Blackcap Blog

Published at 23:00 on 11 August 2013

I tried making salal jam once before, and I remember none of the recipes made that much sense for me. Most were actually for jelly, not jam (which is a lot more work). I picked one and tried it, and found the results disappointing.

This time, I went back the the recipe I used before, and adjusted it a little bit. The result was much improved. Here’s what I came up with:

8 cups salal berries, unmashed¹
1/2 cup water
1 cup sugar
1 lemon, juiced

Wash berries and remove foreign matter (fir needles, etc). Add 1/2 cup water and cook until soft (2-5 minutes). Run the softened berries through a Foley food mill.² Add lemon juice to results, bring to boil, add sugar, stir vigorously for 1 to 2 minutes until sugar dissolves, return to boil, remove from heat.

Apply the standard 10-minute processing in a boiling-water canner.

You might have noticed there is no pectin in the above recipe. Salal berries are naturally high in pectin. Commercial pectin is not needed.

¹ Most jam recipes call for measuring raw mashed berries. Forget it; even fully ripe salal berries are too firm to mash raw. Moreover, I managed to pick most of mine without the stems; if most of yours have stems, you might want to increase the measure to compensate.

² Or if you’re into upscale, electric appliances, I suppose a food processor could do this as well. Just be sure to use an attachment that runs the berries through a mesh of some sort as well as mashing them. You do want to get the skins and stray stems out.

Published at 16:23 on 9 August 2013

As I  just mentioned, there was a big security brouhaha on the ferry this morning, which delayed it for at least 30 minutes: some bicycle passenger forgot how he boarded on the other end and left his bike behind.

Apparently that triggered worries that the bike might literally be a pipe bomb (cue a punk band), and one set to blow up if anyone attempted to move the bike at that. At the last minute, I decided to grab my ham radio HT on the way out the door, so I was able to listen to some of the chatter about it (they never ‘fessed up to all the fuss being over a forgotten bicycle on the PA system’s announcements, of course).

Published at 09:11 on 9 August 2013

One of the things I’ve grown to expect in the Puget Sound region is how, starting sometime in mid- to late- September, the mornings start getting foggy. Even though it’s not consistently rainy yet, those colder, foggy mornings are a sign the seasons are turning.

Since moving to Bainbridge Island, I’ve learned that the fogs actually start in late July over the Sound (at least, they did this year), and gradually build in intensity as the nights lengthen. It’s apparently only until September that they’re widespread enough (and expanded enough in scope from their origin over the Sound) that they become apparent to those on land.

It was another morning of waking to ship horns today. Tendrils of mist were wafting through the apartment courtyard. The island beaches were completely socked-in. A security brouhaha delayed the ferry today, so I’m still in Eagle Harbor at the moment. The fog dissipated over the past half-hour here, but you can see it’s still completely socked-in further out over the Sound.

Published at 23:32 on 2 August 2013

I don’t normally link to real-estate listings, but what was done to this property was so awful that I simply must. Some flippers took what must have been a classic 1960s A-frame and basically ruined it, aesthetic-wise.

It’s pretty much a textbook case of everything evil about flippers. They tend to be investors bereft of any sort of artistic, historical, or aesthetic sense save for pandering to the most banal of whatever design fads are presently prevailing. They renovate properties which indeed are often worn and neglected, but without any consideration for the design elements that make them unique and give them character.

The result, as with this property, is all too often something which can never again easily possess the many of the design characteristics which once gave it defining character. Take that A-frame for example; it once had natural wood finishes as its defining element. Now every such surface has been painted over in a faddish color scheme. It would take a lot of money and effort to remove all that off-white awfulness. So it will probably never be done. What was a major defining design element of an A-frame is now gone, forever.

It’s so sad. That house could have been just as easily been cleaned up and restored into a really great “back to the sixties” vintage home (with a few tasteful modern updates thrown in here and there, of course; nobody’s saying a cheap, unreliable 1960s range in the kitchen must stay). That would have created something truly unique and full of character that simply cannot be purchased in a new home.

Instead, we have a house trying to be something other than what it really is, and failing miserably.

Despite that, it will probably sell just fine. Part of the problem with remodeling is that such tasteless hatchet jobs tend to look just fine to all-too-many eyes… when they’re first done. The widespread regret only starts kicking in a decade or two later. Witness all the owners of classic Victorian homes who eagerly paid good money to have them “modernized” by covering their clapboards with (link) T1-11 siding and removing so-called “excessive” ornamentation back in the 1970s.

Here’s one example of what can be done with a vintage A-frame. (No, I don’t think it’s perfect, but then again I’d expect to have some design quibbles with someone else’s vision. No two people can ever be expected to agree 100% on matters of aesthetics.) The contrast between this LA artist’s vision and the local one of a 1-dimensional person whose vision is limited to turning a quick buck is, shall we say, fairly striking.

Update: Here’s what it looked like before the flippers vandalized it. It wasn’t completely intact by the time they got it (not a surprise, it is 50 years old), but it did still have all the basic fundamentals a home of that style should have. It would have made a great starting point for a tasteful renovation, and it sold for 164 grand less than the current asking price.

Published at 17:45 on 29 July 2013

Random observations in no particular order:

• I last drove I-84 east of Pendleton just under 26 years ago, when I was moving to the Northwest for the first time.
• I remember the countryside around Meacham was the last place that appeared halfway decent before I descended into the Columbia Basin. This time, that same region struck me pretty much the same way.
• Then, I was filled with dread at having to live in that unappealing place. Now, I’m glad I don’t live there anymore.
• The Columbia Basin may not be that appealing a place for me to live in, but the views of it as one descends into Pendleton are great.
• The Old Emigrant Hill Road is a much-recommended alternative to the freeway grade on Cabbage Hill, provided you’re not in a big hurry. It has plenty of big looping curves to give one great views of the basin below and almost no traffic. Heading west, the exit to take is well-marked. Heading east, take the exit for the casino but drive past the casino and down the hill, then turn right at the blinking light.

Published at 08:05 on 25 June 2013

I think its very important to them to adhere to the rule of law and respect the relationship.

US Secretary of State John Kerry, on Russia and Snowden. Source.

Really now, John? Respect for the rule of law is suddenly important, now? How about this law?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

File this one under Yet Another Reason Why I Have Absolutely No Respect For Establishment Politics.

Published at 09:20 on 24 June 2013

Could this have been deliberate? Per The Guardian, the plane is “…full of journalists – and presumably representatives of various governments…” The latter in particular makes it precisely the sort of place that one might expect Snowden to want to avoid being cooped up in for over 7 hours.

What better way to avoid that fate than to mislead all that unwanted company into cooping themselves up with each other for 7+ hours while you slip onto another plane unnoticed? It wouldn’t surprise me in the least to learn that he got onto another plane, possibly when the news hits as he’s getting off that other plane someplace (or, who knows, maybe not even until arriving at his final destination).

Published at 09:18 on 23 June 2013

That has to be the biggest pile of horseshit the Establishment has shoveled out about its invasions of everybody’s privacy in recent years.

And yes, I mean everybody. Everybody is a non-citizen of most of the world’s nations. So let’s suppose the NSA follows the law to the letter and never ever spies on US citizens without warrant. (A very generous assumption, in light of the well-documented principle that a lack of transparency always breeds corruption in organizations.) B.F.D.; just have CSIS, MI6, or ASIS* do that by secret agreement.

With the exception of a few dual citizens (easily handled by other agreements or by simply ignoring the law a bit), Americans don’t have British (or Canadian, or Australian) citizenship, meaning those foreign agencies can legally spy on Americans to their heart’s content, with access to US training and technology, and pass on only the “goodies” to the US after some pretext is used as “probable cause” for a US warrant.

So, so long as the Establishment has the ability to spy on everyone, they will (and already do) spy on everyone. Message content, not just contact records. Without any laws about warrants to get in the way. Your citizenship does not matter one iota. Sorry.

* And it’s almost certainly those three that are doing most of the spying-by-proxy on Americans, because those nations are both English-speaking and close allies.

Published at 09:01 on 20 June 2013

In a summary of his most recent book, George Packer goes on and on about how the evil US ruling class has given pretty much everybody else the short shrift since about the mid- to late- 1970s.

Well, yes, indeed they have. All the details Packer presents are fairly obvious and well-documented.

What Packer misses is any real sense of the root causes of the whole change. The ruling elite has always wanted more for itself, damn the costs to anyone else. It’s pretty much what any ruling elite anyplace has wanted.

There was plenty of whining from the Right about the New Deal and the Fair Deal (Truman’s followup to FDR’s New Deal) when they were being enacted, and much of it was every bit as venomous and hysterical as the words of any contemporary talk-show host.

The difference wasn’t in the ruling elite, it was in the ruled. Capitalism had been largely delegitimized in the public mind thanks to the Great Depression and things like huge numbers of people going hungry and skipping meals while farmers were going under because there was no market for the food they grew (all because those going hungry had lost their jobs and thus the dollars which to express their desire for food). Or houses lying vacant and unrented while Hoovervilles grew. And so on.

Why do you think Joseph McCarthy and HUAC later had it so easy dragging up instances where this or that public official or celebrity had gone to a Communist Party meeting or two, or had joined a populist front group run by the Communist Party?

That degree of class consciousness ensured that while some of the elite whined, the whining was largely ignored by a good chunk of the elite, who worried that if they didn’t swallow the bitter pill of kicking down concessions, they might someday have to be faced with losing all their power, not just a few concessions.

Packer’s lack of deeper insight leads him to propose an implausible theory about external enemies motivating the consensus, a theory that fails completely to explain the Reagan era, where an increase in perceived threat to US global power thanks to the Iranian Revolution and the USSR’s invasion of Afghanistan caused a marked increase in international tensions (just look at what happened to military spending then). All the while Reagan was aggressively accelerating the very “unraveling” that Packer posits was prevented by those same tensions.

Published at 15:19 on 12 June 2013

I spend most of Saturday on the other side of the Sound and had two such moments.

The first was when I saw what I thought were two new duplexes (or maybe triplexes or quads, depending on the size of the units therein) had been built, and there was a “for sale” sign in front. Given that circumstances might still make it impossible for me to live on Bainbridge long-term,* it’s in my interest to keep an eye on the housing market.

Huh? What? One unit per building? Four bedrooms? 3000+ square feet? Oh, yeah — it’s Seattle. Restrictive zoning makes it impossible to build multifamily housing in most of the city. So even though the neighborhood in question has one of the smallest average household sizes in a city with the second-smallest average household size in the country, two 4-bedroom single-family monstrosities more suited to a large Mormon family from Salt Lake City were built. If you want an apartment or condo, you’re not worthy of the peace and quiet of a residential neighborhood. Go live on an arterial or next to the freeway were Seattle says you belong.

The second was near the end of the day when I wanted to catch a bus downtown.

Huh? What? No bus for 25 minutes? In a dense urban neighborhood like this? Oh, yeah — it’s Seattle. The city that’s never found it worthwhile to rationalize its bus service by doing a modest amount of route consolidation. If you want prompt service, either drive and shell out for parking or shell out for cab fare. If you can’t or don’t want to pay that much, get used to waiting because Seattle says your kind doesn’t deserve any better.

That’s just the way it is, take it or leave it (it’s been like that for decades, after all)? Fine, glad I chose to leave it.

* Losing my job downtown and not being able to find another one there, basically. Bainbridge works if you’re commuting to downtown Seattle, but commutes get unacceptably long for pretty much any other destination.