We had gotten pretty dissatisfied with the bacon we normally buy at Giant – about two-thirds of the time, the strips were flimsy, tearing as you pulled them from the slab, and frequently so fatty that they would shrink to about half their size. We tried buying the thicker slabs (which worked well when we would make a spicy bacon that involved cayenne pepper, crushed rosemary, and a lot of brown sugar), and getting Boars Head brand worked well, too (when we could find it; Giant likes to move things around in the store), but we wanted an alternative. I found a company called North Country Smokehouse that looked pretty good, and ordered some from them – we got their applewood smoked bacon and what they called pepper bacon. They had a nice flavor, though, to be honest, not as overwhelmingly nice as we’d hoped, given the price – but it turns out that they had one unexpected and rather nice side benefit: for an hour or so after cooking, the kitchen doesn’t smell like greasy bacon. It smells, instead, like someone’s been stoking a wood fire. I like it.
This is the time of year when people starting thinking about the things that charities wish they’d think about all year long, volunteering to work at soup kitchens, snagging coupons from the giving tree at church, that sort of thing. I’m the same way. I don’t think of myself as particularly generous, as a rule. About six months ago, I started a personal standard for what I give to the collection plate at church, which is: they get whatever the next to largest bill is that I have in my wallet. So if I have a twenty, and the next is a ten; they get the ten. As it happens, I don’t normally carry much cash, so that works out in practice to be a normal donation of five dollars a week. I will jigger that around a bit, as when I once had just gone to the ATM, had only twenties, and gave them one but dropped down one denomination next time, or sometimes I’ll give a little more, just because I’m feeling either guilty or generous. But this morning the pastor was talking about a visit he’d made to a young woman who is dying, and I thought with a start that I don’t even think about people like that. If I do think about it, I think well, there are people who, you know, handle that sort of thing, talking with the sick and dying. I realized with some discomfort that if all I’m doing is giving them five dollars a week, then thats not giving them much to work with.
An article in today’s Post also triggered a guilty spasm. Its about a woman who has taken on the task of supplying about seven hundred soldiers who are in the Army in Afghanistan with the niceties of life – disposable razors, throw away pens, things like that. She started because her son was in a specific unit, and it expanded as he asked her to send things for other in the unit. I was startled by her generosity, both of time and resources. I am always a bit uneasy about people like that. I can admire them from a distance, but up close, they scare me. I’m not sure why. So, from the comfortable distance of the dining room table where we were eating a magnificent Sunday brunch of orange chocolate coffee, waffles with white chocolate chips, and pepper bacon, I read about this woman, and looked at the picture of her living room just chock-full of packages, and thought ‘how do people do that?’ How do they get the drive and energy and compassion?
The NSA (yes, that NSA - the one colloquially known as No Such Agency) has a kids web site . From the Washington Post article:
It features the cartoon "CryptoKids," seven crime-fightin' math/code/language/technology baby geniuses. Rosetta Stone, for instance, is a language fox. According to the site, she has a "fox-cination with language and culture." (Those guys may be able to crack a 109-bit key elliptic curve algorithm in their sleep, but everyone can use rewrite.) The site teaches kids the difference between a code and a cipher, tells you that Rosetta Stone practices martial arts, and includes code-themed brain teasers and games.
Elliptic curve algorithm?
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