Although there still seems to be widespread confusion about the issues at hand, it seems like the general public has learned a good deal in the runup to the Aug. 2nd deadline (if not as much as one would hope).  We’ve learned, for example, that sovereign debt ratings, not just our ability to borrow, are important — and at stake.  We’ve learned a good deal about the sources of our deficits and debt — even if we still disagree about how to handle them.

I find, in talking to liberals and conservatives on this issue, that certain simple — but effective — ideas can appeal to both sides, without being caught up in the “grand narratives” that characterize each side in our Congressional stalemate. One of them, the idea of tying job creation to overseas tax repatriation holidays, I discussed in a previous post (and will simply list here).  But there are others, and I would like to suggest that implementing even one or two would radically change the game, by changing the confidence level of citizens, companies, and the world in our ability to address our issues.

I would further suggest that our largest problem today is not a crisis of confidence about U.S. indebtedness.  Americans and the world at large lack confidence in the ability of Americans to govern their way out of the problem.  The global markets, and the bond market in particular, want U.S. sovereign debt to remain the risk-free benchmark, and despite occasional posturing, nobody is eager to displace the U.S. dollar as reserve currency, given the uncertainty and dislocation that would inevitably create, during a time of sluggish economic growth.

What we need to demonstrate is not, I would suggest, a complete solution to our deficit and debt problems, but a credible start and follow-through.  President Obama has been talking about “significant downpayments” on deficit reduction for precisely this reason.  It’s not a new idea.  It’s also the strategy of every consumer with significant debt — you can’t simply tell the credit card company you’re trying to make payments, you have to establish a track record of actually doing it.

There are reasons, of course, that the party “out of power” would try to block even simple, common-sensical ideas.  Winning the next election means not giving up points to the other side, if possible.  But I hope we’re close to the point where Americans start demanding progress and solutions — not the ultimatum-style “solutions” we’ve seen daily in the debt ceiling “negotiations,” but concrete steps.

Here are a few that seem to have bipartisan appeal, in my discussions with folks lately.

1.  Ban “off budget” expenditures

A large part of our current deficit (and thus, part of the massive expansion in our national debt), is the result of conducting two full-scale wars and innumerable global “operations,” completely outside the normal budgeting process.  I’m sure there are other off-budget expenditures as well.  These should simply be banned.  Putting everything on the budget will force us to have more honest discussions about spending, taxes, and debt.  In particular, it will force us to consider carefully the cost of going to war, and how to pay for it.   We can include some common-sense exceptions:  direct attacks, such as Pearl Harbor, demand immediate responses which may not be budgeted, but Congress could be required to pass an amended budget within 30 days.

2.  Resurrect the “war bond,” and “war tax” when needed

We forget that we used to ask Americans to step up, patriotically, when we went to war.  We issued “war bonds,” borrowing money from ourselves.  We may not be able to finance a contemporary war, where we can easily spend hundreds of billions to trillions of dollars, purely through war bonds, but the mere issuance of war bonds would give Americans a stake in the decisions made — to go to war, to continue at war, and how much we spend on war-making.

We also tend to forget that we used to tax ourselves specifically to pay for war expenses.  After the Vietnam war, we instituted a supplementary tax whose proceeds went to retiring war debt.  We can, by some estimates, do the same thing in six short years for the current debts incurred in Afghanistan and Iraq.  It would be the patriotic thing to do, and would increase American and global confidence in our solvency and fiscal sobriety.

3.  Tax holidays must be met with job creation

I discussed this in more detail in my last posting.  But the basic idea is that when we give significant tax holidays or breaks to American companies, these benefits should be tied to job creation.  Not by empty promises or economic rhetoric, but mechanistically, by tying the tax abatement in question to demonstrated creation and retention of new jobs.  Job creation is essential to the health of American communities, and it’s essential to the economic growth that will allow us to reduce long-term debt.

Beyond these ideas, which seem to have bipartisan appeal, we must come to an agreement about balancing tax levels and spending cuts.  In similar situations around the world, long-term debt reduction and deficit control has been accomplished by a mix of both, ranging from 1/3 vs 2/3rds, to 80/20.  The Gang of Six, or Simpson/Bowles plans were consistent with this ratio, and need to be seriously revisited by both sides.  I offer no “magic bullet” for getting this to occur, and that — not debt reduction — represents the true challenge of our lifetimes as Americans.

In the last few days, I’ve had conversations with conservatives, and I think there’s a compromise position that appeals to both sides, appeals to patriotism, but “gets something in exchange” for the tax holiday.  Which would be a good thing, because despite the rhetoric, we all know that American companies are not going to automatically turn around and use the profits to hire Americans.

The reason we know this is that they have plenty of profits onshore, and they haven’t used those profits to hire many people, either.  For a simple reason — the economy lacks sufficient demand to require new hiring.  This has been exhaustively covered elsewhere, so I won’t bore you by repeating the evidence.

So, if we want jobs in exchange for a tax repatriation holiday, here’s how we do it.

Under a program which automatically sunsets (say, 5 years, but that’s negotiable), American companies are allowed to repatriate profits tax-free, for each new job created in the United States.  In order to create incentives for full-time jobs, capable of supporting a wage earner and their family:

1. For each new job created, a company would be allowed to repatriate a multiple (M) of the fully burdened cost of the employee.  ”Fully burdened” means wages and benefits — the total cost of having someone on staff.
2. Each job would be eligible for the repatriation credit in each year the program existed, perhaps at a declining modifier.  This creates incentives to keep the jobs created, and not lay them off on Day 366.
3. Attaching the credit to the fully burdened cost, rather than the salary alone, creates incentives for companies to create full-time jobs that carry benefits, which are essential to ensuring that jobs can support families.  Indeed, the better the benefits a company provides, the more profits it can repatriate.
4. Also, using the fully burdened cost allows the plan to work easily in those industries with union contracts, since it does not specify anything about the structure of compensation.

There are obviously details that need to be worked out.  What is the multiplier?  How long does the program or credit last?  Should we simply keep a program like this in perpetuity as a means of allowing global trade to be “open” but still incentivize domestic job creation?  Should the repatriation by completely tax-free in year one, and at a steep discount off normal tax rates in future years?

The main outlines sound fair, and even patriotic.  And it’s a mix of liberal and conservative ideas.  From my initial discussions with folks, the idea seems to appeal to both sides, and sounds “fair” both to companies and to the country.

Kick it around a bit, share it with friends, and tell your Congressperson about it.

My goal in planning this dinner was really to try techniques.  I had no preconceived notions about what I’d make, but I started making lists of recipes about two months ago, after Nicole and I went to Napa and did Three Nights of Keller, and later when Scott, Nicole, and I made the pilgrimage to Chicago for Alinea and Aviary.  My method in planning the dinner was suitably nerdy on several fronts:  I treated it like a research project, and had a lab notebook, and being a software guy, the lab notebook was in the form of a wiki.  I kept notes on recipes, techniques, ingredients, possible menus, and so on.  It was fun to see how things evolved.

I tried a number of dishes that never saw the light of day.  I was taken with a “shrimp terrine” dish by Ideas in Food, but since several guests were allergic to shrimp, I turned it into lobster.  But I was also taken with Chang’s ramen from Momofuku, and ended up trying to make lobster meat “noodles” by tossing lobster tail chunks with Old Bay and Activa RM, vacuum sealing, and rolling it into a flat sheet.  After an overnight chill, I cooked the sheets at 55C and chilled, before cutting into fettucine.  This worked fairly well, although the noodles were definitely fragile (I didn’t want to use enough Activa to ruin the flavor or texture).  The noodles, served in an english pea dashi (kombu, shittake, english pea pods, bonito flakes), absolutely sucked.  They had the texture and feel of bad imitation crab.  The moral of the story is don’t do this!.

I won’t bore everyone with the full list of failures, partial successes, or things that “worked” in a technical sense but simply yielded nothing terribly interesting.  I will say, do not bother coring out and stuffing asparagus spears.  It’s not worth it.  Unless you have asparagus with a serious obesity problem, you can’t get enough tasty stuffing inside before they split and explode for anybody to really notice.  It’s an interesting idea, and if it had worked out would have elicited that “wow, cool” surprise noise that every chef is hoping to hear from their diners….but it didn’t.

What works:  tapioca maltodextrin.  Make dry caramel.  Now.  Make parmesan nuggets, or bacon powder, or….hell, grab a tasty dairy or fat and spin it with TM and serve it in some interesting way.  I happened to have a sheet of apple cider sea-salt caramel that had gone all brittle because I’d prepped it too far in advance, so I needed a new presentation than what I’d originally planned, and I remembered that Grant Achatz had done a “dry caramel” powder, and it worked.  Boy, did it work.  It wasn’t what I’d planned, but it was a happy accident, and something I’ll be doing again, especially early in a meal with savory and smoky elements, like the dehydrated double-smoked (house-cured) bacon I paired it with.  Get some TM and start screwing around.  Seriously.

Also:  low-acyl gellan.  After some futzing with other gelification agents, I was wary.  I clearly need more practice with methocels, for example, before I’m ready to unleash something on unsuspecting diners.  But low-acyl gellan:  brilliant.  Sherry vinegar gel cubes to serve with oysters were a breeze.  Measure carefully but then, it just works.  It exhibits a first-order phase transition when the liquid cools below the magic temperature — one second it’s a liquid, the next, it’s a semi-brittle gel, boom.  Stable and still tasty after storage in the fridge, it’s forgiving and completely within reach of cooking at home.  Highly recommended.

What I hated:  working with transglutaminase.  I did the “Checkerboard Sushi” from Myhrvold.  Twice.  The first time, I destroyed way too much nice maguro and hamachi from Mutual Fish when the “slurry” got gloopy (which it does in about ten seconds), and I ended up with blobs between the fish slabs.  You have to work fast with Activa.  What they don’t tell you, is that “fast” means “superhumanly fast.”  The second time, I dusted the slabs through a tea strainer.  It didn’t bond nearly as well and the resulting slabs were fragile, but they looked great and tasted great, and that’s what counts.  It just limited me on presentation possibilites, where a full bond would have been more robust for draping or whatever.  But I hated working with the Activa.  I have a full bag of it, and will probably do it again, but it’s certainly not something I’ll whip out for my own pleasure and use in the kitchen.  Too much hassle and fuss.

Silica gel packets and a food dehydrator — wonderful tools.  A food dehydrator that isn’t circular and takes a rectangular tray would be even better. I sense one in my future.

And if you don’t have an iSi cream whipper, stop reading now and go to Amazon and buy one.  I used this dozens of times in the course of a couple of days, it’s perhaps the handiest tool I have for doing modernist dishes.

I’ll probably have more notes in the days to come, especially as I review my lab notes.  But get in the kitchen and play around!

Somewhere among the notebooks of Gideon I once found a list of diseases as yet unclassified by medical science, and among these there occurred the word Islomania, which was described as a rare but by no means unknown affliction of spirit. There are people, as Gideon used to say, by way of explanation, who find islands somehow irresistible. The mere knowledge that they are on an island, a little world surrounded by the sea, fills them with an indescribable intoxication….But like all Gideon’s theories it was an ingenious one. I recall how it was debated by candlelight in the Villa Cleobolus until the moon went down on the debate, and Gideon’s contentions were muffed in his yawns; until Hoyle began to tap his spectacles upon his thumbnail of his left hand, which was his way of starting to say goodnight….Yet the word stuck; and though Hoyle refused its application to any but Aegean islands….we all of us, by tacit admission, knew ourselves to be ‘islomanes.’

Five years ago today, I steered an overfull Land Rover north in the early morning mist to catch the ferry in Anacortes and take possession of my house on San Juan Island.  My belongings would largely follow a month later, after small renovations and frenzied trips south to pack and prepare for the moving truck.  But the first weeks as an islander were magical.  The house was empty apart from evidence of construction and small enclaves of domesticity — a futon, a card table, and some deck furniture.  I virtually lived on the deck for weeks, in shorts, in warm weather that now seems a fond memory.

As I have written in years past on this day, my island home matures from innocent idyll to complex daily reality, and my fondness for it changes as well, acquiring both depth and sharp edges, as I negotiate a middle ground between deep involvement and the fondly remembered invisibility and anonymity of my first days.  Coming, as I do, from urban America, I find that in order to live in my woodsy enclave on the quiet, almost people-free, waters of Rocky Bay and the Waldron-Orcas-SJI confluence, I have signed up to live in a classic “small town,” for better or worse.

In my annual paean to island life, on the anniversary of my northward migration, I quote Lawrence Durrell’s book, “Reflections on a Marine Venus,” which I reread each year as this date approaches.  This year, I read it, but I find that I no longer associate it with my island home.  This is a sad thing, since my islomania continues unabated, and I fully agree with the sentiments Durrell expresses.

But the tone of Durrell’s islomania, expressed in the language of the early 20th century educated British expatriate, is no longer my tone.  Durrell speaks as a visitor, fundamentally.  He speaks as one coming from a foreign culture, enjoying his contact with the new and the different.  He speaks as one kind of islander, visiting another kind of islander.

As I sit here on the deck tonight, listening to the music playlist that accompanied my trip on the ferry and landing in Friday Harbor, and after re-reading the first pages of Durrell’s book — paragraphs that virtually defined my journey north — I find myself writing a very different “annual report” than usual.  I sat down thinking that I would give the usual “trip report.”

Instead, I find myself eulogizing, and drawing to a close, the words and metaphors which defined that journey.  The motivations and events which led me here are in the past.  I am deeply involved in my community, sometimes more than I have time for or would like.  But that involvement disallows the perspective of the expatriate, the viewpoint of one who loves a place, but will soon move onward.  Durrell’s words will continue to have deep meaning for me, but it’s time to retarget them outward, to places I hope to visit and enjoy.

For the island, five years on, is nothing more or less than….home.  With all of the pleasure, comfort, frustrations, and occasional pain that this denotes.  

Nope.  Douglas Adams does it every time.  It’s the Golgafrinchans, at the end of Restaurant At the End of the Universe.

Because, of course, they’re us.  They’re our bumbling, over-specialized, incapable of making a living for themselves, useless skills aplenty, useful skills thin on the ground, selves.

And, as an archaeologist and social scientist, the Golgafrinchans always remind me of how fragile our civilization is.  I am a social scientist, and I read a good bit of contemporary social science, of course, but in my work I analyze phenomena at a much longer time scale.  I study societies and social groups as they come and go, are born by fission from some other group of people, flourish, perhaps give rise to social “offspring,” and eventually go extinct.  And what is more emblematic of social extinction than Adams’s portrayal of the Golgafrinchan Ark “B”, carrying the non-essential members of society off to form a new world….

The Golgafrinchans occupy a place in my personal “wax museum of humanity” right next to Danny Hillis’s Long Now Foundation, and their 10,000 year clock.  Although the 24 hour news cycle and the buzz of tweets and instant information would have you believe otherwise, it is over much longer time scales that we can evaluate the success, and equitability, and sustainability of the various ways we humans have, of being human.  Our battles might be fought in days or years or lifetimes, but it is only our descendants that can truly “keep score” and decide how well we did.

The Long Now clock is designed to transcend us as a civilization, and as one of the ways we can communicate some of what we’ve learned with our far-future descendants.  It is designed not to require folks to be close enough to us in time and culture that they can read our writings, or comprehend our ideas, but to draw upon principles that are presumably deeper — not necessarily built into the laws of physics, mind you — but comprehensible to beings who are descended from our kind of minds, our kind of bodies.

Combine the perspective of an anthropologist studying the slow coming and going of societies, and the perspective of a software and systems engineer, and I think you get a sub-genre of futurism and speculation:  what it takes to “recover” the good bits of a civilization, after a collapse or other disaster.  Or simply the slow erosion of deep time.

I think of this problem in algorithmic terms.  If you wanted to maximize the chances of being able to recreate us, down the road after we’ve lost our knowledge, lost this particular set of scientific/democratic values, what is the “minimal instruction set”?

In short, what is the “boot loader” for an open, democratic society  combining expressive freedom and respect for scientific discovery?

This is the closest I can come up with, and I do not claim that it’s a deterministic algorithm.  In other words, starting here, you are not guaranteed to replicate the aspects of our civilization we value.  It’s clearly stochastic, and there’s clearly a lot of noise.  Which means only that I’m giving an “initial condition” and transition probabilities for processes which are in the “basin of attraction” of the product we’re looking for, and that if you follow such rules, “more often than not,” you’d end up with something we’d recognize as an open society.  Assuming you either replicate the experiment a lot (i.e., send LOTS of Golgafrinchans to LOTS of uninhabited worlds), or wait for the experiment to repeat itself over and over (i.e., deep time).

But here’s the algorithm (and I don’t claim full originality here):

1. Pay attention and observe patterns in the world around you, keeping an open mind.
2. Bang the rocks together, so to speak, and make things.  Especially new things.
3. Understand how competition and cooperation work, and why each is necessary.
4. Study those who are different, with an open mind.
5. Pass on what you learn, without too much prejudice.

Put this algorithm on an endless loop, and you have something approximating the progressive parts of the last several thousand years of Western Civilization.   Ignore a couple of key clauses, and you have a much wider array of outcomes.  Not all good, and some downright scary.   Do it just like this, and you might, if you’re lucky, end up with an open, tolerant, prosperous, enlightened democracy.

That’s it.  That’s what it takes.  The Golgafrinchans managed it, apparently…and so did we.  But it was a narrow victory, and the question is whether we can manage to keep it up…..

Happy Towel Day!

It’s a fairly compelling story, and it certainly has managed to scare the living s**t out of many Americans, leading to the rise of the Tea Party movement, attempts to destroy public sector unions, and radical budget cutting fever in Congress.

It’s also a carefully constructed story, which happens to succeed only by comparing apples to oranges.  In other words, while we do have lots of debt and unfunded liabilities, the picture is nowhere near as grim as is being suggested.  I intend to go through some simple numbers below which demonstrate that we can handle both our current deficits, and the larger issue of the social safety net, “within the system,” and that collapse is not inevitable.

Typically, someone reminds us that our 14 trillion dollar debt is comparable in size to our “14 trillion dollar economy,” and then compares the total unfunded liabilities of Social Security and Medicare to this.  And of course, the approximately 100 trillion dollar potential liability sounds like it dwarfs our entire national economy.

The problem, of course, is that this comparison is between ONE YEAR of the United States’s economic output (GDP), versus SEVENTY FIVE years of accumulated underfunding of the social safety net.  Let’s put these into comparable units.

We could either (a) figure out how much the unfunded liabilities amount to, compared to the full 75 years of economic output, or (b) we can determine what the per-year amount of unfunded liability is compared to ONE year of economic output.   Both give one the same answer, of course.

If we assume that today’s GDP represents an average, without systematic long-term growth or decline, and since the unfunded liability is being discussed in “today’s dollars,” then 75 years worth of today’s GDP is 1,050 trillion dollars.  A little over 1 quadrillion dollars.  The entire unfunded liability for the social safety net is thus 9.5% of our economic productivity over the next 75 years.   Breaking that down on a per-year unfunded liability basis gives one about 1.33 trillion in unfunded liabilities per year.  Again, about 9.5% of our economic productivity.

That’s a big drain on our economy, since we also spend a good chunk of our productivity on federal, state, and local spending.

But it’s not unthinkably large, nor catastrophic.  On these scales, the discretionary federal budget doesn’t even show up in our calculations.  So the heroic efforts of the GOP to destroy education funding, regulatory agencies, and assistance for the truly needy isn’t about our long-term fiscal health.  At all.

Despite the fact that our long-term liabilities aren’t truly catastrophic when you look at the true scale of the U.S. economy over the 75 year time horizon, these are big numbers and respond non-linearly to demographic changes in society.

Social Security is the much smaller of the two problems.    The unfunded shortfall is fundamentally caused by the intergenerational transfer of funds — each generation is funded partially by the one that comes after it, and the current generation of workers is smaller than the “Baby Boomer” generation, and the next generation is looking like it’ll be smaller yet.  Birth rates have declined.  This causes a systematic long-term shortfall unless we make changes to retirement age, benefit level, or current FICA tax rates.  Or a little of each, which is what the Trustees of the Social Security System have long advocated.  The 13 trillion dollar unfunded liability (over a 75 year horizon) is eminently fixable by following their recommendations, or some combination of adjustments.  This liability represents only 1.2% of our nation’s projected economic output over 75 years.  That doesn’t sound like an insurmountable problem to me.

Medicare is a much thornier problem.  It’s thornier because the size of unfunded liabilities is only weakly predictable from demographics (as is the case with Social Security).  We can predict how many people of each age bracket we’ll have using Medicare at various points in the future, but we can’t predict what the average health care cost expenditure per-person will be, 10 years from now, let along 40 or 75 years.  So the estimates for unfunded liabilities here are all over the map.  And they relate to the overall problem of “rationing” care and reducing overall health care cost increases in the U.S.

What does this mean for politics in America today?

1. We’re bullshitting ourselves about the problems, basically, and which ones need to be solved.  We’re focusing on discretionary federal spending instead of entitlement program finances.
2. Nothing we do on the scale of the current discretionary federal budget will break the bank in the long term.  Education spending and regulation of food safety are not leading the U.S. to the brink of disaster, and we need to call out the folks that claim it is.
3. We can fix the deficit and whittle down the U.S. federal debt within the framework of existing fiscal policy, without “inflating away” the debt.  Our country has a robust enough economy that we have the resources.
4. Our efforts need to be focused FIRST on Medicare and health care costs in general, and figuring out a sustainable solution.  SECOND, we should readjust Social Security funding and benefits policy to close the 75 year gap.  The sooner we do it, the less painful the adjustments will need to be.

Americans aren’t accustomed to having the political dialogue in terms of “trillions” of dollars.  So everything about this is scary, and easily borrowed by demagogues to push their own agendas.

It’s time we all got comfortable with these numbers, and realize that over the next two generations, our economy will produce over 1 QUADRILLION dollars in revenue — goods and services — and that we absolutely can handle the liabilities and issues we face.

If we want to.

I suppose everyone has a different threshold for when a cocktail recipe is “forgotten”…the average person who doesn’t frequent “serious” cocktail bars wouldn’t recognize a Japanese, for example, but if you’ve hung out at Rob Roy or Vessel in Seattle regularly, you’ve probably had one in the last year.  Again, if you’d read Vintage Spirits and Forgotten Cocktails, then you’d probably say that Curacao Punch was no longer “forgotten.”

But try to walk into a bar, even most of the serious ones we tend to frequent, and Curacao Punch isn’t easy to find.  Murray Stenson looked at my blankly, and so have a number of other serious bartenders in several cities.  So I’m going to claim that Curacao Punch still fits this month’s theme.

Frankly, the recipe in Ted Haigh’s book is something I find damned near undrinkable.  He uses 2 full ounces of Curacao, compared to 1 ounce each of cognac and rum.  Let that sink in, in its sticky orange glory.  This might be historically accurate, but unless you’re looking for an adult orange snowcone, dial back on ratios here.  My own favorite was posted by Adam Elmegirab, of Boker’s Bitters in Scotland fame, and I’ve tinkered with it a bit here.

In particular, I find that I prefer a mix of overproof aged Jamaican rum, aged agricole rhum, and cognac.  The nice thing here is you can tailor this to local conditions and ingredients, so if all you get is Appleton V/X, you’re still gonna be seriously happy.  The Curacao should not be Cointreau, this demands richness rather than the drier crisper Cointreau.  Clement Creole Shrubb or the original Senior of Senior Curacao are optimal here.

2 oz  cognac (here:  Remy VS)

1 oz aged Jamaican rum (here:  Smith and Cross Navy Strength)

1 oz aged Martinique agricole rhum (here:  Saint James Ambre)

1/2 oz curacao (here:  Clement Creole Shrubb)

1/2 oz lemon juice

1 oz water (not soda water, just cold filtered water)

1 heaping barspoon cane syrup (3:1 in this case)

Shake and strain onto cracked and shaved ice, garnish with berries or whatever you have.

The effect here is a subtle mix of brandy and rum flavors, with a bit of orange on the finish.  The overproof Jamaican rum  adds a decent but mellow burn, so you’re not going to mistake this for a soft drink.  (Don’t use white Wray and Nephew here, by the way, you want aged flavors, so sacrifice overproof for aged.  Appleton 12 is amazing here too, the Reserve is great, and the V/X is perfectly sufficient)  The sweetness stays in the background, and I find this much more balanced than the recipe from Ted Haigh’s book (sorry, Ted).

Not complicated, but a classic which deserves to be much more well-known in the bars of the West Coast.

This month’s Mixology Monday theme was fun, especially since I’ve been working with rum recipes lately, learning the history, and focusing especially on agricole.  Lime and rum have been paired flavors for centuries, probably since the rum ration under Admiral Vernon (“Old Grog”) included limes and citrus and was found to ward off scurvy.

Early in my cocktailing days, back in college, friends and I drank an unnamed cocktail from Hemingway’s Islands in the Stream, lovingly described as gin, green coconut water, lime, and bitters, served tall in a glass wrapped in wet paper towels to keep it cool in the tropical heat.  The drink was unnamed by Hemingway, and in the late 80′s the resources simply weren’t easy to find to do good historical research.  We added tonic water and simply called it the “Hemingway” and still sip them to this day.

Something like this is made by Mr. Martin Cate down at Smuggler’s Cove, under the name Caribeño, and since I just finished a batch of barrel-aged gin (in a former Tuthilltown rye whiskey barrel), I thought I’d go with the following:

Vieux Caribeño

1.5 oz barrel-aged gin

3 oz young coconut water (fresh is best, some of the asian canned varieties with pulp are fine)

3/4 oz lime juice

1/2 oz cane sugar syrup (for fun, use Lyle’s Golden)

1 dash Angostura

Shake the ingredients and pour over fresh rocks in a collins glass with lime shells.  In the pictured presentation I’ve added a sugar cane stir-stick rolled in powdered lime zest mixed with a small amount of cane sugar.

This works, but my barrel-aged gin is pretty vanilla-forward right now since it’s the first batch through this particular barrel.  The next one I’ll probably cut the straight barrel-aged gin 2:1 with london dry to mellow out the vanillin a bit.  Otherwise tasty!

I strongly agree and support Bob in this line of reasoning, and I urge other islanders to consider supporting this and demanding a real plan we can consider and, if needed, vote upon.

A friend just wrote and said that I should also note that the unintended consequences of a “zero” or “one” policy need to be thoroughly discussed.  On islands with no transfer station, we will see a rise in illegal roadside dumping, attempts to dump trash and recycling in the dumpsters of local businesses, and so on.  We will see a drastic drop in our recycling.

And regardless of how much San Juan Sanitation increases their service level, we all have the occasional garage clean-out, or old refrigerator, or construction debris to deal with.  Where will this material go when we have no transfer station on our island?

The Council seems to suggest that this material will end up in our pickups, on the ferry, off to some other island or the mainland.  I suspect much of it won’t, and our islands will become thinly veiled dumpsites, but badly policed and uncontrolled dump sites.

Perhaps someone from the Visitor’s Bureau, the real estate profession, and other aspects of the tourism industry ought to weigh in on the issue and explain the importance of a clean, beautiful county to our local economy….

After reading today’s article in the San Juan Islander entitled “SW budget based on OI Facility Only,” I am compelled to comment.  I will attempt to keep my comments respectful and civil, but the ludicrousness of the options being presented here makes that somewhat difficult.

While I understand that we face difficult budget choices, and apparently are going to pay dearly for our past choices in this policy area, the idea that an island county should live with zero or just one point for solid waste removal is alarming.

Curbside pickup can and should be more widely used.  Currently, San Juan Sanitation is not able to provide *weekly* pickup to many of the outlying island areas because many streets lack enough subscribers to warrant it.  Obviously, if curbside pickup were mandated, the density of customers would rise and hopefully San Juan Sanitation would respond by instituting county-wide weekly pickup of domestic garbage (and recycling!).  Any policy change here should involve discussions with SJS prior to enactment to ensure that they are ready and willing to move to a much more regular schedule of pickup for all subscribers.

Without this level of service, you as Council members are essentially telling the majority of the County’s population that we should accept that it might take half a day, or a full day, to dispose of a single load of refuse.  Under the “One Station” option, the minimum investment of time for disposing of household waste to Orcas from Friday Harbor would be three-plus hours, and often considerably longer, with a 20-plus dollar ferry fee in addition to whatever fees are assessed at the transfer station.

Under a “Zero Station” plan, that minimum investment of time is more like half a day to a full day.  As you all know, being County residents.  With a monetary cost of 50-plus dollars in addition to transfer station fees.

The fact that such an option is considered possible by the Council causes me to seriously question your judgment.

Mr. Shannon can hide behind his statement that he is merely presenting a plan which meets the requests he’s been given.

You, as Council members, cannot duck this responsibility.

I would ask that you stop presenting options that are clearly injurious to the vast bulk of your constituents, and do the politically hard but necessary thing, and give the voters of the county a plan to vote on, with options for taxes necessary to support it, that provides us with a reasonable minimum of solid waste infrastructure on each island where it is deemed necessary by that island’s inhabitants. This plan may include mandatory curbside pickup (on a frequent basis!) to minimize usage and costs at transfer stations, but the option of no transfer stations in the county is unrealistic.  If you proceed in this direction, I will make common cause with other county residents and fight this ludicrous and injurious plan.