Coffee Angst

Recently, my wife recently intimated to me that she wanted a quality espresso/cappucino maker for her birthday.

Having no idea about what was involved, I visited a number of sites (www.coffeegeek.com,www.espressoplanet.com, www.wholelattelove.com etc.).

First I learned that there was a difference between semi-automatic and automatic machines. True afficionados have no tolerance for those who opt for automatics. Only the semis offer true control over the critical parts of the process.

Then, I discovered that the seminal semi-automatic machine was the Rancilio Silvia Espresso Machine.



This machine was reviewed by coffeegeek.com and the review went about 15 pages, 10 before they even got to the functioning of it! (http://www.coffeegeek.com/proreviews/firstlook/ranciliosilvia/details)

Then, the critics compare owning this machine to owning a Lamborghini, and what good is it if you don't know how to drive it?!

The coup de grace came when it was pointed out even if you get this machine, learn to drive it, er, use it, all is for nought if you do not buy an equally good conical burr grinder (sort of like a nuclear-powered Braun grinder).

I haven't even gotten into the question of what kind of espresso beans you should buy (robusta, Arabic, or "full city"). #$(*I@#O!!!

Then, one of the aims of a well-pulled espresso is to generate the vaunted "crema" (the dense, golden foam that forms on the top of a fresh shot of espresso).

Well, after taking all these things heart, and after visiting www.epinions.com, I ended up buying a mid-priced semi-automatic (Saeco Aroma Inox, with a burr grinder thrown in as part of the deal). We've used it for a couple weeks now, and I am in coffee heaven. Give me my espressos, my americanos, my cappuccinos! And if things are really rough, add the correcto!!

Hopefully, my words will help you not get caught up in the coffee angst

The Ghost in the Machine? Don’t look Behind the Curtain!

Traditionally, religious and non-religious thinkers promoted the idea that everyone had a “soul” or “ghost in the machine” that controlled the person’s higher functions. It is not unusual for most of us to feel that there is a single “I” in control, however, neuroscience has challenged this. It has put forward the idea that the self aside from being an illusion that the brain works hard to produce, is actually a network of brain systems.1

The first hints of this occurred after a 19th century fellow, Phineas Gage, suffered an injury by having a spike go through his cheek and through his brain. Phineas’s perception, memory, language and motor functions were intact, but “Gage was no longer Gage.” He had turned from a courteous, responsible and ambitious person to one who was rude, unreliable and shiftless. Gage’s damage was to his ventromedial prefrontal cortex (the brain region above the eyes now known to be involved in reasoning about other people. Together with other areas of the prefrontal lobes and the limbic system (the seat of the emotions), it anticipates the consequences of one’s actions and selects behaviour in line with one’s goals.

Neuroscientists have shown that the brain does not even have a part that does what the ghost is supposed to do – review all the facts and make a decision for the rest of the brain to carry out. While the brain does have supervisory systems in the prefrontal lobes and anterior cingulated cortex, which can push the buttons of behaviour and override habits and urges, these systems are more like quirky gadgets that are quite limited. They are not implementations of a rational free agent traditionally identified with the soul or self.

A demonstration of the illusion of the unified self

Michael Gazzaniga and Roger Sperry showed that when one cuts the corpus callosum (the bridge between both hemispheres), they literally cut the self in two.

{MRI by Dr. Ed Riley, San Diego University}

Each hemisphere can exercise free will without the other’s advice or consent.

Even more disconcertingly, the left hemisphere continuously weaves a coherent but false account of behaviour chosen by the right hemisphere (without the left’s knowledge).

For example, if an experimenter flashes the command “WALK” to the right hemisphere (by keeping it in the part of the visual field that only the right hemisphere can see), the person will comply with the request and begin to walk out of the room. But when the person (specifically, the person’s left hemisphere) is asked why he just got up, he will say in all sincerity, “To get a Coke” – rather than “I don’t really know” or “The urge just came over me” or “You’ve been testing me for years since I had the surgery, and sometimes you get me to do things but I don’t know exactly what you asked me to do.”

Similarly, if the patient’s left hemisphere is shown a chicken and his right hemisphere is shown a snowfall, and both hemispheres have to select a picture that goes with what they see (each using a different hand), the left hemisphere picks a claw (correctly) and the right picks a shovel (also correctly). But when the left is asked why the whole person made those choices, it blithely says, “Oh, that’s simple. The chicken claw goes with the chicken, and you need a shovel to clean out the chicken shed.”








Harvard psychologist, Steven Pinker, points out that the spooky part is that we have no reason to think that the baloney-generator in the patient’s left hemisphere is behaving any differently from ours as we make sense of the inclinations emanating from the rest of our brains. It appears that the conscious mid – the self or soul – is a spin doctor, not the commander in chief.

I have to admit, a lot of these ideas kind of freak me out, but its better to face it than not.

(1. All ideas found here come from Steven Pinker’s “The Blank Slate, the Noble Savage, and the Ghost in the Machine”, Viking Press, 2002)

The Disappearance of Play

My three year old likes to use stones to stand-in for people in different scenarios. His playing this way is taken very seriously by him.

A recent article in the Christian Science Monitor mentioned that the concept of "unstructured, self-initiated play" is vanishing from our culture. [http://www.csmonitor.com/2007/0718/p13s02-lign.html].

A professor of child development states: "Many young people today don't know how to play. Their time has been so programmed, so structured that they have had little time or opportunity to engage in self-­initiated activities."

He suggests that lack of play hurts one's success in higher-level math and science, as these ultimately require fantasy, curiousity and imagination.

Also, that when adults play with children, it allows children to see parents in a new way other then as power figures. "...when you are playing, you and the child are more equal," "This makes it easier to communicate," and both parent and child learn about each other.

And, while they may not verbalize it, children see parents giving up something to be with them. They see this as evidence that they are important and that the parent cares deeply about them.

The professor,sums up what parents can do in one word: Share. "Share your passions, share your experience, share your humor, share your decisionmaking and, most of all, share, your time," he says.



A brief list of play ideas:

All ages: Have daily chores; help someone else; read; play sports; joke; share stories about when you were a child; take walks or bike rides.

Preschoolers: Go to the playground.

Kindergarten to age 7: Make an art corner with paper, glue, ribbons, sparkles, fabric, boxes, string, and clay; make a fort; sleep out in a tent; play board games; play ball games, like catch; tell riddles and knock-knock jokes; cook and bake.

Ages 8 to 10: At this age, children are very much into playing with peers. Provide opportunities and materials (games, etc.) for such play, but don't intrude.

Ages 10 to 12: Again, preteens are very much into their friends, but they are happy to play catch or more sophisticated card games like poker or hearts with parents. Don't feel hurt if children prefer to play with friends.

Ages 13 and up: Now young people feel comfortable doing grown-up activities with parents: softball, golf, bowling, skiing, sailing, or hiking.

I want it to last and last...

Gunnar Madsen is an interesting kid's musician, likened to "Frank Zappa for the sippy set" (http://www.gunnarmadsen.com/) Before doing kid's music, he was in a group called The Bobs and in 1990 they wrote a song "Welcome to my Fog."

Some lyrics from this song have stayed with me:

when I go for a drive
I feel lucky to be alive
the air feels so good
coming off of the hood
and I don't go very fast
I want it to last
oh yea
strangely enough
it does

I think he's hit on something here, but I can't exactly put my finger on it. It's like some kid's proustean recollection of things past...where the goal is to remember experiences that transcend time. Whereas in our day to day lives, we often parcel out time throughout the day while events slowly grind us down. The poor blighters attached to Blackberries can't even turn time off without penalty.

I find the above lyrics simple but sensitive and sublime in what they are trying to capture.

I can't even remember my childhood or of things of importance from that time. It makes me want to ask others if they can remember theirs.

I wonder too how one holds onto these experiences without romanticizing childhood...?

I welcome any thoughts on any of this.

How do win the New Yorker cartoon caption contest

By Patrick HouseUpdated Monday, June 2, 2008, at 5:02 PM ET (Slate Magazine)

Today I can finally update my résumé to include "Writer, The New Yorker." Yes, I won The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest, and I'm going to tell you how I did it. These observations have been culled from months of research and are guaranteed to help you win, too. (Note from Slate's lawyers: Observations not guaranteed to help you win.)

Most people who look at the winners of the caption contest say, "I could've done better than that." You're right. You could have. But that doesn't mean you could've won the caption contest—it just means you could've done better. And if your goal is not to win the caption contest, why bother entering? There is one mantra to take from this article, worth its own line break:

You are not trying to submit the funniest caption; you are trying to win The New Yorker's caption contest.

Humor and victory are different matters entirely. To understand what makes the perfect caption, you must start with the readership. Paging through The New Yorker is a lonesome withdrawal, not a group activity. The reader is isolated and introspective, probably on the train commuting to work. He suffers from urban ennui. He does not make eye contact. Laughing out loud is, in this context, an unseemly act sure to draw unwanted attention. To avoid this, your caption should elicit, at best, a mild chuckle. The first filter for your caption should be: Is it too funny? Will it make anyone laugh out loud? If so, throw it out and work on a less funny one.

Next you need to know the selection process. The first line of defense at The New Yorker is the cartoon editor's assistant, a twentysomething from Texas named Farley Katz. The cartoon assistant reads every single caption—at least 6,000 per week—and passes his favorite 50 or so to the editors, who narrow the list down to three. If you don't make it past Farley, you will never get your name in print. Knowing how he thinks is crucial. The astute captioner will note that he used to be a rollercoaster operator at Six Flags and a telemarketer. He is an outsider who has never trod in the cemented garden he protects. He had to look up "urban ennui" when he arrived in New York—he didn't learn it riding the subway for 25 years. Exploit the fact that Farley is working off the same stereotypes of The New Yorker readership as you are.

Now that you know your gatekeeper, it's time for some advanced joke theory. Should you make a pun or, perhaps, create a visual gag about a cat surreptitiously reading its owner's e-mail? Neither. You must aim for what is called a "theory of mind" caption, which requires the reader to project intents or beliefs into the minds of the cartoon's characters. An exemplary New Yorker theory of mind caption (accompanying a cartoon of a police officer ticketing a caveman with a large wheel): "Yeah, yeah—and I invented the ticket." The humor here requires inference about the caveman's beliefs and intentions as he (presumably) explains to the cop that he invented the wheel. A non-theory-of-mind caption (accompanying a cartoon of a bird wearing a thong), however, requires no such projection: "It's a thongbird." Theory of mind captions make for higher-order jokes easily distinguished from the simian puns and visual gags that litter the likes of MAD Magazine. To date, 136 out of the 145 caption contest winners (94 percent) fall into the "theory of mind" category.

People read The New Yorker to stay on top of the cultural world if they happen to be smart or—if they're just faking it—in the hope of receiving some sort of osmotic transfer of IQ if they hold the magazine tight enough. Nobody wants to feel that The New Yorker is above them, and the last thing they need is to have a cartoon joke go over their heads, lest they write a whole Seinfeld episode about it. Everyone must get your joke. Use common, simple, monosyllabic words. Steer clear of proper nouns that could potentially alienate. If you must use proper nouns, make them universally recognizable to urban Americans. Excepting first names, only nine proper nouns have ever appeared in a winning caption: Batmobile, Comanche, Roswell, Hell, Surrealism, Tylenol, Bud Light, Frankenstein, Kansas Board of Education. You get the idea. Keep it lowercase, keep it simple.

If you heed these instructions, maybe one day you will get a call from Farley and find yourself a finalist. Now what do you do? First, I Googled my fellow finalists: a legislative director in New York and a public-affairs director in Seattle. Clearly 9-to-5 types, at a loss for time, who would be unable to take advantage of the fact that the contest is decided by an online vote. You can and must do better, preferably by launching a full-scale viral marketing campaign. E-mail everyone you know. Create a Facebook group. Call in longstanding debts. It helps if, like me, you have no shame. I had musicians pitching me at their shows, professors pitching me in their lecture halls, and old ladies at cafes pitching me to their grandnieces. Kiss babies, shake hands, and play to win.

It also helps, of course, if you have the best entry. And I did.

For cartoon: see http://www.slate.com/id/2192564/

My winning caption: "O.K. I'm at the window. To the right? Your right or my right?"

Mildly amusing at best? Check. Theory of mind? Check. Proper nouns? Nope. And what better archetype of urban ennui could there be than a man in a cardigan holding a drink, yapping on his cell phone while blissfully unaware of looming dangers? A very similar cartoon by Jack Kirby from 1962—similar enough to lead the New York Post to shout plagiarism—has the person inside the window frightened and cowering, sans drink, glasses, or phone. But that was 50 years ago, and drudge and complacency have settled on the urban landscape sometime between now and then. You must look for these themes in your cartoon and pounce.

I will stop analyzing now, in deference to Seinfeld's New Yorker gospel: "Cartoons are like gossamer, and one doesn't dissect gossamer." But what does Jerry know, really? He may have a hit show, millions of dollars, and a beautiful wife, but he has never won The New Yorker caption contest. But I have. I have dissected gossamer. And now you can, too. Good luck.

Coffee House

A place to meet for conversation, amusement, ideas and culture. Watch this space.