Fashions in Vegetables: Kale

I'm a little late to this, but here we go:  The "in" vegetable these days is kale.

In the past, I mostly encountered kale at cocktail parties, where it served as a colorful underpinning to cooked and peeled shrimp, next door (usually) to  a small dish of Bookbinder's sauce.

But kale has come into its own in the last year or so.  Juicers (people who swirl up healthy breakfast meals, not athletes who use banned substances) now pulverize kale with other fruits and vegetables to make super-healthy breakfast or post-gym workout drinks.

I try to eat a healthy breakfast, and I go several times a week to the gym.  I figured I needed to look into this kale stuff.

I read articles about kale that suggested serving it, (cooked, of course) as a side dish at dinner.  Alas, the Significant Other and the younger person were uninterested.   Previously they had refused many offers to sample delicious French lentils with onions and chard.  I will not discuss their reactions to dandelion leaves except to say that such greens are no longer in our refrigerator's crisper drawer.

So I understood kale was a non-starter at home meals.  

Meanwhile, kale had gone mainstream, appearing on the menus of many hip restaurants.  So, the first time I saw a kale salad on the menu at a restaurant, I ordered it. 

Such a mistake.   The kale was cut into the usual bite-sized pieces.  Chewing up each mouthful took about fifteen minutes. After about three mouthfuls, the evening was over.  The kale had won.  Declaring defeat, I sent most of the salad back to the kitchen.  Enough was enough.

Once home, I consulted a couple of vegetarian cookbooks to learn how to deal with kale. 

Both acknowledged that kale has a texture that is spiny and tough.  Nobody recommends eating kale raw, but serious vegetarians warn that boiling will rob kale of some of its nutritional benefits. 

What to do? 

Here is a recipe from Barbara Kafka's Vegetable Love, 2005, a fine book that I consult often.  I believe she would be comfortable with my sharing a single recipe.  

Braised Kale

Kale can be cut and eaten well into the winter.  It may be an acquired taste -- but once acquired, it becomes a favorite.

2 Tbsp olive oil

4 3/4 pounds kale, stems removed

1 head garlic (about 10 plump cloves) separated into cloves,

smashed, peeled and chopped medium

2 teaspoons kosher salt

Freshly ground black pepper to taste

Heat the olive oil in a 12-inch-wide pot over low heat.  Take a handful of kale leaves and roughly stack them into a pile.  With a large kitchen knife, cut across into approximately 1/2-inch strips.  Throw the leaves into the pot.  Continue until all the kale is cut and cooking.

Increase the heat to medium and stir the kale around in the pot.  Cook for 10 minutes.  At this point, the kale will have begun to shrink dramatically.  Lift and turn the kale so that the pieces on the bottom move to the top; it is easy to do this using tongs, or use a wooden spoon.  Reduce the heat to low.  Cook for 5 minutes.

Add the garlic.  Stir to mix.  Simmer for 25 minutes.  Add the salt and pepper.  Serve.

Makes 8 cups; serves 8 to 10 as a side dish.

My Remarks

This sounds great, really, but I can't do it in my kitchen.  First off, it requires almost five pounds of kale. 

 Five pounds! I would be eating it for days, which is a bit much for even the most fashionable of vegetable consumers. And, as I have discussed, I am the only person in my household who would eat the stuff.

(I know, I know.  I could just halve the recipe.  I threw in the above comments for comic purposes.)

My second problem has to do with cutting up the kale, While I have a few good knives, neither they nor I are up to the task of cutting large pieces of stiff, unwieldy kale into 1/2-inch strips.  Maybe a good pasta machine set to linguine could do it, but I do not own or want to own a pasta machine.

Third, imagine the pot size required to hold even two pounds of kale!  My big soup pot couldn't do it.   And I am not obsessed enough with fashion to buy any more kitchenware. 

I suspect the people best suited to cooking kale are folks in the American south.  For many generations they have passed to their children recipes that turn collard greens, which are at best a true challenge to cook, into a side dish that is not just edible but so tasty that people ask for second and third helpings.  Southerners know to how to wrangle with nutritious leaves that fight back.

Kale Recommendation

Here are my suggestions:  

If you are a juicer, go ahead and try kale.  Let me know how it works.  Then maybe I'll try it myself.

Order kale at restaurants.  Before ordering kale salad, be sure to ascertain that the kale will be cut into very, very small pieces that can be chewed and swallowed before the end of the evening.    This now is possible at many fashionable eateries.  Combined with some sweet and crunchy accents and an interesting dressing, kale salad can be quite delicious.

As to cooking kale, proceed with great caution.

Vergara v. California: Dismissing Bad Teachers

As we have discussed, Vergara v. California challenges the operations of the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD), which, its plaintiffs claim, disadvantage poor and minority students.

According to the school district, black students in Los Angeles are 43 percent more likely than white students to be taught by a "grossly ineffective" teacher, i.e., one whose performance is in the bottom five percent of teacher rankings.  Hispanic students are 68 percent more likely than whites to have such teachers.

In the 10 years before Vergara was filed, a total of 91 teachers were fired in the entire state of California, most for "egregious" conduct.  Poor performance was a factor in only 19 of the firings.  California public schools employ about 300,000 teachers.

This averages to two people out of 300,000 let go for poor performance every year.

There are two possibilities here:  Either the state had the most phenomenally excellent teaching force in world history, or there was virtually no effort to identify poor teachers and get them out of classrooms.

I vote for No. 2.

The question in Vergara is whether state laws caused this to happen.  The Vergara plaintiffs say California laws have become teacher-friendly at the expense of students and that the processes and expenses of getting rid of poor teachers are so arduous that school districts didn't bother to make the effort.  The defense -- the state and the state's two teacher unions -- claim the problem was school district mismanagement.  They also say schools need more money.

John Deasy

The first witness called in the trial was LAUSD Superintendent John
Deasy, who took his job in 2011.

In the 2006-2007 school year, the LAUSD dismissed three teachers.  The district employed, and continues to employ, almost 30,000 teachers.

In the 2009-2010 school year, LAUSD initiated dismissal hearings for 10 teachers whom the district deemed grossly ineffective. Obviously, given the above numbers, most of those teachers were retained or resigned without taking their cases to court.

In Deasy's first full year on the job, 2011- 1012, the district recommended 99 teachers for dismissal hearings.  Another 122 teachers resigned after being notified they were being recommended for termination and before hearings were convened to examine their cases.

"Just because these 122 resigned doesn't mean that the district does not have poor performing teachers sitting in classrooms," Deasy said in cross-examination.  "The second issue is that this is the snapshot of that day.  They had been in classrooms for years."

In his first day of testimony, Deasy estimated that the cost of firing a teacher was $350,000 on average and, in some cases involving egregious conduct, more.  "That's six teachers that could have been brought in to reduce class size (at the $350,000)," he said.

Deasy's conclusion:  "When you follow the law, an unfortunate byproduct of following the law is, in my opinion, the discrimination of youth having to be placed in front of an ineffective teacher."

In cross-examination, the defense referred often to Deasy's increased action to identify poor teachers and move them out of the school district as evidence that the system was working.

"Well-run districts," said the lawyer for the teachers' unions, "are able to fire ineffective teachers."

Quantifying the Differences between Effective and Ineffective Teachers

Raj Chetty, another plaintiffs' witness, set out to quantify the effects bad teachers have on students and their futures.  Chetty is a Harvard economist and affiliated with the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Chetty admitted to being a big-data guy who tried "to bring a scientific approach to public policy decision-making."

Chetty and others data-mined the effects of teachers on 2.5 million New York children using extraordinarily detailed school data from the New York district, 18 million test results and IRS filings regarding student college placements from 1989 to 2009.  After a long, long discussion of methods, Chetty said there were significant differences in learning (he called it value-added) for students in average teachers' classrooms and those of the bottom five percent of teachers. He said students learned significantly, quantifiably less when taught by poor teachers.

Chetty said that, had he been asked before his research project began in 2009, whether he could have identified the differences with such clarity, "I would be skeptical..... (I would have thought it) would be hard to isolate the effectiveness of teachers.  I was wrong."

Chetty is an egghead.  We may think he is stretching his analysis too far, but remember that he examined classroom-by-classroom results and the college placements of New York students over a 20-year period.

Here is his conclusion:

"If we replace an ineffective teacher with a teacher of average quality (in all cases), the impacts would be on the same order as ending the financial crisis again and again and again, year after year.  It would be a dramatic effect on the American economy in the long run."

Let's note also that Chetty's research has been taken up and mentioned by the federal Department of Education and the Obama administration on several occasions.



Discussion


Diane Ravitch, America's esteemed education historian, has not been called to testify in the Vergara case.  But she has been for decades a zealous proponent of educational improvement.  In 2000, she was involved in the formation of the National Council on Teacher Quality (NCTQ), a conservative group.  At that point, she said, teacher training institutions "were too touchy-feely, too concerned about self-esteem and social justice and not concerned enough with basic skills and academics."

Since that time, there has been a huge shift in schools toward what Ravitch calls "data-driven assessment."  In 2012, Ravitch broke with the NCTQ in a column in the Washington Post, saying this:

"Now, to be candid, I am fed up with our nation's obsession with data-driven instruction....I fear that they are pushing data-worship and data-mania of a sort that will cause teaching to the test, narrowing of the curriculum and other negative behaviors (like cheating).  I don't think any of this will lead to the improvement of education.  It will lead to higher test scores, but it will undermine genuine education ... a love of learning, a readiness to immerse oneself in study of a subject, an engagement with ideas, a willingness to ask questions and to take risks.  I don't know how to assess the qualities I respect, but I feel certain that there is no standardized, data-driven instruction that will produce what I respect."

The Question

And so here we are.  Students are being evaluated on test scores, and teachers who do not deliver regular improvements in test scores are being found faulting.  These teachers are challenging whether they should be held to account for student failures on quite basic measures.  Students from poor and minority backgrounds are claiming a right to achieve at least this much.

Meanwhile, educational experts like Ravitch are urging us to set the bar much higher.

The Chicago Cow

I passed this cow sculpture outside the Chicago Cultural Center on a walk around the Loop last week.  It's a smallish, unpretentious thing, not like that 16-foot-long charging bull statue down by Wall Street in New York.

I thought immediately that it must be a replica of Mrs. O'Leary's cow.  You remember, the one that kicked over the lantern and set off the Great Chicago Fire of 1871.  (See below.)

But no.  This Chicago cow statue is a reminder of Cows on Parade.  You probably remember this.  It began as a community event in Zurich in 1998, when local artists and celebrities decorated fiberglass cows that were placed all over the city.

A Chicago man was inspired by the display and brought it to Chicago the next year.  Here are a couple of the hundreds of Chicago Cows on Parade in Chicago in 1999:

There was of course an O'Leary Memorial Cow on the Chicago parade, but I couldn't find a photograph of it.

Cows on Parade was a huge success and went on to visit cities in the United States and 50 countries over 12 years.  It reportedly has been followed by a Lions on Parade, but this doesn't seem to have generated as much attention.  Maybe there is animals-on-parade fatigue.  Or maybe cows are a hard act to follow.

Anyway, back to the Chicago cow.  The man who brought Cows on Parade to the city gifted the statue to the city in memory of the event.  It is in no way way a major tourist attraction, but there are many pictures on the internet of the cow interacting with visitors.

People do like to participate in art.

School lawsuit: Vergara v. California

Some of the basic tenets of our country's approach to education are under challenge in an interesting case winding up this week in a Los Angeles courtroom.

The plaintiffs are nine minority children enrolled in the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD).  They are backed by a billionaire from Silicon Valley.

The defendants are the State of California and the two California teachers unions, the California Federation of Teachers and the California Teachers Association.  The unions are wealthy too.

At issue is whether five state laws regarding teacher employment have the result of consigning poor and minority students to classrooms staffed by ineffective teachers, violating the students' rights of equal protection under the California constitution.  (I discussed this more generally several days ago in The Dance of the Lemons.)

The judge in the case will issue his decision soon, but it certainly will not end the matter.  Each side has vowed to appeal if the ruling is not in its favor.

The case is important, and I believe it has not received the attention it deserves.  There is broad dissatisfaction with the results our public school districts are achieving compared with other countries' education systems.  We need a broad discussion of what should be done.

At local, state and national levels, we have been working on improving schools for many years.

The first big effort was to devote more money to education. Some people believe still more money is the answer.  To date, very substantial increases in educational funding have yet to yield even marginally better results.

The other approach has been to change standards for student achievement.  The current federal effort is called the "common core" curriculum.  The last one was "no child left behind."  In between we had a "race to the top." Other revisions have been attempted, often several times, in virtually every state.  Some years back, a friend said of the latest such program, "It's just another way to measure 70 percent."  He got it right.

I think of this every time some new top-down grand plan is adopted and we are supposed to expect better results.  It never seems to make a difference.  People want everything to be different but nothing substantive to change.  Our children are the poorer for it.

Education essentially is a personal transaction involving a teacher and students.  It requires respect, even love, between the two, as well as trust and agreement on the goals to be achieved.  This may sound trite, but it is not achieved easily.

Outside factors inevitably influence the educational transaction -- the support of parents for the schools, the mutual respect of school administrators and teachers and, most of all, the trust of each group that the others have the success of students as their single, over-riding goal.

It is this last element where school effectiveness breaks down.  I find it curious that it is seldom discussed in these terms.

Students are the plaintiffs in Vergara v. California, but the case is essentially a battle among the adults.


Next up:  three discussions of the major claims of the Vergara plaintiffs, the responses of their opponents and some context on the issues.

American Gothic and a Painting I Like Better

Above is American Gothic, a truly iconic American painting.  I saw it last week for the first time at the Art Institute of Chicago in a room full of American Regionalist paintings.

I recognized it immediately.  It is easily the most famous of Grant Wood's paintings.  An Iowan, he died young in 1942 at the age of 51.

Here is another picture of a Wood painting that I just pulled
up on the internet.  It is entitled The Birthplace of Herbert Hoover, West Branch, Iowa, 1931.  (Perhaps an unfortunate title and date, but he did others like it.)  It looks
to me like a sympathetic, even romanticized view of
farm life in Iowa early in the last century.

Still, what Wood is remembered for is American Gothic. Many art experts look at it and describe the picture as an ennoblement of the discipline, work ethic and even valor of the Midwestern American farmer.

I didn't see it that way.  When I looked at American Gothic in its original form, I recognized an icon, all right, but one that has been adopted and repurposed endlessly in American advertising and television as a big joke about how rural and square the country used to be.

Who knows what Wood had in mind?  Maybe he was imitating stiff 19th century American portraiture. I find it hard to believe he felt affection for the characters in the painting.

In any event, in that particular room at the Art Institute, American Gothic is by far the biggest attraction.  Tour groups gather around (as if there were anything new to see) and listen to careful explications of its origin and meaning.

Meanwhile, just a few yards away is what, to me, is a wonderful American Regional painting from 1945.  The Art Institute acquired it last year, and it was painted by an Art Institute alum named Thomas Hart Benton.  It is called The Cotton Pickers.  Here it is:

Benton, also from the Midwest, specialized in realistic paintings of people in their environments.  This picture was painted, from notes or memory, years after a visit Benton made to Georgia in the 1920s.  It depicts black people harvesting cotton under the hot Georgia sun.  One woman is offering a man water; a young child sleeps under a make-shift shelter.  The people, like all Benton characters, are sinewy, as is the landscape.  You can almost feel how their backs must ache. Their labor and their endurance are evident and moving.

The Art Institute of Chicago museum is an embarrassment of riches.  It is far too much to appreciate in a single visit.  But I hope that, perhaps over time, visitors will shift their focus in the American Regional room from the Wood painting to the new Benton acquisition, which rewards a longer look and more careful study.

Is San Francisco New York?

Is San Francisco New York?

The above citation is to a hilarious article in New York magazine about San Francisco.  Following the article is a veritable slugfest of comments by partisans of each city.

I have spent a number of years in and near New York and San Francisco, and I like to think I have enough experience and distance to see the good and bad in each. Some observations:

San Francisco has a bunch of nutty people. Always has, always will.  Name another American city with a vigorous nudist rights movement -- I dare you.
        A recent demonstration in San Francisco rallied supporters of Venezuela's Bolivarian government. Meanwhile, in Caracas, many thousands were taking to the streets to protest the Venezuelan government.
        There are continuing "guerilla" demonstrations these days against buses sent by Silicon Valley companies to ferry 18,000 San Franciscans from the city to their jobs at Google, Facebook and other tech firms. The demonstrators want the buses not to be allowed to use regular city bus stops.  They also want the tech workers to move out of San Francisco.

New York, on the other hand, has more billionaires.  Some New Yorkers brag about this, which puzzles me. I've only heard of one allegedly nice billionaire, and he lives in Omaha.  The rest of them sound like jerks. Plus more than a few of New York's billionaires seem to be Russian oligarchs; I wouldn't want those people living on my block.

Housing prices in New York and San Franciso are outrageous.  People in Manhattan compete to pay $4,000 a month for one-bedroom apartments.  The average San Francisco home now costs north of $900,000.   Each city maintains a rent-control regime of  more than 100,000 apartments with below-market rates and no means-testing of the renters who benefit.
        In 2012, a scant 126 new apartments were constructed in San Francisco, well fewer than were wanted and further squeezing prices and driving people out of the market.
         Last year, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced the city would construct a high-rise building of small apartments with as little as 250 square feet of living space each. ( Bloomberg himself is a billionaire whose 14 homes include  a sumptuous five-story townhouse on the Upper East Side. Hmm.) On the other side of the market, a new batch of condominiums opened that looked out over Central Park from high above 57th Street; prices ranged from $50 million to $70 million each.

New York's prominence as a global financial center has made many people rich, but employment in finance is believed to have dropped by 30 percent since the Great Recession.  Meanwhile, New York attracts ever-more foreign tourists each year.

San Francisco's economy, based largely on tourism for at least the last 40 years, has been strengthened of late by the social networking explosion in its former working-class district south of Market Street. This has made a number of young technical workers quite wealthy, which has made many of the rest of the city's residents angry. In most other cities, residents would welcome a new industry, even if its participants dressed in jeans and hoodies.

Each city has a rich heritage, New York as the first great American metropolis (okay, maybe second after Boston) and San Francisco as the first great metropolis in the American West.  No one living today, however, can claim credit for these things.  The cities are attractive sites for tourists and their economies are flourishing, at least for those with the right skills or connections.

Neither city is attracting jobs for ordinary people, and neither has a public education system that turns out students ready for jobs in its most profitable industries. Middle-class people continue to leave for the suburbs or other states.

Actually, there are some dynamic cities that seem to be doing well these days -- Austin, Nashville, Atlanta, Denver, even Pittsburgh.  These cities are inviting to newcomers and seem to have the potential for economic growth that will improve the lives of their citizens overall.

San Francisco and New York, not so much.    

Nilima Sheikh at the Art Institute of Chicago

I went the other day to the Art Institute of Chicago and saw a new exhibit by Indian artist Nilima Sheikh.  Her works have been gathering prominence internationally since at least 1984, and she has been featured at Art Basel events where major collectors shop for modern art.  But this is her first museum exhibit, at least in the United States.

It is gorgeous, 10 large banners filled with many intricate images of vivid color and great beauty.  The title is "Each Night, Put Kashmir in Your Dreams"  which comes from a line in a poem by Agha Shahid Ali.

 The poem comes from a much-admired 1997 volume, The Country Without a Post Office, which is full of poetry about Kashmir.

Dreaming about Kashmir may be a theme with Indian artists.  The main character in Salman Rushdie's 1980 book, Midnight's Children also dreams of Kashmir just before a seminal shift in his life.

All the works in the Sheikh exhibit explore the many cultures and long history, often violent, of the Kashmir Valley.  (Kashmir now is part of India but has been a subject of contention and bloody flare-ups between India and Pakistan since their partition in 1947.)

Here Sheikh examines not the modern history but Kashmir in the deep past and current memory. The region was, and apparently for artists, still is regarded as paradise on earth.

 There are references to the Silk Road, which connected Kashmir with what is now China and other parts of Asia and the Middle East.  In addition to Hindu and Islam, it traces the influences of Persia, Buddhism and Sufism.  There are many references to poetry, and the back of  each banner is filled with writing from various backgrounds, ancient to modern.

As I said, it is all quite beautiful.  But it made me wish I knew a lot more about Eastern history and literature and that I had actually visited Kashmir.  If I were better educated in these subjects, I think I would have enjoyed Sheik's art all the more.

In my first paragraph, I referenced Nilima Sheikh's emergence into Western awareness in 1984.  That year she released a series of 12 small tempera paintings entitled When Champa Grew Up that traced the life of an Indian girl from childhood through marriage and then her torture and immolation by her husband's family.  The work was much praised and very well received.

I found an image of one of the 12 works and posted it on my computer before I came to Chicago, but just now I deleted it inadvertently.  You can learn more about When Champa Grew Up online.

I am severely computer-constrained at the moment but will post again as soon as I am able.

The Dance of the Lemons

You may have heard about the "Dance of the Lemons." It describes how the worst teachers (lemons) end up in public schools with the most low-income and minority students.

The term is an insult to the teaching profession, but anyone who has taught school or sent a child to school in a large metropolitan school district gets it:  Most teachers are fine and some are excellent, but there are bad teachers.

Here's how it works in large-city public school districts.

Some schools in large districts are in good (let's be honest, expensive) neighborhoods.  The parents are supportive and involved, the children are attentive and generally manageable and the classroom experience is efficient and gratifying.  Teachers naturally gravitate to these schools.

When a bad teacher (who doesn't advance student learning at an appropriate rate or who does not treat children with respect or doesn't motivate students) arrives at a good school, parents mobilize.  They let the principal know their displeasure, they complain to other teachers and, generally, they make the bad teacher so uncomfortable that he or she leaves the school.

Other schools in large districts (those in poorer or marginal neighborhoods with less sophisticated parents, often of minority backgrounds) are more challenging.  The children's home experiences are often chaotic. The parents are less likely to show up for parent-teacher conferences or to be able to evaluate the effectiveness of their kids' teachers.  The children are less focused and, frankly, harder to teach. Teaching at these schools is very demanding.  Experienced and highly competent teachers either burn out and leave the profession or transfer from these schools to "good" schools.

As the best teachers migrate to the "good" schools, more teaching openings arise at the "poorer" schools.  Newly hired teachers and the bad teachers driven out of the "good" schools end up in the "poorer" schools.  Since many new teachers leave the profession in their early years -- the job is intense and difficult in the best of situations, and many young teachers understand they cannot do it well -- there is generally much higher teacher turnover at "poorer" schools.  The bad teachers who have been pushed out of the "good" schools, protected by tenure, end up in the most challenging classrooms with less sophisticated,  undemanding parents.  These bad teachers often stay in these schools for the balance of their careers.

Word spreads when school performance declines.   Parents who can do so move to different neighborhoods or enroll their children in charter, magnet or private schools. People with younger children avoid the challenged school areas altogether.  Enrollments decline as the poor schools get worse, and some of the poor schools are closed or merged with others.  Parents in adjoining neighborhoods lose trust in their schools.

(In fact, student enrollment at large metropolitan school districts has been declining for many years.  This has spillover effects on property values, local businesses, job prospects for young people and petty and major crime.)

When school enrollments decline, so do the number of teaching jobs.  Usually the last hired are the first fired.  The new teachers at the "poorer" schools are let go, and the bad teachers stay put.

Rinse and repeat.  The process has hollowed out many metropolitan school districts, leaving them unattractive to parents in all but the most expensive neighborhoods and offering no good alternatives to families who cannot afford better alternatives for their children.

This recently has become the subject of a students' rights case in California.  More on this later.

Child Protection Finale -- New York

Several days ago I discussed a horrifying family case in New Jersey.

As you may recall, a man battered his four-month-old child so badly that the boy is blind, brain-damaged and in need of 24-hour care for the rest of his life.  New Jersey's child protective agency was found to have failed to protect the child, and a jury awarded more than $100 million dollars to take care of the child and to punish the agency.  If the boy does not live long, what remains of the jury award presumably will revert to his nearest relative, his mother, who also failed to protect him.  She will become quite wealthy.  The father is serving six years in prison.

The NY Times reported on Saturday the outcome of another, similar situation.  In that case, a woman's live-in boyfriend had shaken her crying 21-month old daughter and smashed her head against her crib, leaving her injured and unconscious. The mother waited almost 12 hours before calling 911.  The girl died.  Like the father in the New Jersey case, this boyfriend had a known violent history; he had served time in prison for beating another child.

In this case, too, the the state agency was found to have acted with "reckless disregard for the safety" of the child.  The jury also found that the mother did not cooperate with the agency when help was offered.  She lied to the agency about her boyfriend and denied that she was living with him.

As in New Jersey, the family sued, but this time the jury refused to assess damages.  New York law allows awards for pain and suffering but not death.  The jury found that the child had not suffered in the period between the time she was injured and died.   It is a small mercy if she did not.

The boyfriend who killed the child is serving 25 years in prison after pleading guilty to first-degree manslaughter.  The mother also served two years for manslaughter.  It is remarkable to me that she would sue even a deficient, negligent state agency for money when her own behavior contributed so greatly to the death of her daughter.

There is a visceral, near feral drive that parents feel to protect their children. I always assumed it was evolutionary and universal.  As abominably as the state agencies behaved in both these cases, I find the mothers' behavior even more shocking.

This is getting to be too much for me.  I'll leave the topic alone for a while.

Traveling tomorrow, will try to think of something fun.

Mars and Venus at the Gym

I have worked out at several gyms over the years.  In that time, I have learned that men and women go at exercise in very different ways.

Some observations:

1.  Men go to the gym to bulk up.  Some men avoid going to the gym because they are not bulked up.
   


                                         

Women who go to the gym do NOT want to bulk up.  Some women avoid going to the gym because they are afraid of getting bulked up.

2.   Men's muscle targets are, in order, pecs, more pecs, shoulders, more shoulders, delts, triceps, biceps and abs.
   

Women's muscle targets are, in order, glutes (always called butts), more glutes, thighs, more thighs, abs and, sometimes, triceps

3.    Men do short sets of muscle exercises with the heaviest weights they they can handle.  Many of them grunt and throw their weights on the floor after each set.

   


Women do many sets of many reps with itty-bitty weights.  They always put the weights back neatly in the racks.

4.  Men think women admire men with broad shoulders and
     six-pack abs.

      Women think men admire skinny women with tight butts.

5.    Men's favorite exercises are pull-ups, bench presses and dead lifts.

      Women's favorite exercises are leg curls, butt-tighteners and ab crunches.

6.  Men do not pay enough attention to their lower
     bodies.











   

Women do not pay enough attention to their upper bodies.













7.    Men make up five percent of the people in exercise classes.  Women make up 95 percent.

   

8.  A few men do spinning classes. Women make up 70 percent of spinners.

   

     


 9.  A few men do Pilates.

Most Pilates classes are full of women.

10.  A few men and many, many women do yoga.

There are probably other differences -- like, say, in the changing rooms -- but I mean it literally when I say I'm not going there.

In fact, gyms themselves are changing.  I've noticed a couple trends in recent years.  More on that later.

Child Protection in New Jersey

A ghastly child welfare case took another turn in a New Jersey court this week.

It involves a boy named Jadiel Velesquez.  When he was four months old, his father beat Jadiel so savagely that Jadiel, now four,  is blind and permanently brain-damaged.  He will require round-the-clock care for the rest of his life.

The case was tried last year.  Jadiel's attorney noted the many failures of New Jersey's Department of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) to intervene when his maternal grandmother begged repeatedly for help. In one widely reported situation, the grandmother called the youth protection department after Jadiel's mother dropped him off for babysitting.  Inside the boy's diaper bag, the grandmother found a crack cocaine pipe.

In fact, Jadiel's father had a distressing and violent history.  By the age of 20, two years before Jadiel was born, the family's attorney noted, the man had been arrested 20 times.  The father had battered other girlfriends and tossed a dog off an apartment balcony.  And, honestly, Jadiel's mother did not use good judgment in having a baby with such a man and failed to protect their child from his rage.

"Come on, what else did they need to know?" Jadiel's attorney, speaking of DYFS, asked the jury.  He had Jadiel rolled into the courtroom so jurors could observe the damaged child.

In negotiations before the jury ruling, New Jersey offered a $10 million settlement to take care of the child for life.  Jadiel's family said no.

Last year, a jury awarded $166 million to Jadiel.  All the money was to be paid by New Jersey's admittedly failed DYFS agency.  No financial responsibility was assigned to the boy's father, who was serving six years for aggravated assault.

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This week, the judge in Jadiel's case reduced the $166 million award by $64 million.  The judge said the jury had overestimated the cost of caring for Jadiel for the rest of his life by $30 million;  the care would cost at most $75 million, the judge decreed.  The judge also said the cost assessed to DYFS was too high; he knocked that down by 25 percent.  The judge also said the jury erred in not assessing any damages against Jadiel's father, who injured him.

So now Jadiel and his grandmother, the only adult who seems to have cared about him, will collect more than $100 million, somewhat less after their attorney costs, which likely will be calculated as a percentage of the award.

Interestingly, the Star-Ledger of Newark said the judge found the jury "was not influenced by attempts to turn jury sentiment in favor of a defenseless child by playing to juror emotions."

Really?  Wheeling a blind, brain-damaged four-year-old into a courtroom was not an attempt to turn jury sentiment?  

Here's what I would have done if I were the judge:  I would have let the jury's $166 million decision stand.  I would have ordered that amount, net of per-hour attorney reimbursement (no John Edwards-style contingent fee), be put in a trust with two trustees, one medical and the other financial.  The trustees would be charged with assuring that the damaged child received appropriate care for as long as he lived.  I would make sure Jadiel's grandmother was supported as well, and that she would receive a six-figure settlement should she outlive Jadiel.  After the boy died, I would have ordered whatever money remained in the trust to be returned to the state.

As I said, this was a ghastly case.  But it was not a lottery.  The jury was justly outraged, and it voiced its outrage with an enormous award.  If the money were to come from Jadiel's father and mother and the pensions of the social workers who did not do their jobs, it would be fine with me.  A state agency failed horribly, and now the state of New Jersey must do what it can to mitigate the suffering it allowed to happen.  In fact, it can do quite a lot.

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There was another notorious case in New Jersey's Department of Youth and Family Services (DYFS) history, and unlike in the Jadiel case, the state's compensations to the victims strikes me as not enough.  

It arose in 2004 when a "little kid," Bruce Jackson, was caught rummaging through a garbage can near his home, looking for food.  The "child," four feet tall and weighing 45 pounds -- police estimated his age at 10 -- turned out to be 19 years old.  He and his three younger brothers, adopted with DYFS approval,  reported they sometimes ate wallboard when they were hungry, which appeared to have been all the time.

The Camden County prosecutor said, "They actually looked like children you'd see from third-world countries on television commercials." 

Speaking of the boys' parents, a DYFS spokewoman said at the time, "They had cleared every background check every time they adopted another child.  The court reports and adoption studies had lots and lots of positive things said about them, about being loving parents.  The kids are described as very bright, friendly."

Great outfit, that DYFS.

In addition to malnutrition, the boys had not seen a doctor or dentist in five years.  Their teeth were rotting, and all had head lice.  Their home had not had electricity for five months, and gas service had been cut off at least a month earlier.  

Authorities said all four had been home-schooled, whatever that meant.

As in the above-mentioned Jadiel Velesquez case, this outrage went to trial.

Twenty-seven months later, Bruce Jackson faced his adoptive mother in court in 2006. By this point, he had gained 95 pounds and grown 15 inches in height.

He looked at his mother and said this:  "You would make us eat pancake batter, dried-up grits and oatmeal, uncooked Cream of Wheat and raw potatoes instead of cooked food.  You didn't take us to any doctor's appointments.  You wouldn't let us watch TV or play with our toys.  You wouldn't let us take a shower when we were dirty.  You yelled us, cursed at us, hit us with brooms, rulers, sticks, shoes and belt buckles; I still have the marks to prove it."

As in the Jadiel case, New Jersey offered a settlement before the jury was convened:  $5 million for Bruce and $7.5 million for his three younger brothers.  They accepted the offer.

After many years of malnourishment and stunted growth, mental and physical, I doubt sincerely that these four brothers, with no parents or relatives to rely on, were ready to take care of themselves in the real world.  Their lives will be difficult at best and, likely, tragic.  Their legal representatives should have held out for more.

After this case case concluded, New Jersey undertook a $1 billion overhaul of its foster care program. Maybe things are much better now. 

All I can say is this:  If I knew a child who was in a vulnerable situation, I would abduct him or her and get out of New Jersey, no matter the consequences for me.  The results in these two high-profile cases strike me as unsatisfying in many different ways.

The Newest Analogy

Maureen Dowd of the The New York Times beat me on this one.

In her column today, she quoted a fellow speaking of the new Los Angeles mayor, Eric Garcetti.

The quote:  "He's as invisible as Flight 370."

We'll be seeing this one -- "invisible as Flight 370" -- for months and possibly years to come.

You heard it here second.

Suspicious Dairy Products

Would you trust this cheese?

Last evening, we packed for our flight east.  As we were finishing, the Significant Other noticed two cups of yogurt and a good-sized chunk of Gouda cheese left in the refrigerator.  This morning he gave me the yogurt to add to my doggie bag from the previous evening's dinner.  He wrapped the Gouda in a Ziploc and placed that in his carry-on.

Surprisingly, both raised a stir with the TSA at the airport.

As I put the doggie bag avec yogurt on the X-ray line, I was told that yogurt was contraband.  And the security agent was absolutely right:  Yogurt is mostly liquid, and only the smallest containers of liquids are allowed on commercial jets today.

"You're right," I said.

The security agent told me he would remove the yogurt.  He put it in a trash can that was already filled with a great many bottles of suspicious water.  My doggie bag proceeded through the checkpoint.

Later, when I picked up my clothing and the doggie bag at the other end of the line, I found that the TSA agent had removed only one cup of yogurt.  The second remained in my plastic bag.

Maybe I was in a felonious mood.  Whatever.   I just kept the yogurt.  Later the SO ate it during our flight.

But think of the danger:  That cup of yogurt could have downed an enormous airliner!

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The story does not end there.  Remember, the Significant Other was traveling through the TSA line with a large wedge of Gouda cheese.

Here, the TSA did its job.  After the SO's carry-on went through the X-ray machine, he and it were pulled over.  The carry-on was inspected carefully, and the cheese was discovered.   Both went through the security line again.  

This time the Gouda passed.  We reunited and boarded our jet.  

Later I found a big tube of sunblock that I had not remembered when I went through the TSA line.  Anyone who knows me can attest that I am a notorious scatterbrain; in this case, I simply forgot.

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Happily, we arrived safely at our destination.   

Starlings, Part Two: An English Story

I first noticed photographs like the ones above this year.  They depict large groups -- murmurations, to be specific -- of starlings in winter migration.  Such pictures apparently have been a staple of photography in Europe for some years.

From the photographers' vantage points at a distance or in airplanes, the views are striking compositions and make for beautiful shots of the bird formations.

On the ground, people sometimes tell a different story.

Recently, the English press descended on a street in Hereford, just west of Wales and northwest of Gloucester, to report the effects of a recent encampment of an estimated 20,000 starlings, who stopped for several weeks in Hereford in mid-migration from the Scandinavian winter to warmer climes in Northwestern Europe.

At that point in Hereford, the sky darkened like clockwork each morning and evening as the birds flew out to forage for food and then returned to their temporary roost, a large Leylandii hedge that separates a Heineken plant and a street of family homes.

The Mirror quoted Hereford resident Walter Bloomfield on the nature of the residents' complaints:

"There are thousands of them and the droppings go all over the garden and the house.

"The windows are covered in poo and a lot of the residents around here are having to get their cars cleaned all the time.

"When you go outside it is hard to avoid them -- you have to wear a hat or a hood to stop them messing on your head."

A Hereford car decorated by starlings

Some residents had taken to carrying umbrellas.  Others were said to be washing windows and cars daily.

(Americans whose children have played soccer on pitches fouled by Canada geese may sympathize.)

The starlings were expected to depart within a few weeks for the European mainland, but the residents had already begun to worry that the birds will return to Hereford next year.

In fact, Hereford is by no means the only roosting post for starlings.   There are reports of other murmurations, in numbers as great as 100,000, stopping to roost in Snape, Suffolk, Gretna Green and, most famously, Brighton Pier. What seems to have distinguished the Hereford situation is its appearance for the first time this year.

Heineken, which owns the hedge where the starlings were roosting, was caught in an uncomfortable spot between the residents of the affected streets and the concerns of British birders and the U.K. government.

In 2006, the British Trust for Ornithology reported that the country's starling population had declined by two-thirds in the previous 40 years.

The Royal Society for Protection of Birds, a private group, reported in 2012 the lowest number of starlings in the UK since its Big Birdwatch began in 1979.  During the period, the average number of starlings spotted in British gardens dropped from 12 to three.

(The British take their bird-watching seriously.  In 2005, the publication Bird Study reported the results of a 20-year investigation of nest-site competition between the common starling and the Great Spotted Woodpecker. The conclusion:  "A national decline in starling numbers and the reduction in nest-site competition may have contributed to the increase in nest success, numbers and habitat distribution of the Great Spotted Woodpecker in Britain." So, one point for woodpeckers, one loss for starlings.)

The belief is that the number of European starlings has dropped as acreage devoted to farmland -- which contains their chief sources of food, fruit and insects -- has declined in England and on the continent.  Since it is unlikely that European buildings and homes will be bulldozed and the land returned to faming anytime soon, a certain tension remains.

In Hereford, a spokesman for Heineken tried to strike a balance in comments to journalists.

"We want to help our neighbours wherever we can, but we also have a responsibility to the natural environment," he said, adding  "We're also working with a bird protection expert to make sure any proposed actions would not cause any harm or injury to the birds."

A "starling expert" from the Royal Society for Protection of Birds took a stronger tone.  "I can understand people's concerns," said Richard James, "but we would urge people to tolerate them if they can.  They are a species in trouble."

Next up:  The starling in America.

Part Three: Starlings of America

Starlings taking a break on a road in Virginia

Several years ago, as I left a friend's home one afternoon before Christmas, I noticed hundreds of starlings perched quietly all around.  Starlings on lawns, on driveways, in the street, on power lines, on the roofs.  The effect was ominous and creepy, like a scene in Alfred Hitchcock's film, The Birds.

In fact, starlings have no business being in North America.

The story of their arrival has been told many times, but is worth a brief reprise.

The first European starlings came here in 1890.  Their importer was Eugene Schiefflin, a rich New Yorker who had set out to seed the U.S. with every bird mentioned in Shakespeare.

Schiefflin struck out with with bullfinches, chaffinches, nightingales and skylarks.  But he was successful, if you can call it that, with starlings.  He set 60 of them loose in Central Park. (Or 80, or 100 over two years; stories vary.)

Starling sightings began to be reported the next year, first a couple groups in Brooklyn and then others across the metropolitan area.  Starlings were observed killing nesting robins and bluebirds. A flock of starlings descended on a cherry tree in Connecticut and ate all its fruit in less than 15 minutes.

The starlings were successful immigrants.  By 1902 they had been spotted in New Jersey and Ossining, NY, by 1916 in Washington, DC, then in Savannah in 1917, Missouri in 1930, San Diego in 1959.  Starlings are everywhere now, numbering in the hundreds of millions, all descended from Schiefflin's original group.

If Eugene Schiefflin were alive today, a number of Americans would probably want to lynch him.

Farmers find their orchards and vineyards decimated around harvest time.

Chicken farmers and livestock ranchers have learned that starlings are fond of animal feed.  The birds fly in, eat the food set out for the animals and leave droppings behind, raising fears of avian-borne diseases.

Birders find that starlings dislocate native birds like woodpeckers in building cavities and tree holes.

Airport operators dedicate themselves to keeping starlings from roosting or nesting near runways. The birds, which fly in groups, can be sucked into jet engines on takeoffs and pose real threats of crashes.

And, when great numbers of starlings settle in a small area, their droppings encourage the development of histoplasmosis, a fungus whose spores can cause lung disease in humans.

Occasionally Americans have tried to eradicate starlings when they have settled in large numbers in particular areas.  On at least a few occasions, this has involved spreading a USDA-approved poison where the starlings feed.  (The poison is recommended because it does not pass to other animals.)

A major problem with this method is that the starlings do not die immediately.  They fly away, in flocks as usual, and expire over several days, falling to earth in great numbers, often on people's lawns.  The sight of a large plot of ground blackened by masses of dead birds can be quite upsetting.

Various groups have taken to the internet with recommendations for dealing with starlings.

Animal lovers urge filling holes in building foundations and walls and trees to discourage nesting, putting nets over budding fruit and banging pots or making other loud noises to encourage flocks to fly elsewhere.

Less squeamish experts advise removing starling nests and disposing of eggs.

One man in Northern California's wine country is among a number who recommend the shotgun.  His post is littered with many enthusiastic "BLAM"s, firearm reports meant to kill perhaps a few starlings and encourage many others to move along.

At this point, nobody seriously believes we can get rid of starlings in North America. We might as well call them natives.

Shakespeare would be amazed.  He mentioned a starling one time in one line in a minor play in 1597, and, in an indirect result, 400 years later, more than 200 million starlings are settled permanently in what he might have called the New World.

Ironically, as the starling population declines in Europe, it continues to increase in North America.

This transfer of non-native species -- birds, fish, plants -- to new environs is having effects worldwide.  I plan to discuss the situation in future posts.

More Fun with United Airlines

The Significant Other and I planned to fly across the country on United Airlines today.

Yesterday, the SO checked our reservations and learned that one of the tickets, purchased 10 weeks ago, had been cancelled. A bit of a surprise, but not unusual for United.

There followed an hourlong phone discussion, first with a truculent United agent and then a supervisor.

Their message: yeah, we cancelled your ticket for no reason, and, no we didn't tell you -- tough.

Sucks if you trusted us.

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People who live in  cities with United-dominated airports -- Portland OR or San Francisco, in our case -- have understood for years that episodes like the one above are part of the fun of doing business with United.

Now people in the New York area, where we live now, are getting the message.  United merged with Continental Airlines a couple years ago, and it now controls more than 75 percent of flights at Newark Liberty and more than 70 percent at Kennedy.  (This has allowed for big increases in airfares, of course, and it has been speculated that airline unions convinced the Justice Department to turn a blind eye to anti-trust concerns in this itty bitty circumstance.)

United's treatment of customers in the East is pretty much as we recall from our time on the West Coast, although, to be fair, the flight attendants aren't quite as mean as they used to be.  Perhaps the Continental employees are influencing the United culture in a good way.  There's always hope.

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The last time we flew out of Newark, the jet arrived at the gate in good time.  After passengers had lined up to board the plane, the gate agent announced that our flight had been delayed because it lacked "a pilot."  The delay was estimated first at 30 minutes, then 60 minutes and on and on.  Three hours later, we took off.

In fact, our pilot had been at the airport the whole time.  United delayed a 200-passenger flight for another pilot who was dead-heading back across the country.

Interestingly, the dead-heading pilot could have taken a later United flight that arrived four minutes after our long-delayed flight actually landed.

Long story short:  United wasted 600 hours of its passengers' time to save four minutes for one of its employees.  And lied about it.

Such a funny airline.

Newspaper Trivia

The NYTimes is a fine newspaper, but its regular publication of self-absorbed freelance submissions never fails to amuse.  Headlines and subheads from two essays in the March 16 edition:


Let Me Count the Days
Nothing says mortality like the realization you won't live long enough to use up your office supplies

The Secret Life of Our Trash Can
After 15 years, our garbage can was busted.  Parting with it wasn't so easy

After reading the above, I realized that I could do this first-person navel-gazing thing myself.  In just a couple minutes, I came up with three sure-fire topics:

Unmated Socks in the Laundry Room 
A metaphor for my failure to finish graduate school

Was My First-Grade Boyfriend Mr. Right After All?

The Library Book Less Returned
Whether to go back and pay the fine


Heck, I have a computer.  My mind wanders endlessly.  I could knock out a meditative, wry, mildly ironic piece in a half hour, tops.  Most likely, the Times would buy it.

Only one thing stops me. I have a lot of relatives, and if they caught wind of it, word would spread.  I would be a figure of fun at family reunions for the next 20 years. 

Fixing America's Favorite Suicide Destination?

Here is what most people think of when they think of the Golden Gate Bridge.  It is a gorgeous structure, perhaps the most iconic in American architecture, easily the most famous symbol of San Francisco.

Below is what comes to my mind.  The picture, shot from a similar vantage point, features a display of many, many, many pairs of shoes.  It was set up as San Francisco celebrated the bridge's 75th anniversary in 2012.

Many people disagree with me, and I can hear it. Desperate people who want to die will find a way. I have known people who killed themselves, and I have talked with a psychology professor who said, essentially, that we just have to let them go.

My point about the Golden Gate Bridge is that it is pernicious for a government to do nothing for 80 years to mitigate an attraction that has made it easy for as many as 2,000 people to commit suicide. (The exact number is unknown, and estimates almost certainly are lower than the real number.)

This doesn't happen in private settings. You cannot climb over a handrail and jump off the Empire State Building; this may be because the building's owner doesn't want lawsuits or because the owner doesn't want to be responsible, even indirectly, for people's deaths. Why shouldn't our government, the people's government, hold itself to a similar standard of caution?

If you were on the Golden Gate Bridge and you saw someone haul himself over that 4-foot handrail, would you stop and try to talk him back onto the sidewalk and, from there, to the parking lot? If not, why not?

Each pair of shoes represents a suicide done by jumping off the Golden Gate

The first desperate person to jump off the bridge did so within weeks of its opening in 1937.  No one knows how many people have died in the same manner, but the number is certainly greater than the official tally of 1,600.  The Golden Gate is by far the most popular suicide destination in the country, possibly the world.

In recent years, suicides have numbered more than 30 annually, with 80 or more attempts frustrated each year by police and pedestrians.

I lived in the Bay Area for a few years and crossed the Golden Gate at least several times a week.  It was understood that many people died jumping off the bridge, but newspapers rarely reported on the phenomenon.  My guess at the time was that editors feared that stories would encourage vulnerable people to try to kill themselves.  This may have had the unintended consequence of dampening public discussion about a lamentable situation.

Now, finally, there is serious talk of doing something.  A coalition of Bay Area transportation authorities has committed most of the estimated $66 million needed to place strong nets under the walkways that edge both sides of the bridge.  People who jumped would be caught in the nets and pulled back up onto the bridge.  The belief is that many fewer people would attempt suicide under the circumstances.

Efforts to prevent Golden Gate suicides have been proposed since at least 1948. Several were shot down by public, and officials' fears that views would be obstructed.  The current proposal seems to answer this concern because the nets would be set below the bridge railings.  The idea received landmark approval in 2010 from the directors of the bridge authority.

In fact, if the bridge had been built according to its original design, the suicides might not have happened. According to the website of the Bridge Rail Foundation, which has lobbied for a suicide barrier, the original engineer, Joseph Strauss, sketched out a 5'6" safety rail with a top cap designed to frustrate attempts to climb over the top of the rail.  Later the bridge architect changed the specifications and redrew the plan for the existing, much lower railing that so many people have straddled on their way into the San Francisco Bay.

This is a gruesome piece of history for  a beautiful city.  People who have opposed barriers -- and there have been many over the years -- insist that mentally disturbed people will continue to find ways to kill themselves.  There is some truth to this, but a number of the very few survivors of Golden Gate Bridge jumps report they regretted their action before they hit the water.

It strikes me as grotesque that no action has been taken for 77 years while a known attraction has allowed so many people to kill themselves with relative ease.  Preventing suicide in all cases is impossible, of course, but efforts to make suicide more difficult seem to me worthy and humane.

Over the last 20 years, suicide barriers have been placed on bridges in Toronto, Washington, D.C, Auckland, New Zealand, and Augusta, ME.  There have been no suicides off those bridges since the structures were put in place.  In Augusta, authorities report a lower rate of local suicide overall.

I say do it.  Do it now.

Note

A moving documentary about suicide and the Golden Gate Bridge was released in 2006.  The filmmakers trained cameras on the bridge for a year, documenting many suicides and preventing a few, and then followed up with friends and family members of those who died.  It argues for no point of view.  The Bridge is available for streaming. 

Update

Funding for construction of a safety net under the Golden Gate was approved in 2014.  Work on the project, whose cost had nearly tripled to $200 million, began in 2017.  It is expected to be completed in 2021.  

Construction of the bridge itself -- setting footings in bedrock under the bay, erecting the iconic metal metal structure, stringing suspension cables and laying roadway to meet the bridge on either end -- took four years in the 1930s.