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November, 2017:

Rant: Processed, My Ass; I Wanna Kill Something

Nov 17th, 2017
by Jeff Duntemann.
28 comments

Yes. I wanna kill something. And what I wanna kill is the term “processed food.” I wanna drive stakes through its eyes, pound it flat with a sledgehammer, then flip it over and pound it even flatter. I’d stake it to an anthill except that I like ants a little too much. The term must die. It’s a lie, fake science, fake health, fake everything. It’s also racist, classist, and elitist. I’ve heard it enough. I do not want to hear it again.

Some background: Five or six years ago, when I was on the verge of turning 60 and my blood pressure was inching up, I saw my GP. The first thing he said was, “We have to get you off of processed foods.” He hadn’t asked me anything about my diet. He didn’t define what a “processed food” is. He didn’t know that I was eating processed foods, whatever they might be. He didn’t know what I ate at all, but he was so sure that hypertension is caused by processed foods that he didn’t consider his advice absurd. I was so taken aback by the lack of logic that I didn’t even call him on it. I will not make that mistake again.

I just wrote him off, and soon had a better GP. This one simply handed me a prescription for lisinopril, which has been doing the job just fine ever since.

Still, everywhere I go, I see cautions against eating “processed food.” Nobody ever defines the term. Everybody who uses it assumes that its definition is obvious and universally understood. I dunno… Is cooked food processed? Is pasteurized milk processed? No? Then what does “processed” actually mean?

Crickets. (Which some consider health food. Unless the crickets are killed first, in which case no, because that would be processing them.)

If it’s about salt, say that it’s about salt. And provide numbers. I did the science on myself and found that salt does not affect my blood pressure at all. (Obviously, YMMV.) There’s actually significant evidence that it goes the other way. In fact, there’s evidence that eating more salt causes you to lose weight.

If not salt, then fat? Research finding that most fats are not only harmless but necessary and beneficial is piling up. Eating fat gooses your metabolism, especially if it’s been awhile since you’ve eaten carbs. Eating a high-fat, zero-carb breakfast is one of my major strategies for keeping my weight under control.

Sugar? I’ll definitely buy that. But it’s funny how nobody mentions sugar as a key element of processed foods. Chemicals? Which chemicals? Give me a list. Be specific. You and I are made of chemicals. I eat nothing but chemicals. And so do you. We need a precise technical definition here.

All that said, little by little, I’m beginning to get a clue. I may even have a definition for you: Processed food is any food that my tribe disapproves of. Yes, here and there I’ve heard snarky pseudo-definitions on the order of “any food containing more than five ingredients.” Good luck if you want six different vegetables in your vegetable soup. I counted the ingredients in Bugles earlier today: Corn meal, coconut oil, sugar, salt, baking soda. That’s it. Bugles are health food! (What’s scarier, to me at least, is that they’re over fifty years old, and I remember their introduction.) “Processed food” is in fact one of the most important entries in the Encyclopedia of Virtue Signaling.

“Processed food” is also, in some circles, code for something eaten by working-class people, who admirably don’t care what our fackwot Harvard-educated elites think of them. Harvard, by the way, was bought off by the sugar companies decades ago to make the case that sugar was safe and fat was evil. Ever since I learned that, I’ve considered Harvard a fake university, and The Atlantic agrees with me. The gist here is that you really really don’t want to be lumped in with people who work with their hands, so never admit that you even know what fish sticks or TV dinners are.

Ok, I know, shut up, Jeff and cut to the chase. Here’s the deal: The term “processed food” is an undefinable nonsense term used by snobs who try to make it look like they know something about health but are actually obsessed with distancing themselves from those yukky working classes. It’s just that simple.

Want to prove me wrong? Go find me a precise, technical, unambiguous, and widely accepted technical definition of “processed food.” You must meet all four points, without exception. (If you don’t, I will shoot it down in nuclear flames.) Otherwise, I think my conclusion stands.

How the Dunteman(n) Name Came to America

Nov 12th, 2017
by Jeff Duntemann.
8 comments

Note: I’m writing this for the benefit of several distant cousins whom I’ve just met for the first time, all of them descended from the younger brother of my great-great grandfather. Facebook doesn’t allow any significant text formatting, so Contra gets it.

My research shows that the Dunteman(n) name came to America from Germany at least four times: Once to Chicago (my group), once to southern Illinois, once to Cincinnati, and once to rural Iowa. As best I can tell, all four emigrations came from one small area of Lower Saxony. Carol and I visited the little town of Schlarpe back in 2002, and were allowed to peruse the church’s life records (births, deaths, baptisms) with the help of a German couple we knew who drove us to Schlarpe from Bonn. Some of what I outline here came from the church’s records; some is on sites like Ancestry, and some came from family history fanatics elsewhere on our tree.

My great-great-great grandparents emigrated to Chicago some time in 1849 or 1850 (we don’t have passage records yet) probably in reaction to the European turmoil of 1848. Their names were Johann Karl Christian Duntemann (1808-1863) and Millizena Erdmann Duntemann (1814-1896). “Millizena” is the old German form of Melissa. German men and women of that era often had two or three “first” names and chose one for ordinary life. He went by Christian Duntemann. In Germany, the name Duntemann always had two n’s at the end. It also had an umlaut over the “u”. Most Duntemann descendents who came to America dropped the second “n” in the years running up to WWI, perhaps to sound less German. As best I know, the umlaut didn’t survive the crossing to the U.S.

Christian and Millizena Duntemann had nine known children. The first name used by those for whom we have record of all names is underlined:

  • Amelia Duntemann 1834-?
  • Johanne Caroline Millizena Duntemann 1837-?
  • Laura Duntemann 1841-1851?
  • Heinrich Duntemann 1843-1891
  • Christian Frederick Wilhelm Duntemann 1846-1927
  • William Duntemann 1850-1921
  • Louis Duntemann 1851-1928
  • Louise Duntemann 1854-1928
  • Hermann Duntemann 1859-1933

We know nothing about the two oldest girls except their birth dates. They might have remained with relatives in Germany, or perhaps been married off before the rest of their family emigrated. (Finding the family passage records would be a big help here.) The same was true of third daughter Laura, until Old St. John’s cemetery near O’Hare Field was condemned and the bodies moved in 2011. When Christian and Millizena’s remains were exhumed, the body of a child was found beside them. She was wearing small gold earrings, and by her size might have been as young as eight or as old as twelve. Church records are silent on her fate, but consider that cemetery plots were often purchased only when the first member of a family passed away. Church records do show that the plot was purchased by Christian in 1851. Laura was ten that year, so we’re fairly sure the small body found was hers.

All of the children except for the three oldest girls are known to have survived to adulthood, and all but one of those survivors now have many descendents. The exception is Hermann Duntemann, who had a son Emil in 1888 who survived only a few days. His wife, depressed for many years by the loss of her firstborn, committed suicide in 1920. There are stories that he married again later in life, but we’ve found no record of a second marriage, nor of other children.

One of the many still-open questions is whether Christian Duntemann’s younger brother Charles was the one who emigrated to southern Illinois, down near Effingham. A Duntemann descendent living there currently told me that Charles Duntemann’s death certificate listed his birthplace as Schlarpe, Germany. There’s a conflict in birth years, but such conflicts are fairly common in family history work. Schlarpe is a very small town (we’ve been there) and although another Charles Duntemann was possible in that era, it would be unlikely.

That’s the story of how my Duntemann bloodline got here. (I descend from Heinrich; the cousins I’ve recently heard from descend from William.) I haven’t been doing a lot of active searching for a few years, and my genealogy database program won’t install under Win7. So it’s time to go shopping for a new program, as I suspect my good cousins are about to shower me with facts I didn’t already know.

Odd Lots

Nov 10th, 2017
by Jeff Duntemann.
2 comments

Egg++ and My USB Microscope

Nov 8th, 2017
by Jeff Duntemann.
4 comments

Something a little peculiar happened this morning. I cracked an egg into a (white) bowl for scrambling, and the albumen looked a little pink rather than clear. Blood, fersure, though I already knew (I don’t know why) that blood in an egg doesn’t necessarily mean that the egg was fertilized. However…next to the yolk was a little brown thing about 3/8″ long. It was about the right shape for an embryo, but it was too small to pick out any details. So…

…I cranked up my new USB microscope, which I got from Carol for my 65th birthday this summer. Worked like a champ:

minisee0002-500 Wide.jpg

I’m no expert in chicken embryology, so this is still a guess, but I’ve never seen anything like it in an egg before. The pink in the albumen suggests blood, after all.

Here’s the setup I used to take the photo, which will show you the microscope and its focusing stage:

microscope-500 wide.jpg

Like any reasonable optical microscope (we have one from Carol’s college years in biology) it has a coarse focus (the knurled column attached to the metal base) and a fine focus on the end of the camera tube itself. It plugs into any USB port and draws whatever power it needs from the port.

The device shown above costs $77.95 from Amazon.

If you don’t think squicky blobby things do the instrument justice, here’s something on the hardware side. This is a surface-mount LM386 audio amp, measuring just a hair over 3/16″ long:

LM386SM0002.jpg

The imaging software I’m using (free) is called MiniSee, and it works tolerably well. Other packages exist, and as time allows I’m going to try them.

The real challenge with the microscope is lighting. Lighting makes a huge difference in the quality of the image coming in from the sensor. There are eight white LEDs in a circle around the sensor, with a brightness control built into the USB cable. These work well for looking into dark places (like the back of my mouth) but don’t do well with objects lying on the metal stage. A flat black background is useful, especially for metallic objects. I intuit that some sort of small gooseneck desk lamp would do the trick, and I’m looking.

The instrument comes with a number of plastic probe tips for looking at your ear canal, up your nose, and, well, where the sun don’t shine. The mini-CD wouldn’t spin up on my quadcore, and as it turns out I didn’t need it, given MiniSee. (One of the reviewers on Amazon claims it’s all in Chinese, anyway.)

Overall, I’m more than pleased, especially for something in the $75 price class. There may be better ones. I see quite a few on Amazon. But this one will do.

Oh…I scrambled the egg and ate it, once I picked out the embryo. What’s a little chicken blood when dinner generally hits the table medium-rare and still dripping?

The Missing Month of October…and Oh Yeah, Hawaii!

Nov 7th, 2017
by Jeff Duntemann.
6 comments

Jeffs Office 2 - 500 Wide.jpg

People are starting to ask me if I’m dead or something; my last post here was at the end of September. I’m by no means dead. I’m merely 65, which means I don’t have the volcanic energy I had when I was a mere child of 50. And there was much on the calendar in October. A certain part of it was medical, which I don’t feel like going into here, apart from saying that it was nothing life-threatening, just profoundly irritating. (Nor is it over, alas.) Some of it was home improvement: We replaced every window in the house. Every. Last. One. Why? Most windows have some sort of flange or handle to grip when you want to slide them open. Not these, no. The only grabbable part was the little lock-handle, which I doubt was designed to take that kind of lever-arm. I broke one not long after we bought the house. So we got rid of them all, in one swell foop.

And we added one. That was the real challenge. My somewhat-too-small office (see photo above) had these weird double doors that swung inward, which (given that my big reading chair was in front of them) made them utterly useless, and left my office without ventilation. So we had a local handyman tear out the doors, 2X4 up a frame for a new window, and then add wallboard, sheathing, insulation and stucco below the window once the window was installed. Because the whole wall had to be retaped and repainted, that meant moving an 8′ bookcase containing all of my reference books and many of my programming books, as well as a huge file cabinet and my reading chair. The handyman added a new outlet box for the benefit of my steampunk computer table, and I changed all the outlets and plates on the wall because the existing duplexes didn’t all match.

I’m fussy about my workspaces, let’s say.

There were whole days (most of a week of them) during which my office was basically unusable. I moved my lab machine out to the wet bar, but it just wasn’t conducive to writing. And by the end of the day, I was generally so worn-out that I sat on the couch with my Paperwhite and devoured novels rather than wrote. Writing is hard work. You knew that, I hope.

Somehow I did make some solid progress on Dreamhealer in October, while swatting off distracting ideas for new novels like flies. I hope not to alienate my readers here, but if I have a choice between making progress on a novel and dropping an entry onto Contra, Contra generally doesn’t win. My low energy levels are making me look at what may or may not be a Real Thing on the personal energy front. The cost seems excessive, but the need is real.

And then finally, on the 25th, Carol and I hopped a plane and flew to Hawaii. At last, personal energy ceased to be an issue. We spent a few days on Maui, and then flew to Honolulu to take a room at the New Otani Hotel on Sans Souci beach, which overlooks downtown Honolulu. It overlooked something else: The War Memorial Natatorium, a titanic ocean-water swimming pool with bleachers, built to commemorate WWI, built in 1927 and now falling apart. The photo below is the view from our balcony.

What did we do in Hawaii? We slept in a lot. We bobbed in the water a lot. After dark we flew a Megatech Firefly until it broke. We talked about the damndest things. We ate maybe a little too much. We took in the Honolulu Zoo and the Waikiki Aquarium, both of which were an easy walk from the hotel. (In fact, they were the major reason we chose the Otani.) We tried our best to act like newlyweds again.

Our room faced west, and from our balcony we watched the sunset most nights. They were among the most colorful sunsets we’ve ever seen.

The food at the Otani was excellent. They serve corned beef hash that has so little potato in it that they might as well call it pulled corned beef. The open-air dining room overlooks the beach, and requires reservations even for breakfast. They have a more formal restaurant on their second floor that has geishas, and prices so high even we balked. Fortunately, there is a little convenience store in the next building that sells decent sandwiches and Bugles. Picnicking on the beach was in fact a fine thing.

I made a game out of grabbing driftglass from the surf, which sounds easy until you try it. I picked up quite a bit of it our last afternoon at the beach. One assumes that the brown glass is from beer bottles, but it seems awfully thin for bottle glass. I found a piece of white glass with a blue Japanese design on it, and assume it came from a sake bottle.

While diving for driftglass fragments on the wave-tossed ocean bottom, it occurred to me that Driftglass would make a great title for a novel–and I even got a concept for one to match. Alas, Samuel R. Delany did a story collection called Driftglass in 1971. Will that stop me? Don’t know yet. Let’s just say that I have a lot of other writing to do first.

We spent Halloween at the beach before heading home on November 2. In honor of Halloween, I watched British blob-monster movies on my laptop all the way home. There are several, two of them Quatermass films. Damn, but they seemed way scarier in 1963. We haven’t had a genuine blob monster movie released in quite a while. Reboot, anyone? Once I score The Blob, I may do a writeup on the genre here. No, it’s not British, and like a lot of American horror movies, it centers on ukky creatures eating annoying teenagers, generally while they’re trying to make out. That may say something about something. Don’t ask me what, because I don’t want to know.

And so I return to Contra, with solid plans for several new entries, including one on health insurance that will doubtless annoy everyone. I also feel the need to do a few good rants. Not sure what I’ll come up with next, but I’ll think of something.