Monday, April 27, 2009

My Favorite Butcher Was A Real Cutup!

The Texas barbeque aficionado of our day is Wyatt McSpadden, a talented photographer, born in Amarillo and transplanted to Austin. In his recent book, Texas BBQ, McSpadden proclaims that his favorite butcher was Harold Hines who worked in the McSpadden family grocery store in Amarillo in the 1960s. Hines prepared barbeque in the meat department on a few Saturdays each month and McSpadden was smitten. In his own bedraggled past, this blogger marveled at a butcher who worked in the grocery store owned by the blogger's maternal grandparents. The old fellow's name was Otto Osler and he was old-school. My managerial grandmother constantly snarled about Otto's apron which was not spotless and the chewing tobacco in Otto's cheek. For Wyatt McSpadden, the spirit of Harold Hines lives in Texas barbeque. For this blogger, Otto Osler lives there, too. If this is (fair & balanced) nostalgia, so be it.

[x Texas Monthly]
Holy Smoke
By Wyatt McSpadden

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I grew up in a grocery store in Amarillo. My dad and his brother took over Central Grocery, the family business, from their father when they returned from World War II. In 1962, when I was ten years old, I started going to work with Dad on Saturdays. I carried around a milk crate to stand on so I could work produce or bag groceries, my apron rolled up so I wouldn’t trip on it. The store was a marvelous place for a little kid, but the best part, the heart of it, was the meat market. Central Grocery was known around town for its fine meats, and the star of the operation was the butcher. The butcher was special: He didn’t sack groceries, run the register, trim the lettuce, or stock the shelves. The meat market was off-limits to me—its floors were slick, the knives were sharp, and the butcher was not to be disturbed.

One butcher stands out in my memory. I was in my early teens when he came to us. His name was Harold Hines, and everyone said he was a really good butcher; I can’t say if that was true or not, but I do know he was friendlier with the customers and with me than most of his predecessors had been. What really set him apart, though, was that once or twice a month, on a Saturday, Harold would make barbecue. That’s what he called it, although it was something he prepared in a big electric slow cooker in the meat market. I loved it—the smell that filled the store, the little cardboard bowls he’d give me to sample from, the soda crackers and longhorn cheese. The aroma drew folks to the market. Harold was a star.

For the past fifteen years, as I’ve traveled around Texas looking for barbecue places to photograph, my inner sack boy has been reawakened. Some of the places I visited weren’t so different from Dad’s store: Prause Meat Market, in La Grange, with the beautiful Friedrich refrigerated cases made in 1952, the year I was born; Gonzales Food Market, where co-owner Rene Lopez Garza still wears an apron and paper hat from a bread company; Dozier’s Grocery, in Fulshear, with a modest display of canned goods and paper products standing between the entrance and one of the most eye-popping selections of meats I’ve ever seen. What these places have that Central Grocery didn’t is real wood-smoked barbecue, made out back in brick pits fueled by post oak, pecan, and mesquite.

Many of the places I visited started out as meat markets. Kreuz Market, in Lockhart, and City Market, in Luling, still display vestiges of their butcher-shop heritage, even though these days the house specialty is smoked meats. Over time the process of creating pit barbecue has transformed such modest spots into magical places. The smoke and heat have penetrated the walls and the people who toil within them. Part of the magic is in the food; part is the fact that I was always made to feel welcome. Whether I called in advance or dropped in unannounced, I was, without exception, free to shoot whatever interested me. These pictures are my thank-you to all the wonderful folks, all the Harolds, who let me inside their lives and who took the time to stand for me or open a pit or stoke up a flame. ♥

[From Texas BBQ, by Wyatt McSpadden. Copyright © 2009 The University of Texas Press. McSpadden narrates a slide show of images of some of the state’s best barbecue joints, pitmasters, and finger-lickin’ meats from his new book, Texas BBQ. at this Texas Monthly link:Smokin'.]

Copyright © 2009 Emmis Publishing

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Copyright © 2009 Sapper's (Fair & Balanced) Rants & Raves

Shed No Tiers For Me

The most current version of Texas envy is grounded in the fact that California (sneer) has 9 Tier I universities and New York (double-sneer) has 7 such super-schools. Texas only has 3: UT-Austin, Texas A&M University, and Rice University.

Nationally, the United States has 51 Tier I Universities — ranging from Harvard University to the University of California at Berkeley. This year, in the Lone Star State, the cry has gone up for more Tier I universities because the two public super-schools in Texas are not located in the major urban centers; Houston, San Antonio, and Dallas want public Tier I institutions to call their own. Of course, the invidious comparisons of Texas to California and New York prompt the Texas urge to surpass those inferior states. A few years ago, the University of Texas at Austin sought to wrest the contract to manage the Los Alamos National Laboratory (NM) from the University of California at Berkeley. The contract was renewed with Cal-Berkeley. Ouch. More recently, the nano-technology research center that had been founded at UT-Austin was snatched away by the State University of New York at Albany. Double-Ouch. It's enough to bring tiers to a Texan's eyes.

Interestingly, an academic at Columbia University (one of the 7 New York Tier I schools) offers another alternative. Abolish the university. The Tier I issue is DOA. If this is (fair & balanced) academic heresy, so be it.

[x NY Fishwrap]
End The University As We Know It
By Mark C. Taylor

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Graduate education is the Detroit of higher learning. Most graduate programs in American universities produce a product for which there is no market (candidates for teaching positions that do not exist) and develop skills for which there is diminishing demand (research in subfields within subfields and publication in journals read by no one other than a few like-minded colleagues), all at a rapidly rising cost (sometimes well over $100,000 in student loans).

Widespread hiring freezes and layoffs have brought these problems into sharp relief now. But our graduate system has been in crisis for decades, and the seeds of this crisis go as far back as the formation of modern universities. Kant, in his 1798 work The Conflict of the Faculties, wrote that universities should “handle the entire content of learning by mass production, so to speak, by a division of labor, so that for every branch of the sciences there would be a public teacher or professor appointed as its trustee.”

Unfortunately this mass-production university model has led to separation where there ought to be collaboration and to ever-increasing specialization. In my own religion department, for example, we have 10 faculty members, working in eight subfields, with little overlap. And as departments fragment, research and publication become more and more about less and less. Each academic becomes the trustee not of a branch of the sciences, but of limited knowledge that all too often is irrelevant for genuinely important problems. A colleague recently boasted to me that his best student was doing his dissertation on how the medieval theologian Duns Scotus used citations.

The emphasis on narrow scholarship also encourages an educational system that has become a process of cloning. Faculty members cultivate those students whose futures they envision as identical to their own pasts, even though their tenures will stand in the way of these students having futures as full professors.

The dirty secret of higher education is that without underpaid graduate students to help in laboratories and with teaching, universities couldn’t conduct research or even instruct their growing undergraduate populations. That’s one of the main reasons we still encourage people to enroll in doctoral programs. It is simply cheaper to provide graduate students with modest stipends and adjuncts with as little as $5,000 a course — with no benefits — than it is to hire full-time professors.

In other words, young people enroll in graduate programs, work hard for subsistence pay and assume huge debt burdens, all because of the illusory promise of faculty appointments. But their economical presence, coupled with the intransigence of tenure, ensures that there will always be too many candidates for too few openings.

The other obstacle to change is that colleges and universities are self-regulating or, in academic parlance, governed by peer review. While trustees and administrations theoretically have some oversight responsibility, in practice, departments operate independently. To complicate matters further, once a faculty member has been granted tenure he is functionally autonomous. Many academics who cry out for the regulation of financial markets vehemently oppose it in their own departments.

If American higher education is to thrive in the 21st century, colleges and universities, like Wall Street and Detroit, must be rigorously regulated and completely restructured. The long process to make higher learning more agile, adaptive and imaginative can begin with six major steps:

1. Restructure the curriculum, beginning with graduate programs and proceeding as quickly as possible to undergraduate programs. The division-of-labor model of separate departments is obsolete and must be replaced with a curriculum structured like a web or complex adaptive network. Responsible teaching and scholarship must become cross-disciplinary and cross-cultural.

Just a few weeks ago, I attended a meeting of political scientists who had gathered to discuss why international relations theory had never considered the role of religion in society. Given the state of the world today, this is a significant oversight. There can be no adequate understanding of the most important issues we face when disciplines are cloistered from one another and operate on their own premises.

It would be far more effective to bring together people working on questions of religion, politics, history, economics, anthropology, sociology, literature, art, religion and philosophy to engage in comparative analysis of common problems. As the curriculum is restructured, fields of inquiry and methods of investigation will be transformed.

2. Abolish permanent departments, even for undergraduate education, and create problem-focused programs. These constantly evolving programs would have sunset clauses, and every seven years each one should be evaluated and either abolished, continued or significantly changed. It is possible to imagine a broad range of topics around which such zones of inquiry could be organized: Mind, Body, Law, Information, Networks, Language, Space, Time, Media, Money, Life and Water.

Consider, for example, a Water program. In the coming decades, water will become a more pressing problem than oil, and the quantity, quality and distribution of water will pose significant scientific, technological and ecological difficulties as well as serious political and economic challenges. These vexing practical problems cannot be adequately addressed without also considering important philosophical, religious and ethical issues. After all, beliefs shape practices as much as practices shape beliefs.

A Water program would bring together people in the humanities, arts, social and natural sciences with representatives from professional schools like medicine, law, business, engineering, social work, theology and architecture. Through the intersection of multiple perspectives and approaches, new theoretical insights will develop and unexpected practical solutions will emerge.

3. Increase collaboration among institutions. All institutions do not need to do all things and technology makes it possible for schools to form partnerships to share students and faculty. Institutions will be able to expand while contracting. Let one college have a strong department in French, for example, and the other a strong department in German; through teleconferencing and the Internet both subjects can be taught at both places with half the staff. With these tools, I have already team-taught semester-long seminars in real time at the Universities of Helsinki and Melbourne.

4. Transform the traditional dissertation. In the arts and humanities, where looming cutbacks will be most devastating, there is no longer a market for books modeled on the medieval dissertation, with more footnotes than text. As financial pressures on university presses continue to mount, publication of dissertations, and with it scholarly certification, is almost impossible. (The average university press print run of a dissertation that has been converted into a book is less than 500, and sales are usually considerably lower.) For many years, I have taught undergraduate courses in which students do not write traditional papers but develop analytic treatments in formats from hypertext and Web sites to films and video games. Graduate students should likewise be encouraged to produce “theses” in alternative formats.

5. Expand the range of professional options for graduate students. Most graduate students will never hold the kind of job for which they are being trained. It is, therefore, necessary to help them prepare for work in fields other than higher education. The exposure to new approaches and different cultures and the consideration of real-life issues will prepare students for jobs at businesses and nonprofit organizations. Moreover, the knowledge and skills they will cultivate in the new universities will enable them to adapt to a constantly changing world.

6. Impose mandatory retirement and abolish tenure. Initially intended to protect academic freedom, tenure has resulted in institutions with little turnover and professors impervious to change. After all, once tenure has been granted, there is no leverage to encourage a professor to continue to develop professionally or to require him or her to assume responsibilities like administration and student advising. Tenure should be replaced with seven-year contracts, which, like the programs in which faculty teach, can be terminated or renewed. This policy would enable colleges and universities to reward researchers, scholars and teachers who continue to evolve and remain productive while also making room for young people with new ideas and skills.

For many years, I have told students, “Do not do what I do; rather, take whatever I have to offer and do with it what I could never imagine doing and then come back and tell me about it.” My hope is that colleges and universities will be shaken out of their complacency and will open academia to a future we cannot conceive. ♥

[Mark C. Taylor, the chairman of the religion department at Columbia, is the author of the forthcoming Field Notes From Elsewhere: Reflections on Dying and Living. Taylor received a BA from Wesleyan University and a PhD in religion from Harvard University. Taylor began teaching at Williams College in 1973. In 1981 Taylor was the first foreigner to be awarded the Doctorgrad in philosophy in the 500-year history of the University of Copenhagen. In 2007, Taylor moved from Williams College to Columbia University.]


Copyright © 2009 The New York Times Company

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Oink!

In 1976, the United States Public Health Service's National Influenza Immunization Program (NIIP) sought to immunize over 200 million people against swine influenza within six months. This program faced much opposition as many doctors, pharmaceutical companies and insurance companies refused to take responsibility for mishaps. Unfortunately, cases of a rare side effect believed to be linked to the shot — Guillain-Barré syndrome, a rare neurological condition that can be fatal — emerged in the weeks after the immunizations began. More than 500 people are thought to have developed Guillain-Barré syndrome after receiving the vaccine, and 25 died. No one completely understands what causes Guillain-Barré in certain people, but the condition can develop after a bout with infection or following surgery or vaccination. The government paid millions of dollars in damages to people who developed the condition or their families. But the swine flu pandemic, which some experts estimated at the time could infect 50 million to 60 million Americans, never unfolded. Only about 200 cases of swine flu and one death were ultimately reported in the U.S., according to a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report. The moral of the story? Don't go whole hog for a swine flu scare. If this is a (fair & balanced) public service announcement, so be it.

[x Open Salon]
The Web 2.0 Guide To Swine Flu
By Rahul K. Parikh, MD

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Kudos to the Centers for Disease Control for marching onto the Internet to share information related to swine flu with us. For those who are looking for information, there are several ways to track the latest:

(Note: not an inclusive list, so if readers know others, let me know and I'll add them for everybody)

    Home Pages on the Web:
  • CDC Swine Flu Site Contains the latest information, including numbers of cases reported and advisories to protect yourself. You can RSS feed or get email updates as our understanding of what's happening progresses.

  • Multimedia:
  • Video/Podcast short features from the CDC's influenza division explaining the symptoms, signs, and potential treatments for the illness>/li>
  • Widget code to embed and follow developments with
  • Ecards Seriously, send Pig Pen or any of your other less hygenic friends a Hallmark to remind them to wash their hands
  • Flikr See what's new and old (there was a 1976 swine flu oubreak) at the Agency's photostream

  • Twitter CDC is Tweeting, which is how I found about both the White House Briefing and last Friday's briefing, on two different sites. They usually alert folks to any live events and briefing they'll be holding ahead of time

  • CDCEmergency
  • CDC_eHealth


  • Other Sites:

  • White House Blog With a transcript of today's press briefing
  • Google Maps Someone, somewhere is tracking cases at Google Maps. At this point, it's not clear who is and how accurate it may be, however.

The point here is a good one: keeping the public up to date and informed, and doing it in a way that prevents any widespread panic. Many of the sites also are available in Spanish, as is the CDC hotline at 1-800-232-4636. ♥

[Rahul Parikh is a Pediatrician in the San Francisco Bay Area. He regularly writes about medicine and society. Parikh grew up near Los Angeles, CA. He went to college at UC Berkeley and then attended the Tufts University School of Medicine in Boston, MA. While at Tufts, Dr. Parikh helped create the Sharewood Project, a free medical clinic that provides care to homeless and indigent citizens in Boston. He received his pediatric training at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. During that time he spent two months in India working with pediatric residents in Mumbai and Ahmedabad. He currently practice pediatrics with a special focus in adolescent medicine.]

Copyright © 2009 Salon Media Group, Inc.

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