Goats in Coats

Goat!

I’ve been looking forward to this issue of Ply magazine for a long time!

For the pictures, I guess. Not sure the content is going to teach me much… from one of the first articles, “Angora goats cannot be jacketed, so vegetable matter is a given.” Really? Meaning I’ve done the impossible for years by keeping jackets on my goats on a regular basis? Amazing! I honestly have no idea what she’s talking about.

Book Corner 2022.15

The Hungry Brain

by Stephan J. Guyenet, Ph.D.

A similar conclusion to SALT, SUGAR, FAT by Michael Moss as to why American obesity rates are skyrocketing: the food just TASTES TOO DAMN GOOD.

To find a time when things were different, we don’t have to go back to hunter-gatherer times – although Guyenet does; we spend a hypothetical day with a few hypothetical members of a non-hypothetical tribe of East Africa, who eat a certain fibrous tuber as a mainstay of their diet. You chew the flesh and then spit out the pithy stuff. It’s not very good. Nobody’s very excited about it. Likewise until 20th century convenience foods and ubiquitous restaurant cooking, you had to eat your own household’s cooking. I’m betting that often wasn’t very good either.

It wasn’t Oreos. It wasn’t Big Macs. Now it is. Mmmmmmm.

This particular book is about the brain science behind metabolism, hunger cues, etc. Along the lines of the main thesis I’ve described above, his biggest weight loss tip is to eat food that isn’t very good. Of course you’ll eat less of it, for starters; but it may also have some effect on the brain, and on the levels of something called leptin, to expose yourself less often to the utter deliciousness that is the American supermarket diet.

(He doesn’t phrase it as “eat food that isn’t very good.” He calls it “simple food.”)

But nooooooooooooo I refuse to give up deliciousness. That said, point taken, and it’s always good advice to eat simple food close to the source.

One surprising thing I bookmarked was his allegation that we tend to put on most of our yearly weight gain as a result of the extended holiday season. I always thought that what you did the majority of the year would far outweigh some indulgence at the end; but maybe I’m not really admitting to how lengthy the holiday season is in proportion to the year as a whole. Anyway, to avoid upward creep of poundage, he says to focus on strategies to minimize holiday overeating.

I thought those were a couple of unique tips.

Book Corner 2022.14

The Vicar of Wakefield

by Oliver Goldsmith

Every now and then there’s nothing like a good classic. (Groucho Marx voice:) And this is nothing like a good classic!

It’s wild and crazy. Fortunes are lost, houses burn down, reputations are ruined, ruffians roughhouse, people come back from the dead, and digressions digress a la galore. The vicar has six lovely children, two of them marriageable daughters. At heart, it is a classic Marriage Plot; and that’s OK by me.

Double Whammy

A double whammy is when one of my heroes interviews another; such as Malcolm Gladwell interviewing Oliver Burkeman. This is a lovely interview and unusual in the welcome respect that they don’t spend all that much time asking Burkeman questions that just cause him to repeat everything I’ve already read in the book. It goes more like a therapy session. We learn that Burkeman started getting obsessed with maximizing him productivity at a very precocious age; he faults his over-anxious, get-to-the-airport-14-hours-early father. But I was like that myself, and I think some of us are just hardwired as such. When Burkeman tries to turn the tables, and prods Gladwell to talk more about how he grew up in such an opposite environment, I’m as fascinated as he is. While Burkeman’s parents said, “Just do your best,” which sent him into a tailspin thinking that he couldn’t slack off for a moment or it wasn’t his “best”… Gladwell’s easy-going parents said, “You’re bored? Good! It’s good to just drift along once and a while…” and Gladwell grew up embracing the easy-going life. But he keeps dodging the question of how he’s become so successful without that drive towards productivity – why isn’t he working at a surf shop in Bali? I’d love to know.

Large chunk of the relevant transcript follows, emphasis added by me; in these spots I particularly wonder if these people are genetically related to Xopher:

Oliver: What would be the motivation to have written all the books that you’ve written and to have created all the other content—podcasts, audiobooks, everything else—what would be the motivation to have got on to that escalator in the first place if you were just completely relaxed about your relationship to the world? 

Malcolm: I may have inherited it from my parents. I don’t think of either of my parents as being future oriented. They were people we never discussed tomorrow. We only ever discussed today. And I never think about tomorrow. Really. Not much. My most powerful memories of my parents—my father is no longer with us; my mother is very much—are of them being in the moment. 

My father would only ever talk about what he was doing, and he would almost never talk about what he intended to do. And my mother was always celebrating the thing that was happening. She’d make a fresh scone, and eat it, and then she would say something to the effect of: “At this very moment, eating this particular scone, I am insanely happy.” 

…

I’m not thinking about tomorrow. 

Book Corner 2022.13

Joan is Okay

by Weike Wang

This wasn’t quite what I was expecting. What I was expecting from JOAN IS OKAY was something along the lines of ELEANOR OLIPHANT IS COMPLETELY FINE. Both are about misfit women. (And both women are either OK or completely fine.) But ELEANOR is played for laughs and sentimentality, while JOAN was completely serious and refused to follow any predictable narrative arc.

Joan is an ICU doctor who lives inside her work. She enjoys nothing more than being a cog in a machine. She has odd, not-exactly-close yet not-really-distant relationships with her mother and her older brother, and likewise had with her father, whose death back in China opens the novel. Her relationships with her co-workers are also not cold or distant or weird, but odd, in a matter-of-fact kind of way.

Joan gets a new neighbor across the hall who infiltrates her life in a frankly creepy-friendly way. He gives her food, objects, furniture. As this guy noses in more and more, his furniture filling her previously spartan living space, one would be forgiven for thinking: ah, now here is where the fun young guy shows Joan, one piece of furniture at a time, how to live, laugh, and love! But, no. It is not that kind of book at all.

The author is not a medical doctor, but she is a chemist with a doctorate in public health. It’s always so refreshing to read about characters who are in STEM. Writers only ever seem to write about other writers, usually thinly disguised as “artists.” (I always imagine them thinking, “It’ll be way too obvious I’m writing about myself if I make her a writer… I know! I’ve got it, she’ll be an artist.” Right, they’ll never suspect.)

Far Afield

Winter is just effing relentless. We are very bored. We drove, what, two, three hours yesterday just to be in a slightly different place. Wantastegok.

The meal we had at T. J. Buckley’s of Brattleboro was worth a drive even further than that. I do not think you can dine like this anywhere in the Burlington area. It’s a tiny place. “Located in a restored 1925 dining car,” you can peer over at the one-man-band making your meal. And I did – my scallop dish was so phenomenal, I kept looking over my shoulder, saying, “Really? Really?” As in, this came out of that one guy and that little room right there? Somehow if there were a closed door and an undisclosed number of people and gadgets, it would be more believable. Oh gosh, I’m hungry just remembering it. I kept getting notes of vanilla. If there was vanilla in it, they didn’t disclose.

Oh, understand that prices were through the roof, and justifiably so. I’m so glad we went, though.