dkSez : : : : : : Don Kahle’s blog

Doubling sweet potato recipes (2), then halving each, treating yams as equals. The halves & the halves-not.
http://twitpic.com/v8fmp

These yam & sweet potato recipes start with cubing tubers. 17 cups of cubes later, we’re acquainted. Yams orange. http://twitpic.com/v89yz

My sons are coming for dinner, but I hope to give them something much more valuable and enduring than a meal and some gifts. Something I was never given, so today I’ll be giving it to myself as well. Finally, I will determine the difference between sweet potatoes and yams. Two different recipes — one sweet, one savory… –each made twice, once with yams, once with sweet potatoes. May the best tuber win!

RG51 – buy local options
As of right now, you have less than seven shopping days before your favorite year-end holiday marked by gift exchanges. Whether you prefer Christmas or Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Solstice, Festivus, or some animistic ritual that involves repurposing a fruitcake, the point is the same. Time is running out.
Now would be a good time to begin lowering expectations for yourself. That winter parka you were going to knit for the one you love? Not gonna happen. That custom recording of oak savannah songbirds, recorded with your loving hands in the west Eugene wetlands? Maybe next year. That perfect replica of your child’s third-grade class photo, crafted as a mosaic using hand-torn shards of old Christmas cards? Tearing up those old cards is all you can expect to accomplish this year. That might even feel good, staving off a panic attack.
Panic is common this time of year. It’s what made you think last year that a solar powered paper shredder was the perfect way to get your accountant brother-in-law to appreciate the Great Outdoors.
Take a deep breath and think it through. Your list has people who live nearby and people who don’t. Boxing and mailing is a bad idea at this late date, unless interminable lines remind you of your magical childhood visit to Disney World. Gift certificates can more easily be mailed. But gift certificates are so risky. They’re easy to lose, they often expire before you get there, and you might have to go to the mall to get one.
Consider giving gift certificate certificates. They come in a variety of festive colors now, not only the traditionally drab gray and green. They can be used by the recipient to buy a gift certificate at any store. There are no hidden costs, they have no expiration date and they can be purchased at any bank.
Shopping for the locals is almost as easy.
If you want “buy local” embedded in the message of the gift, you should know about Unique Eugene. A dozen local businesses banded together a decade ago to form an alliance (www.uniqueeugene.com). They sell gift certificates that can then be redeemed at any of their members’ stores. You’ve probably seen their entry in the Eugene Celebration parade each year. Maybe you’ve been meaning to thank them for the fun they add to the parade. This would do that.
The sure-fire solution for the buy-local crowd is Holiday Market, except you may find yourself with too many choices. Wandering through the Lane County fairgrounds this time of year, I often feel like a fly on a spin-art machine. Holiday Market is colorful and dizzying, in equal measure.
They’re ready for procrastinators. Beginning tomorrow, they’re open almost every day until 6 p.m. They’re open Christmas Eve until 4 p.m. The only day they’ll be closed is Monday, Dec. 21. If you guessed all those pagan hippies are taking the day off to celebrate winter solstice, you’re wrong. “They’ll all be home making stuff to sell those final three days,” Marketing Manager Kim Still told me. They sell gift certificates (good also at Saturday Market, scheduled to reopen April 3, 2010) at the Information Booth.
Since December 24 is both a shopping day and a celebrating day, you could launch your festivities in the afternoon without admitting any last-minute strategizing. Just blindfold your recipient, guide them into the middle of Holiday Market, put cash in their hand and tell them to spend it. They’ll find something locally and lovingly made, even if they don’t bother to take off the blindfold. Guaranteed.
We should also thank the city of Eugene for finally tinkering with their parking policies and offering free short-term parking along several downtown blocks for December, making a quick trip to a local downtown business just a little easier this year.
Maybe next year, Eugene will offer parking ticket certificates. I’d like to pay for a parking ticket that hasn’t been written yet, and then give that “gift certificate” to somebody who frequents downtown (or would) if they had immunity from next year’s first parking ticket.
Imagine a moment of free parking in downtown Eugene! Could peace on earth be far behind?
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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) owns a media marketing management company, serving local and civic-minded businesses. Several members of Unique Eugene have been clients, including Holiday Market, but no billable hours were logged in the writing of this column.

Yesterday Barack Obama was given a little more than six ounces of gold, in the form of a medal, measuring about two and a half inches across. Since the announcement of this gift in October, many have wondered aloud (including Obama himself) whether he is worthy of it. Or worthy of it yet.
He is, and he will be. Swedish chemist, engineer, and inventor Alfred Nobel understood better than most that the present and the future can be tied together in unusual ways.
Obama has a proven ability to do all things quickly. He joked last spring that he was on track to complete his first 100 days in office several days early. National Review online editor Jonah Goldberg has speculated that here is a man who can make 12-minute brownies in seven minutes. If only world peace could be cooked up as easily as a batch of brownies.
No American president has ever received a Nobel Peace Prize this quickly. Teddy Roosevelt had been in office five years; Woodrow Wilson, six. Jimmy Carter globe-trotted for decades after leaving the presidency before he got his. Obama has won the prize before his Air Force One lost its new car smell.
Alfred Nobel, the prize’s founder, had a keen interest in how the present can affect the future and vice versa. He reshaped his own legacy after a French newspaper in 1888 inadvertently published his obituary, stating that “the merchant of death is dead.” As the inventor of dynamite, the description of the man was not incorrect, but they got the date of his death wrong. He went on to live another eight years — enough time for Nobel to make his earlier obituary incomplete.
When Nobel died in 1896, he left the bulk of his estate — about $250 million in today’s dollars — to fund Nobel Prizes in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature and for peace. They are given on each anniversary of his death.
The Nobel committee has followed its founder’s fascination with how the present and the future shape each other. The consequential is not always sequential.
For example, two Nobel prizes in 2006 were awarded for applications of what economists call the “shadow of the future.” Microcredit in particular and game theory in general posit that expectations of the future can shape present behavior in powerful and measurable ways. A specific future can be leveraged backwards into the present.
Microcredit demonstrated that lenders can better serve their clients and their investors if they consider the client’s future asset when they consider extending credit. A woman with a cow or a bicycle or a cell phone will repay the loan with the extra capabilities that the purchased asset provides. If the lender deals with her from the start as if she already has that asset, repayment success rates soar.
Obama is fond of the phrase “bending the curve” of destiny. He relates it broadly to the spread of freedom across the globe and specifically to containing the escalating cost of health care. He understands that the future is malleable.
Choices we make today affect choices we’ll have tomorrow. But it’s no less true that expectations we have for tomorrow affect choices we make today.
Yesterday’s award to Obama practiced that profundity. The committee leveraged their vision of a more peaceful world tomorrow with a prize today.
Giving the Nobel Peace Prize to this young American at the beginning of his presidency attempts to connect a present hope with a future peace.
Alfred Nobel read his premature obituary and then resolved to live down his reputation as a “merchant of death.” In the same way, giving the Nobel Peace Prize to a young American president gives him — again, prematurely — a reputation he’ll be resolved to live up to.
Obama campaigned for hope and change. He convinced a majority of voting Americans to support him. In a world that was portrayed as frightening by his predecessor, his opponent, the media, and even the conventional wisdom, that was no small accomplishment.
Obama had been president for only 12 days before the Nobel committee closed its nominations for 2009. So it’s safe to say he wasn’t nominated for his presidential accomplishments. Unless he was.
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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes each Friday for The Register-Guard. He blogs right here, where all his published columns are archived.

The holiday season is no time for nostalgia. Nostalgia never did anyone any favors. The past has much to offer us, but nostalgia doesn’t create that connection. It foils it.

We came to the Left Coast twenty years ago and the first thing I missed was history. I raised my sons in Connecticut, where your house isn’t considered old unless it once was taxed by the King of England. Everything here is so young and fresh and new. When we try to honor the past, we usually botch it up with cartoony versions of what we imagine once was. Ever notice how all the old-style brew pubs look the same?

We keep photographs or newspaper clippings of our favorite moments from the past, but the rest of the paper or the scene around the subject is gone. Without context, we doom ourselves to nostalgia, narcissism’s vengeful neighbor.

We only remember what we remember, never what we were told. And so the past keeps its distance from us, which is what it and we prefer. Nostalgia won’t allow us to retrieve the past, while we make it more attractive than it was. We’re stuck, wishing for a past that never was and unhappy with the present too.

Christmas and Hanukah and other solstice celebrations bring tradition, but on their own terms. When nostalgia creeps in, the real thing often breaks through. Around a feasting table, our siblings mercilessly remind us of the parts of the story we left out. The past becomes present again, and we’re better for it. We see ourselves in context of who we were and where we came from.

We needn’t open the gift. The gift opens us.

Pitch me your thousand pleasures of the holiday season, and I’ll toss back the “sand” and keep the “thou.” My single favorite pleasure this time of year is “thou.”

We never should have let “thou” fade into archaic oblivion. We’ve lost any elegant distinction between the singular and plural of the second person pronoun. “Elegant” connotes a certain social respect, or it can mean a pleasingly precise solution with no extra motion. “Thou” gave us both. It could focus intently on another individual with no ambiguity. It could also convey respect, even homage — a proper noun, so to speak.

“You” can’t be expected to do the same. It’s the wrong shape, for starters. The sound of the word cannot be made more emphatic. Elongation cannot convey an urgency. Say the word “you.” Now say it again, like you really mean it. Try the same exercise with “thou” and you’ll hear what I mean.

You can emphasize the singular only with extra words. Start a sentence with “You, Don Kahle …” and I’m pretty sure a scolding will follow. “Thou” skirted all those troubles.

Our own southern states came to regret this linguistic misstep, coining “you all” and “y’all” for the plural, reserving “you” for singular references. That was a step forward, but then they lost a war. What Dixie can’t provide, Old Europe can.

Christmas brings us songs from centuries past that nobody has dared improve. Tradition is allowing dead people to vote, and they choose the same songs they sang, the way they sang them.

Christmas music is filled with sexism, militarism, xenophobia, and a piety that leaves no room for differences. Like Grandma’s favorite pound cake recipe, we’re more careful today, but once a year won’t hurt us, and the special cheer may do us good. “Polyunsaturated” to Grandma meant the pet bird came inside before it rained. Why shouldn’t Grandma continue feeding us occasionally?

None of those unfortunate features need detract from the beauty our language once had. Some enjoy Shakespeare for this same reason, but I prefer the song. It’s one thing to hear the rhythm of well chosen words, but something else to utter them, effortlessly from memory, as if you wrote them or as if they just occurred to you.

Traditional song brings “thou” back, dressed in all its original splendor. Was there more splendor in a world when I might have asked if thou thought it so? Yes, I believe there was. Or even “yea,” to mean yes and amen at once — I’m certain of it.

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Forsooth, Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) writes a column for The Register-Guard on Fridays. He stays busy the other six days each week with a variety of other ventures.

When did feeding people become a social service? FOOD for Lane County’s downtown restaurant does more than feed people, but put aside the condiments of kindness and consideration for a moment. When did food become optional for some of our own?

Henry David Thoreau lumped together food, clothing, and shelter as a single, primary human need: warmth. He wrote before psychology and sociology had been invented, and before this nation could offer its citizens much beyond the basics.

Now we have and know a lot more, but we’ve misplaced and forgotten plenty too. People need food and clothing and shelter. Without warmth, the body shuts down. After that, no further services are required, social or otherwise.

The Thomas Egan Warming Centers will open as soon as the weather dips a few ticks below freezing, because the warmth provided by a doorway or a tarp or a dog is sometimes not sufficient. The Warming Centers draw their name from somebody who knows, or he would know, except he didn’t survive. Thomas Egan died last December. On a sidewalk. Cold kills.

Shelter, clothing, food. Non-negotiable human needs.

The most vulnerable among us need many other things too. Anger management classes, mediation services, parenting tips, drug counseling, gambling addiction hotlines, immigration assistance. All good things, and good investments for society when they are inserted strategically to avert later (and more costly) failures. An ounce of prevention and all that.

But we hurt the cause of human dignity when a primary human need gets lumped together with these other social services.

FOOD for Lane County collects food from restaurants, grocers, gardens, and other donors. Their mission is to get that food into the hands of hungry people. They’re good at it. The Dining Room provides a restaurant meal to anyone who is homeless or hungry four nights a week.

But The Dining Room does more than feed people. They provide the full restaurant experience, powered by a small army of volunteers. Family Dinner Program Manager Josie McCarthy sees food as a gateway service. Restoring dignity is the ultimate goal. She devised a formula that blends the two together. “Come for the hunger; stay for the hospitality.”

The volunteers at The Dining Room wear aprons emblazoned with a steaming coffee mug and the effort’s slogan: “Brewing human dignity.”

That extra measure comes from the volunteers. They get to know their customers, anticipate their choices, remind them that they are known. Being known is an important second step. Being seen is first.

Many who have been homeless describe the experience as being invisible, first and foremost. They live in the shadows, under the bridges, out of sight, unseen.

Do you avert your eyes because you don’t want them to feel embarrassed? Or because you’re unsure what you’ll say if they ask you a question? Or because you’ve imagined yourself close to where they are? Fear of becoming homeless is one of the top three fears of the average middle-aged American woman.

Invisibility can develop into a weird sort of empowerment. If people can’t see you, rules don’t apply. If nobody’s watching, it doesn’t matter what you do.

The Dining Room has rules. Customers who don’t follow them are escorted out. No cussing in the restaurant. No special orders. No seconds. The rules apply to everyone. Common courtesy is expected. Dignity is brewed on the premises.

Volunteers and staff at The Dining Room insist that every person deserves respect and retains the capacity to show it and earn it. By stoking the embers of basic decency that glow in every human heart, the restaurant creates a warmth that goes deeper than the food.

If you add dignity to the Thoreau’s warmth list, food and dignity go together. Shelter and clothing keep humans warm by covering them from the outside. But food isn’t warmth until the body processes it. Likewise, respect is a fuel that can be converted into dignity — another warmth.

There’s effort involved, for the giver and the receiver. Volunteers at The Dining Room often work up a sweat. Sweat has a sweetness to it. The effort itself produces warmth.

Thoreau also wrote, “He who cuts his own wood is warmed twice.” A community feeding its hungry is both filled and fulfilled.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) volunteers at The Dining Room most Wednesdays. He writes a weekly column for The Register-Guard and blogs right here.

I admire Bill Sizemore. He brings a certain evil genius to his ballot measures. He acknowledges and even celebrates the gamesmanship involved.
Smart, good-hearted, powerful people won’t play the game the way Sizemore does because they don’t want to appear unserious. Sizemore doesn’t care how he looks. He wants to win. When his opponents refuse to dignify his proposals with a full-throated response, they contribute to his success. Losing with dignity is still a loss.
When it comes to passing a ballot measure that increases taxes in any way for any purpose, Lane County has lost 13 straight. So what will the Citizen Advocates for Public Safety (CAPS) do if they determine there isn’t enough money to pay for adequate law enforcement, treatment programs, and related efforts to reduce crime across the county?
I’m not suggesting that CAPS co-chairs Dave Frohnmayer and Jean Tate try to think like Bill Sizemore if they must craft a ballot measure that increases funding for public safety. I’ll do it for them.
Recommend to the Lane County commissioners that they put before voters not one ballot measure, but two.
The first measure will have to ask for money. When it comes to public safety, we should remember that the working poor and the socially vulnerable have suffered more for the inadequacies of the system, so any tax considered should ask less or nothing of them. They’ve already paid. It may be a vacation home tax or a millionaire’s tax or a restaurant tax or a who-knows-what tax.
Now we get to the gamesmanship that B.S. indulges in so well. Follow that measure with this one: “Shall Lane County consider the voting patterns of the ballot measure above when allocating its limited public safety funds across Lane County’s 83 voter precincts?”
Some voters don’t want more public safety funding because they live in what they believe is (so far) a safe neighborhood, or they have dogs and guns that they trust more than badges, or because they find the criminals more sympathetic than law enforcement. Well and good. Let them vote their conscience.
But it’s time we exposed those who vote no for funding measures and then complain when the dog catcher isn’t available on Sundays.
A “no” vote on the second measure would force tacit admission that this voter prefers not to connect cause and effect. Some would label such people “anarchists.” The cause of their funding vote should not lead to the effect of more or less public safety funding in their neighborhood.
This plan won’t quite expose those who vote one way and then act another, but it will expose where most of them live. Every voter is entitled to his or her privacy. Any choice expressed on a ballot is a protected element of individual freedom. It can and should be kept private.
But vote totals for each precinct, on the other hand, are freely available to anyone who cares to look. Each precinct in Lane County has a couple thousand active voters. Trends are easy to spot. South Eugene voters like taxes. Rural voters don’t.
The imprecision of the precinct vote totals is what gives the ballot measure its evil charm. Too often we consider our vote such a private matter that we keep our opinions to ourselves. In this case, the specter of neighborhoods receiving public safety services according to their vote totals would change that. Neighbors will lobby one another because their collective vote might matter in tangible ways.
Voters will hear about the miseries we accept because parole officers are overworked, jail beds are in short supply, or response times are stretched to dangerous lengths — not from TV ads, but from their neighbors. The stories will be swapped like Christmas cookies.
Of course, if the funding measure passes, everyone will be required to pay, regardless of their precinct’s totals, because the vote of each individual is a protected privacy. That’s where the evil part of the genius comes in. Only the losers will know who they are, unless they lobbied their neighbors against the funding measure and it passed anyway.
Go now and do your serious work, Dave and Jean. You can tell everyone this wasn’t your idea.
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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) has done work in Eugene since 1995 — some serious, some not. He was president of the City Club of Eugene in 2002. He published Comic News until 2005. He writes a weekly column for The Register-Guard and blogs at www.dksez.com.

We celebrate diversity, while knowing very little about it. Celebrating the full spectrum of humanity ain’t easy, especially here.

Racial, ethnic, age and gender diversity can be devilishly difficult to attain in a small town that is 90 percent Caucasian. That doesn’t make it less important. In fact, it seems that the groups who howl loudest for the value often are doing the least in practice.

If Eugene had an advocacy group as honest as it was valiant, they would call themselves “White People For Diversity.” The group would incessantly refine diversity’s wikipedia page, contribute articles to leftist magazines and edit books on the important topic for classrooms and scholars. They would defend to the death the rightness of the idea, even if they never quite got around to the rights of the peoples. Then they would adjourn to a different ethnic restaurant each month, where they could congratulate themselves for their progressive rectitude.

Ethnic dining does not diversity make.

Our mothers meant well when they warned us not to trust strangers, but true hospitality requires that we forget that lesson, or temper it with courage. If we really want diversity, strangers can help us more than our friends. But we don’t know any strangers. All we know is not to trust them.

We conspire against our ideal because we rely on self-selection to grow our social networks. Whether it’s a business group, a civic organization, or a political action committee, we rely on members to recruit new members. Our outreach doesn’t reach out.

Like sad replicas of Charlie Chaplin’s little tramp, a hidden force kicks the hat away from us, just as we’re about to reach it, over and over. We reach for the hat of greater diversity with all the best intentions, but just as it’s almost within our grasp, our own comforting foot of sameness kicks it away. That only increases our resolve, which starts the cycle again.

Members invite new members, but the new members look a lot like the old members. Self-selection favors sameness over diversity. When somebody slips through the cracks and gets invited to a group that isn’t such a natural fit, the friction enforces the original inertia. The extra effort to make that new member feel welcome doesn’t last, and so that new member doesn’t last either. The newbie gets busy and stops coming, or sparks fly and it begins to feel like too much trouble.

You’ve probably never heard of the Round Table Club of Eugene, but it’s been meeting eight months a year for almost a century. It was formed in 1912 to give University of Oregon faculty and staff a connection to whatever intelligentsia may be found in its host city. You might call it Eugene’s original “town-gown” organization, except the all-women Fortnightly Club predates it by decades.

The Round Table Club once was the literal version of the metaphorical “old boys’ network.” Former Eugene Mayor Ruth Bascom gained admittance and broke the gender barrier, but that may have been due to her surgeon husband more than her city hall stature.

Last spring, the club’s leadership embarked on an experiment. They extended invitations for membership to two “classes,” vetted by others. The local Chambers of Commerce put forward two dozen graduates of their annual Leadership Eugene Springfield class. The University of Oregon contributed the names of the three dozen professors granted tenure last spring.

The club braced itself for a jolt. Many of these qualified applicants would be strangers to everyone in the room, except for the others in their “class.” The newbies may have outnumbered the old-timers. Many would be half the age of the average current member.

What happened — or what’s happened so far — has been less dramatic. Fewer than a dozen of the invitees attended the fall’s first meeting, and not all of them chose to pursue membership. Several have.

Will this bring the new blood and diversity the club seeks? It’s too soon to tell. Sidestepping self-selection hasn’t hurt the club, and may yet help it.

Don’t trust strangers for candy, but if you want diversity, ask somebody you don’t know.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) has been a member of the Round Table Club of Eugene (www.eugeneroundtable.com) since 2002. He’s the organization’s past-president. He writes a weekly column for The Register-Guard and blogs.

What happens to you matters less than how you respond to what happens to you. This aphorism applies to nations too. Thirty years ago today, the United States of America was between a shattering stimulus (which happened two days earlier) and a ruinous response (which began two days later).

Our nation has become more stupid as a result. That assertion may offend you, but I hope you’ll read to the end of this essay, in spite of that. How we respond to our own anger is part of the problem.

On Nov. 4, 1979, Islamist terrorists stormed the United States embassy in Tehran, Iran and took 66 Americans hostage. Americans stared at their televisions and newspapers, transfixed. I remember resolving to read everything I could about the captives. My awareness of their plight would express my solidarity. Many made similar resolutions.

On Nov. 8, 1979, ABC responded to that sudden appetite for news related to the crisis. “America Held Hostage,” hosted by Ted Koppel, competed with Johnny Carson’s late-night talk show. After the hostages were released, the program was renamed “Nightline.” A flood of news offerings followed. NPR’s “Morning Edition” also launched that week. Ted Turner gave America its first 24-hour TV news outlet when CNN went on the air June 1, 1980. USA Today followed a short time later. Taken collectively, they have damaged our national psyche.

Meanwhile, personal computers, Internet, and cell phone technologies were quietly underway. Author Malcomb Gladwell hadn’t yet taught us what to call it, but that moment 30 years ago was a “tipping point.” We can’t yet be certain where we’re going, but it’s beginning to look suspiciously like we’re going there in a handbasket.

America was founded on the radical idea that its people should know what they want to know. Our best innovations and basic governmental structure are organized around preventing ignorance: public schools, land grant universities, the First and Sixth Amendments to the U.S. Constitution, the Freedom of Information Act, public meeting laws, financial disclosure requirements for elected officials. It’s a long and impressive list.

At every juncture, we give citizens more information as the best way to give them control over their government and freedom in their lives. No one contemplated what might happen if people were given too much information.

Do you know why lion tamers use a whip and a wicker chair? They snap the whip behind the lion to make them move away from the loud noise and toward the tamer. A well-fed lion must be riled, because nobody pays to watch a sleeping lion. The shiny tamer now has the agitated lion’s undivided attention.

Between the lion and the tamer is the chair, but the chair has four legs. After being upset by the crack of the whip, the lion’s hard-wired response is to lunge — expedience! — the exclamation point of the jungle. Grab the closest leg of the chair! But the tamer maneuvers the chair so the closest leg keeps changing. The lion’s brain tries to keep up with the changing chair-leg information, but can’t. The overloaded lion brain short-circuits itself, shuts down, and the lion no longer cares. “Whatever.”

The whip gets the lion fearful or angry, so it moves. The shifting chair legs make the lion confused and frustrated, so it stops. Stop-go-stop-go. The lion is tamed.

So it is with each of us. Information moves us, like a crack of a whip. But too much information debilitates us. We can’t keep up with all the choices available, whether it’s toothpaste or health care legislation. Which option is best? Which leg of the chair is closest? It keeps shifting. We become stupefied. We become stupid. “Whatever.”

Stupidity is more difficult to treat than ignorance. Adding information to an already stupefied citizen is giving salty water to a thirsty man.

So here we are, incapable of processing all the information available to us. We’re stuck, unwilling to admit that we need help, overwhelmed, feeling stupid. We try to keep up, filtering the information we receive, favoring those voices we agree with and refusing to process whatever confuses us or makes us mad.

Thirty years ago, something terrible happened. We’re still responding.

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Don Kahle (fridays@dksez.com) has worked in radio, television, film, magazines and newspapers (in that order) since 1978. He blogs too.