonight, a group thing tomorrow night. That's fine." And so I went over there expecting-- a crowd of people.
And so then in my head I was... I feel as though I'm reading a #MeToo story told by a young woman. Why didn't he say "I thought..." like a plain-spoken adult? It's like the inside of his head is an environment with moods and wisps of cognition. He's invited into a private space, he has his trepidations, but other people will be there, and he's hoping he won't be alone with the man.
The black-and-white-striped shrimp can grow 13 inches long and weigh a quarter-pound, compared to eight inches and a bit over an ounce for domestic white, brown and pink shrimp.
Scientists fear the tigers will bring disease and competition for native shrimp. Both, however, can be eaten by humans.
‘They’re supposed to be very good,’ Pam Fuller, a biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey told CNN. ‘But they can get very large, sorta like lobsters.’
They're very good. They're the size of lobsters. Does everything have to be a problem? Can't we just say thanks?
"City wildlife officer Derk Ehlert says when crawfish first appeared, the city released eels into the waterways, hoping they'd catch the crawfish and eat them. But then the next year, there were still 3,000 crawfish in the parks. This year there are 10 times as many and they seem to be spreading. At one point, hundreds of crawfish clambered out of the lake and ambled along the Tiergarten's shaded paths.... To the west of the Tiergarten, in the Spandau borough, Olaf Pelz cracked the shell of one of Hidde's red crawfish in his restaurant, called Fisch Frank... 'When we serve it here we make it with salad and bread and typical sauce,' he says. He puts dollops of mayonnaise and cocktail sauce on the plate, and tops the crawfish with a thin slice of lemon. Despite his efforts, customers are skeptical. Erika Klugert rises from her outdoor table to watch Pelz uncover the soft tail meat of the crawfish. 'This food requires too much work,' Klugert says."
I wanted to give this post a "crustaceans" tag, but I didn't want to create a new tag. So I started typing out the word in the place where I add my tags, and by the time I got to "crus-," there was only one tag the software was suggesting, and it wasn't "crustaceans," so that's it for the potential "crustaceans" tag.
I'm not creating a new tag, because I don't want to bother with adding it retroactively, searching for crustaceans in the 14-year archive. Sometimes I do create new tags and do that work. For example, I did it yesterday with Kathleen Turner. But that was a matter of doing a search for "Kathleen Turner."
"Crustaceans" would not be so easy. I'd have to look up which animals are crustaceans and search for them individually.
And I already have separate tags for some of them — lobsters (with 41 posts!) and crabs (with 17 posts!). But I don't have a "shrimp" tag. And I've mentioned shimp quite a few times.
In the end the story of Barack Obama will make perfect sense. It will all fit together. The lonely man — raised by wolves — swept up into our American psychosis.
“Even though I’m president of the United States, my power is not limitless,” Obama, who has forced himself to ingest a load of gulf crab cakes, shrimp and crawfish tails, whinged to Grand Isle, La., residents on Friday. “So I can’t dive down there and plug the hole. I can’t suck it up with a straw.”
What's weird is that I included that 2009 photo of myself that I also reused 3 days ago. It's funny how things cycle around in blogging. Leaving tags along the way can help tie things together, but some of the tagging just leads to weirdness. So, when I was starting to write "crustaceans," and there was only one suggestion left when I got to "crus-," can you imagine what it was? It was "husbands crushing their wives' aspirations"! As noted above, that tag had only one post. It was: "Anthony Weiner says he 'crushed the aspirations' of Huma Abedin."
That was just last September. What was I thinking? That it was funny to do that as a one-time tag or that the tag would cause me to notice this phenomenon and amass evidence of it? If the latter, it couldn't work unless I remembered the tag, which I didn't. Maybe now I'll remember it, and the aspiration-crushing husbands will be noticed and collected as they clamber out of the lake and amble along the shaded paths.
ADDED: On rereading this post, the one tag I'd like to create is "straw." Obama "can’t suck it up with a straw," there's the recent straw-related environmentalism, and I know I've blogged about not liking how people look sucking on straws.
7:06: He's laying out a "battle plan" to fight the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. He's "deploying" the military.
7:08: What to do during the "siege." A decision has been made to speak in military terms. Of course, he's not the first President to ask us to think about a nonmilitary problem in military terms. The War on X... the moral equivalent of war....
7:12: To make sure this won't happen again, Obama is establishing a commission.
7:15: We need to "jump start" the "clean energy" future. There's "the potential" to create "millions of jobs" but "only" if we "act together." We need to do something big at the national level to make this happen. Some people say we can't afford this, but he's saying we can't afford not to do it. He's vague about what this will be. The only thing he won't accept is doing nothing. He won't accept the "paltry limits of conventional wisdom." So even though we don't "precisely know" what we need to do, we will do it. Like we did in WWII and in going to the moon. We'll do something. And it will have to be big, but we don't know what it is. Then he drops from that scarily high level of abstraction and the unknown to... shrimpers. Something about shrimp people. We must think BIG and... shrimpy.
7:20: And suddenly, it's getting religious. I think he's bringing this speech in for a landing, because... it's a bit prayer-like. There's a "hand" that will "guide us." And — yes — it is the end: "May God bless America."
7:26: Well, that was a terrible speech! When it wasn't grim and dreary, it was grandiose. But the grandiosity was so vague... and half-hearted. Oh! The malaise!
AND: Here's the text of the speech. This is the part that interested me most:
As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs -– but only if we accelerate that transition. Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation –- workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.
This is the anti-capitalist move. There is all this opportunity, but free enterprise and capitalism can't take advantage of it. We need a top-down, government-imposed scheme, he announces. He doesn't explain why. It's an article of faith.
Now, there are costs associated with this transition [towards energy independence]. And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now. I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy....
This is such embarrassing cliché rhetoric: Some say we can't do it. I say we can't not do it.
He cites a bunch of modest ideas that have been suggested and says we should think about them, then says that we have to do something, even though you could take all those things together, impose them, and still not break what he calls our "addiction" to fossil fuel. He blathers about WWII and the moon landing -- as noted above -- and talks about "what has defined us as a nation": "the capacity to shape our destiny.... Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like. Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there. We know we’ll get there." That is so hopelessly grandiose and vague, and to keep us from looking at it too long and despairing, he's all: Look! Shrimp!
Each year, at the beginning of shrimping season, the region’s fishermen take part in a tradition that was brought to America long ago by fishing immigrants from Europe. It’s called “The Blessing of the Fleet,” and today it’s a celebration where clergy from different religions gather to say a prayer for the safety and success of the men and women who will soon head out to sea....
It's the shrimp and religion combo platter. Yummy!
After all, if cicadas [are] the shrimp of the dirt, they should stand in just fine for their pink cousins...
... in whatever shrimp recipes you've got.
Since the word "shrimp" has popped up, let me drop in this song I chanced into yesterday when I was researching the question what are the greatest melodies?
How many shrimps do you have to eat/Before you make your skin turn pink?
My first post today is about my struggle with the Sunday morning talk shows. I watch to blog, so I want the transcript. I said I record 4 of the shows, and, now, getting ready to blog this CNN headline, I realizethat there's a 5th Sunday morning show, and I never watch it. It's CNN's "State of the Union."
Fortunately, the complete transcript is available, so we can look at exactly what Mike Huckabee said and why there's something wrong with the headline:
DANA BASH: [Y]ou do write very eloquently about it being a religious conviction to oppose to -- oppose gay marriage, but then you also talk about the biblical backings of being heterosexual. So, given that, how do you kind of square that religious conviction with being open to having gay friends?
HUCKABEE: Well, people can be my friends who have lifestyles that are not necessarily my lifestyle.
Notice that Huckabee shifted the topic from being gay to having a lifestyle. So right there it's obvious that he's not going to be comparing "being gay to drinking, swearing" — as the headline has it. He'll be comparing acting out on homosexual desire to acting out on a desire to consume alcohol or acting out on the urge to express oneself with profanity. These are all sins in his book, but like anybody else who has friends and believes that a lot of things are sins, he's friends with sinners.
The new Pope, Francis, eats "[b]aked skinless chicken, salad, fruit and a glass of simple wine," and this is supposedly terribly different from Pope Benedict who ate "fettuccine with shrimp, zucchini and saffron," Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone who once "hosted an elaborate vegetarian dinner to celebrate Benedict’s 60th anniversary as a priest in 2011, featuring fresh-picked fare from the area near Venice, including chicory, white asparagus, peas and cherries," and NY's Cardinal Timothy Dolan who likes "fettuccine Bolognese, lamb cutlet, spinach and peppers, with Sicilian cannoli and homemade tiramisu."
Where is the stark contrast? Fettucine is just noodles. What's elaborate about putting some shrimp on it or some meat sauce (which is all "Bolognese" means)? Then there's lamb and a bunch of vegetables. Why is "chicory, white asparagus, peas and cherries" elaborate compared to "salad" and "fruit"? What's in the salad? Maybe chicory. What's the fruit? Maybe cherries. And cannoli and tiramisu are just routine desserts in Italy (and NYC). There's nothing fancy about eating cannoli!
I don't really mind if WaPo does a puff piece on the new Pope. But it's just such a dumb way to talk about food. They're mindlessly impressing the "simple Pope" narrative onto random facts.
Thanakorn, who faces a 37-year sentence, is 27. King Bhumibol Adulyadej is 88. Whether Bhumibol cares what is said about his dog, I don't know, but "Prosecutions have soared since the army, which styles itself as the champion of the monarchy, grabbed power in a coup last year."
The dog is Tongdaeng, an adopted stray, "is praised for her loyalty and obedience, has been used to outline [the king's] vision of how Thais should behave." There's an animated movie about Tongdaeng that's #2 at the Thai box office.
"If you buy prawns or shrimp from Thailand, you will be buying the produce of slave labor," Aidan McQuade, director of Anti-Slavery International [said].....
U.S. customs records show the shrimp made its way into the supply chains of major U.S. food stores and retailers such as Wal-Mart, Kroger, Whole Foods, Dollar General and Petco, along with restaurants such as Red Lobster and Olive Garden. It also entered the supply chains of some of America's best-known seafood brands and pet foods, including Chicken of the Sea and Fancy Feast....
Thanks to all the many commenters who hung out with me for the VP debate live-blog, some of whom are still hanging out there, trying to drive the comments into the 4 figures for the first time. There's some great stuff inside -- I front-paged some of it -- on-topic and off-... off-topic and off-color. There's the funny, and there's the search for a better, more Cuban, recipe for creole shrimp... and I'm sure we'll all find what we're looking for.
IN THE COMMENTS: Ruth Anne Adams said...
Why don't you sweeten the pot? Why don't you promise to vlog an egg salad sandwich or burned pasta or creole shrimp or something when we hit 1000?
I know! A pork-and-crap sandwich!
I'll do a vlog when it hits 1000, so give me some more ideas here. I don't really see why it should involve abasing myself however!
The spiral isn't static. It spirals. It's difficult not to get caught up in the question of when, if ever, abortion is morally acceptable, and as you try to decide and pin down the point, you are continually disoriented by the movement. Whichever form you try to fix upon quickly moves to the next stage. I spent a lot of time trying to look at these little moving drawings. For me, the "clump of cells" impression is gone by the end of the second week. What follows, up until week 6, is something complex but abstract, at one point looking like an overly complicated corporate logo and later unfolding into a mushroomish form. After that, there's the search for the mesmerizing moment when what you might say looks like a shrimp becomes what you've got to admit looks like a baby. The connection between how it looks and the permissibility of abortion is, of course, a separate moral question. Also a separate question: the accuracy of the drawings.
Says Jay Vogt, off topic, in the "Science of sitting" post. He continues:
Over the past two days, we been presented with posts on giant cannibal shrimp, revenge by extraneous dentistry, testicular mutilation, necrophilia, the legal writings of Ruth Bader Ginsburg and infanticide.
I'm not sure that I'm up for much more work on this vein.
I haven't been this upset since I attended the the brunch reception for the debut screening of "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife And Her Lover."
Funny, just as you were writing that, I was doing a new post about the "inescapable shame of being a storyteller." Maybe there's an inescapable shame of being a blogger. But if it's any consolation, years ago, I went to "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife And Her Lover," and, leaving at the end, I felt very uncomfortable just to be in the crowd of people who had seen it.
Now, Jonathan Franzen has a memoir called "The Discomfort Zone." I don't think you're supposed to feel comfortable. I like that book. I've read it. Another book I've read and liked is "Don't Get Too Comfortable," by David Rakoff, which has the subtitle "The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems," so you see the idea there.
Franzen also has a new book of essays, which I just bought. It's "Farther Away." (I guess you're supposed to feel alienated.) It contains his essay about David Foster Wallace that was what David Haglund shamed him about.
He had 2 children,Peggy and Matthew. At restaurants, Peggy had "a double portion of shrimp cocktail, dessert, and milk, with a pickle on the side, if available," while Matthew ate "lamb chops, almost exclusively."
He didn't like us too much: "Murder in my heart, daily, hourly, incessantly, and you ask if I feel as nasty as ever about planetary affairs. … How ready this wretched planet is for the bomb or more Nancy Reagan."
Imagine having such a troubled relationship with other people that you fixated on the idea of a nuclear war that would end it all, not just for you, but for everyone.
IN THE COMMENTS: Seven Machos says:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is what my kids like to eat at restaurants and what my lousy view of the world is like, and how I am occupied with thoughts of murder, and all that John Wayne Gacy kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth.
"The lake’s flies and brine shrimp would die off — scientists warn it could start as soon as this summer — threatening the 10 million migratory birds that stop at the lake annually to feed on the tiny creatures. Ski conditions at the resorts above Salt Lake City, a vital source of revenue, would deteriorate. The lucrative extraction of magnesium and other minerals from the lake could stop.
Most alarming, the air surrounding Salt Lake City would occasionally turn poisonous. The lake bed contains high levels of arsenic and as more of it becomes exposed, wind storms carry that arsenic into the lungs of nearby residents, who make up three-quarters of Utah’s population. 'We have this potential environmental nuclear bomb that’s going to go off if we don’t take some pretty dramatic action,' said Joel Ferry, a Republican state lawmaker and rancher who lives on the north side of the lake.... In theory, the fix is simple: Let more water from melting snowpack reach the lake, by sending less toward homes, businesses and farms. But metropolitan Salt Lake City has barely enough water to support its current population. And it is expected to grow almost 50 percent by 2060...."
... Instapundit link for the onion-rings-are-vaginas controversy here. (Note the effect on Site Meter... and I'll suppress the urge to do another Freudian interpretation.)
IF ONION RINGS STAND IN FOR VAGINAS, then to what symbolic use can we put an Awesome Blossom?
The "Awesome Blossom" link goes to a cool blog called Televisionary, which I never noticed before, although the name calls out to me. (I'm blogrolling it right now.) The post there is all about product placement on TV shows. Key passage:
[S]etting nearly an entire episode of The Office in a Chili's restaurant and talking about the various dishes they offer ("I wanted one of those skillets of cheese," says Michael; and in a later episode: "May we have an Awesome Blossom, please, extra awesome.") was more than a little excessive to say the least (as was a shot of a Chili's employee explaining their corporate policy not to overserve drinks to customers). Another glaring example was the iPod in the Christmas episode, which was featured as the gift that everyone at Dunder-Mifflin wanted to steal (The Office is available for download through iTunes). At other times, the series has referenced Sbarros, Red Lobster, Bubba Gump Shrimp, Mac computers, Hooters, Mailboxes Etc., Country Crock Spread, and Starbucks. Which, when you add them all up, is a rather halting trend for the show.
So, not about vaginas, per se, but Glenn asks a good question about those giant fried onion things. (Leave it to a law professor to ask good questions.) What are the Awesome Blossoms in the crazy world of sexual symbolism? (And doesn't Country Crock Spread sound dirty? Well, so does everything, now. Dunder-Mifflin, indeed.)
UPDATE: And the Instapundit link is overwhelmed by a Crooks and Liars link, by the darling John Amato, who also linked to his pal, the socially awkward TRex. Remember, I had my encounter with TRex and John Amato at the CNN party on election night, and John Amato was a sweet, warm guy. I enjoyed meeting him. I don't begrudge him defending the Democrats' last President. But he's soooooo far above the grouchy little prick TRex. Thanks, John, for sending me all this traffic, and I still love you.
"... in front of the cathedral, or chat calmly with your neighbors on the street. There were even beautiful scenes like children bathing in the fountain in the Plaça Reial."
Classmates said he... sometimes bullied smaller students.... [Peter] Tibbetts, who was eventually forced to leave Andover in the spring of 1970 after school officials accused him of using drugs, said his one regret about his relationship with Bush is that he agreed to participate with him in the bullying of a student in the dormitory. Their target was a short classmate whom they taunted, and then sewed his pajama bottoms so that they were impossible to put on. The act was particularly embarrassing, said Tibbetts, who said he felt remorse for joining in with “kids being cruel.”...
So... there was a prank where you (presumably) sew the bottom of the leg openings together, so that when the unsuspecting target leaps into his pajama bottoms, he gets his legs almost all the way through and is surprised when his feet hit the dead end instead of popping out where he's expecting his leg momentum to end, sturdily planted on the floor. He probably topples over ridiculously, and anyone who's around to see it laughs. It's like the old short-sheeting prank.
Oh! The cruelty! What kind of person would do such a thing! Imagine the remorse Peter Tibbetts had carried with him all these years for what they did to the classmate of shortness, who, let's not forget, was also "taunted."
No taunts are quoted, so I have no way to assess the cruelty of any particular taunts that were aimed at the schoolmate whose only known characteristic is shortness. (Hey, shrimp!?) I have no way to know if this short person took his own shots or if every kid in that rich-boy academy went back and forth doing whatever it is that underlies the Globe's term taunt.
And, by the way, does Peter Tibbetts have a political affiliation? Is he supporting any candidates who are not Jeb? Or am I just supposed to accept his characterization of Bush as cruel because he claims to feel remorse?
Other students remember Bush as intimidating, if not exactly a bully.
So... the Globe's effort to smoke out lots of reports of bullying got exactly one thing, the dumb pajama bottoms prank!
David Cuthell, who thinks well of Bush today, remembers that Bush approached him one day in the school cafeteria, angry and ready to do some damage. “He sort of lifted me up in the air and I think was going to squash a grapefruit in my face,” said Cuthell, who said he was around 115 pounds at the time. Then a friend who was even stronger than Bush came to the rescue, lifting Bush away from Cuthell.
Cuthell likes Bush, so Cuthell's quote matters, but compare the quote to the paraphrasing surrounds it. It's the Globe that made up "ready to do some damage" to sum up what Cuthell may have to read in Bush's mind. But Cuthell said "I think was going to squash a grapefruit in my face," which is patently not literally what he imagined to be Bush's intent. Cuthell is being comical... and dragging in a reference to the famous scene in the Jimmy Cagney movie "Public Enemy":
In the end, another guy lifted Bush away from Cuthell, and one can only guess what life at the prep school was like. Boys lifting up other boys. Not even tackling them. Lifting them. So what?! What I'm reading here is an absence of cruelty and a damned modest amount of rowdy fun. This is all you've got, Globe? It's just dumb.
But, now, I do want to take this part seriously. Again, the informant is Tibbets:
The first time Tibbetts smoked marijuana, he said, was with Bush and a few other classmates in the woods near Pemberton Cottage. Then, a few weeks later, Tibbetts said he smoked hashish — a cannabis product typically stronger than pot — in Jeb’s dormitory room.
“The first time I really got stoned was in Jeb’s room,” Tibbetts said. “He had a portable stereo with removable speakers. He put on Steppenwolf for me.” As the rock group’s signature song, Magic Carpet Ride, blared from the speakers, Tibbetts said he smoked hash with Bush. He said he once bought hashish from Bush but stressed, in a follow-up e-mail, “Please bear in mind that I was seeking the hash, it wasn’t as if he was a dealer; though he did suggest I take up cigarettes so that I could hold my hits better, after that 1st joint.”
Globe is really screwing up the facts here. Steppenwolf's signature song is "Born to Be Wild":
But, okay, let's throw out that "drug dealer" shit. No reason not to muddy the campaign waters, eh, Globe? But you should have dug deeper, like I did. I found some actual film footage of Jeb smoking pot:
You know, this used to be a hell of a good country. I can't understand what's going on with it....
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