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On the Shelf: Me and Miranda

First published on  Substack.

I’m on the shelf. My expiration date unwritten—pickled, salty, sour, sweet, and crunchy. I’ve been sitting here for a long time in Kerr glass, my ringed lid rusty. Unopened. Un-openable, except by the strongest hands.

Immediately next to me sits a small rag doll made with the sloppy, loving hand, stitches, and eye of a child, Megan Wood (born McKenzie, then Brown, eventually McClard). She wears an embroidered pinafore over a plaid dress. Red plaited pigtails trail down her back. A fringe of hair partially covers one of her black eyes. Her name is Miranda.

If you look closely, you can see the absence of her left leg. My mother had a sad story to tell about that. Her biological father—whom she didn’t know was her father until adulthood—had given her a fluffy Chow Chow puppy called Ching. Mother always claimed that Ching hated her from the outset, only loving her foster mother, Mother Wood. One day, she found Miranda in Ching’s mouth, hanging by her leg. In the struggle to get her away from the nasty beast, Miranda lost it.

Miranda was my mother’s best friend until her foster mother took her away. Later, her biological mother, Mrs. McKenzie (my grandmother), would return Miranda to her maker. Mother Wood, her foster mother, felt that my mother’s attachment to the doll was unhealthy, even sinful—which is why she sent her away to my grandmother, the wicked seed from whom my mother sprang.

As my mother lay dying last year, she referred to Miranda as her best friend. She wanted to see her. I retrieved her from the box on the shelf where she kept a few other meaningful trinkets from childhood. Miranda is now ninety years old, still here after all mothers have passed to the next world. Miranda remains on the shelf next to me, along with stories of the girl who made her and the woman who made me.

This is the first installment of vignettes entitled “On the Shelf,” as told from the perspective of a Kerr jar. I hope you enjoyed it. I would love to hear from you about things on your shelf!

To read more about my mother’s life and times, order her memoir:

Leavings: Memoir of a 1920s Hollywood Love Child

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Anne’s Danish Rye Recipe

This recipe is developed from many different recipes I have tried over the past year. Every loaf I made prior to landing on this one failed in some way–too dense, too hard to cut, too hard of a crust, bubble under the crust, crack in the top, gummy interior, etc. Most recipes omit the “Secret Handshake,” which I am including here. From Christian Mjadsberg I learned that having some white flour is important. Previously, I had gone the all-rye route. The texture is much better now. Hope you enjoy!

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If you don’t have a starter (takes 4-5 days):

  • 3T European Yogurt (the runny kind)—buttermilk would work too
  • 50g Rye Flour
  • 100g warm water

Each day, add 25g of rye flour and 50g of water. You just leave this out on the counter, covered.

After you use it for your first loaf, put remainder in refrigerator in a jar and feed it (25g of rye flour and 50g of water), every couple of weeks. On the day you plan to use it, take it out, feed it, and let it warm to room temperature.

The night before you plan to bake your bread:

For the levain—mix together in a large bowl, cover, leave on counter for ~12 hours:

  • 300 grams dark rye flour
  • 100 grams white flour—I have made all-rye, but the texture is not as good
  • 350 grams water
  • 70 grams ripe sourdough starter—you can use more if you want, not an exact science

Grains and seeds—soak overnight covered

  • 300 grams of grains and seeds (I use rye berries and sunflower seeds, but you can use a mix of anything, flax, pumpkin seeds, etc.)
  • 285 grams water—I use boiling water.

 

Bread Baking Day

Final Dough—add the soaked seeds/nuts, and their liquid to the levain, then add the rest of the ingredients to the bowl and thoroughly mix. I just mix with a wooden spoon—it should be a gooey mess.

  • 200 grams dark rye flour
  • 130 grams white flour
  • 180 grams water
  • 18 grams salt
  • 2 tablespoons molasses

Further instructions:

Grease a 13 x 4 inch (1.5 lb loaf pan).  Set aside.

Using a sturdy wooden spoon, transfer the dough to the prepared loaf pan, distributing it evenly across the length of the pan and smoothing out the top with spoon or rubber spatula (if you are having trouble smoothing out the top, dampen utensil slightly with water).  Let it rise until it comes to within a ½ to ¼  inch of the top of the pan. This may take anywhere from 1 ½-4 hours depending on the temperature of your kitchen and the dough.

Secret handshake: Just before putting into the oven, take a skewer, moistened with water and poke holes to bottom of pan. I used the following pattern (hocus pocus):

ryeholes

As it turns out, this is very important for allowing steam to escape; it will keep the loaf from popping up in the center, and forming a bubble between the top crust and the bread!

Preheat oven to 350 degrees fahrenheit, bake for ~60 minutes, until bread has an internal temperature of 205 degrees–this is also an important secret to bread-baking success. Remove from pan, place on cooling rack and cover loosely with a clean tea towel Don’t cut it until the next day. To cut, use a good serrated knife, and cut in thin slices.

 

 

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51 things that drive me nuts

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This post is “all about me” and all-about-me-isms, inspired by the inanity of self-promotion and the Internet.

  1. Medium article titles that begin with a number: I signed up as a subscriber to Medium some months back, thinking that I would enjoy reading the writing of a lot of smart people. With rare exceptions, I have found the content to be lacking. Every other title begins with a number; 3, 5, 7, and 10 are the most popular. Seven things that will change your life. The 10 most imporant things you need to know. Three steps to your future. The site exemplifies all-about-me-ism, and is turning out to be nothing more than another self-promotional platform.
  2. Passwords: Like you, I have hundreds of them, and I am using software to manage them. My own passwords are hard enough to deal with, but now I also am responsible for keeping track of 91 year-old mother’s passwords. What once were relatively simple tasks to complete, like logging in or changing one’s password, have become onerous occasions of stepping through an endless sequence of security tasks. Which brings me to…
  3. Verification codes: I understand why companies have turned to these as a means to verify that you are who you say you are; it is an extra task that I have become accustomed to. However, my mother, once a tech goddess, no longer can see well, and has some difficulty with processing and information. She also has difficulty with typing, so makes a lot of mistakes. Verification codes are a complete nightmare for her, and therefore, a nightmare to me.
  4. Security questions: Of course, I can usually answer my own security questions, unless they are case-sensitive, which sometimes they are. If you have three that need to be submitted at one time, and you have not consistently used cases in their creation, it is almost impossible to resolve. Add to this scenario, keeping track of my mother’s security questions. I now have a lengthy record for her that includes everything from her social security number to the name of her first pet, first teacher, favorite teacher, first car, color of her first car, where she met my father, etc. Sometimes she can remember these things, and sometimes not.
  5. Frauds:  People who are not who they pretend to be. See 5 through 10.
  6. Phishers: We all have received a phish in our email or messages. Some of us have fallen for them, some of us have not. I don’t judge people who have fallen for phishing schemes. I don’t even judge people for liking the band Phish! Phishers, however, are evil people who prey on the trust of others for financial gain. Often these people are elderly, and sometimes, they are young and naive. I have witnessed it at both ends in my own family, and fortunately we caught the phish before it caught us.
  7. Donald J. Trump: The So-called President might be the greatest phisher of all time. His phishing scheme is brilliant. He doesn’t even need to steal people’s identities; he has other people do it for him, members of the dark web, so that his continuous stream of (f)lies can be broadcast over the news lake, hooking unsuspecting and unknowing prey on his line. He reels them in and eats them for lunch. He phishes for souls.
  8. Liars: See previous.
  9. Cheats: See number 6.
  10. Back-stabbers: You know who they are in your own life, in the Whitehouse, in the workplace, at school, and possibly in your own family, and we get to see them in action every day on broadcast and social media. Life has become one giant reality television show, with each person out for him/herself.
  11. Recruitment gamers: This is a very specific type of fraud that I have to deal with in my profession. There is a class of people, who game the market research industry to qualify for and participate in paid research studies for which they are not qualified. They are a complete waste of time and money.
  12. Bad drivers: See items 12 through 16
  13. Oblivious drivers: You know them, you might be one of them. They are the ones who back out of parking spaces without looking. They are the ones putting on their makeup or texting at a stoplight. They are the ones who don’t hear honking, or notice a long line of traffic piled up behind them.
  14. Indecisive drivers: You may remember the Portlandia skit where there are two cars at a four-way stop, and each of the drivers politely indicates for the other driver to go. They sit at the intersection forever. That is real.  And then, there are the people who can’t decide which way to turn, whether to turn, or which lane to drive in, or which parking spot they want. Pain in the ass.
  15. Angry drivers: Scary.
  16. Drunk drivers: Dangerous. Stay home or take a Lyft.
  17. Bad cyclists: Entitlement is a dangerous thing, especially when you don’t wear a helmet or follow the rules of the road. A cyclist once chased me down and swore at me after weaving around me to cut me off from a turn that I had started long before he was in the picture. I almost hit him.
  18. Bad pedestrians: The same people who are oblivious drivers are probably oblivious pedestrians. Pedestrian right-of-way does not mean that you can cross the street at any time, any place, without looking up from your mobile screen.
  19. Narrow shoes: Lately, I have been inspecting bare feet in sandals, and have noticed that a majority of women have deformed feet, giant bunions and corns, the product of narrow shoes. I myself have a bunion on my left foot. Turns out that foot is wider than my right foot. For some reason, our culture values dainty feet and daity shoes on women, which has led to millions of deformed feet. Drives me batty.
  20. Indecisiveness: My own is bad enough. In others, it is intolerable.
  21. Dinner: What should we have tonight?
  22. Phone solicitors: “Don’t hang up. This is not a sales call,” is a sure sign that it is. I have gone to picking up and hanging up without even listening. The National Do Not Call Directory doesn’t work. Nothing works.
  23. Nickel-and-diming: Being a good citizen, I give to a number of charitable causes that matter to me. It drives me bonkers to have them call me every other month, asking if I couldn’t just up my donation a few dollars more. And then there are  the airlines with their add-on fees, the assisted living center where my mom lives, and the list goes on.
  24. Bad food: There is no excuse for it. Cooking is not brain surgery. Fresh. Whole. Use herbs and spices.
  25. Doctors: In the pocket of big pharma. They don’t know as much as they pretend to know. Most of them don’t care about their patients, let alone care for them.
  26. Bad bosses: There are a lot of them, people who have climbed the ladder through fraudulent means or by virtue of having a penis, or by virtue of pretending to have one.
  27. Boring work: We all do a lot of it for a paycheck.
  28. Undependable people: People who say that they will do something and then fail to do it. In corporate life, this is particularly insidious when you are doing a “collaborative” project and you end up doing all of the work, and the other person ends up taking all the credit.
  29. Calves liver: No, just no. I don’t like it in a house, or with a mouse, or in a tree. Your mother does not make it better than my mother. It is just gross, no matter how over or undercooked it is, even if it is slathered in caramelized onions. Ick.
  30. Bad coffee: Starbuck is the worst. The best part of waking up is not Folgers. Mr. Coffee is dead. Drip.
  31. Bad smells: Feces, farts, rotten eggs, body odor, perfume, skunky pot, bad breath, wet dog, dog breath, especially after your dog has polished off a snack from the cat box.
  32. Kids loose in parking lots: I don’t blame them; I blame…
  33. Inattentive parents: We live on a park that has a porta-john, and one day I looked out and saw a kid bouncing up and down on top of it, and some sort of brownish liquid was splashing up like old faithful. His dad was standing nearby focused on his phone. I politely suggested that he might not want Johnny to do that, and he just shrugged. If you don’t want to watch your children, don’t have them.
  34. Cancer: It kills. I’ve had it. My friends and relatives have had it. We have all had enough of it. I pray that science will prevail, and that one day a magic bullet will be discovered.
  35. Death: There is no cure.
  36. War: I am against it.
  37. Irresponsibility: Making mistakes is a natural consequence of living. Taking responsibility for our mistakes and not blaming others is difficult, but not impossible. No excuses. Just apologize, forgive yourself for your mistakes, and forgive others for their transgressions, and move forward. Life is too short for the blame game.
  38. Greed: 99.9% of the problems in our world are caused by greed.
  39. Inspirational quotations: They do not inspire me.
  40. Climate change: I hate what we are doing to our planet. No laughing matter.
  41. People who do not believe in climate change: Idiots.
  42. Religious extremism: There is no place for it in the world.
  43. Extremism in general: Very bad things happen to good people when extremism prevails.
  44. Platitudes: Good things come to those who wait. WTF? Hard work always pays off. Really? Tell me about it. Great minds think alike. I hope not.
  45. TED talks: A boring, formulaic self-promotional tool.  Formula: 1. Create well-crafted visuals 2. Open with a joke or cute story 3. Plan a spontaneous moment. 4. Make a statement with complete certainty. 5. Don’t forget to have a snappy refrain that you can repeat in your talk at least 7 times. 6. Be relatable by telling the audience a story about your institutionalization, or the time when your family lived on the streets and ate bugs, because we can all relate to that, right? 7. Make sure that your thesis is one that nobody in their right mind would agree with. Note: Always have 7 steps.  TED talks are nothing more than personal infomercials.
  46. Social media has become like MySpace: Social media (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, YouTube, etc.) have all become inane platforms for self-promotion. You remember what happened to MySpace, don’t you? Social media should be social, not “all about me.”
  47. Workplace politics: You can’t avoid them, no matter how hard you try. Best solution I have found is to find the door.
  48. All-about-me-ism: Everything today is “all about me.” What about my needs? Identity politics and its prevalence in public life is an example of it. With each day, we become ever more fractured. We believe that our problems are unique to “our tribe (I know, ‘tribe’ is not politically correct),” be it by skin color, ethnicity, religious beliefs, gender, non-gender, sexual orientation, or whatever. We are all people! And, please don’t tell me to shut up because I can’t understand your experience because I am a member of a priviledged class. You are right, I am priviledged, and I am sorry for that, and you don’t understand my experience either. Nobody understands anybody’s experience, but we can, and must, try to understand each other and work it out together if there is ever any hope for our society.
  49. Anti-government-ism: Present anti-government sentiments in this country are truly terrifying. Imagine a country without laws that protect our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Imagine a country where equal treatment under the law is an impossibility. Imagine a country without publicly supported roads, bridges, schools, and medical research. Imagine a future in which Donald Trump is king and he has gotten rid of government as we have known it. Imagine hell.
  50. -isms: Yep, they all drive me bonkers.
  51. Lists: They are terrific when I go shopping, or have a lot to get done. Otherwise, I would rather read some thoughtful prose. I apologize for this list against lists.
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Move over, Harriet and Harry! Make way for Lucy and James.

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As a pre-teen, I fell in love with Harriet the Spy in the way that many pre-teens fell in love with Harry Potter a decade ago. I often attribute my adult profession of anthropologist to my love of Harriet. She was my idol. I dressed up like her, kept a notebook, and even got caught once “spying” at one of my neighbor’s houses in Billings, Montana. I had heard that their house had a dumbwaiter, and in the book Harriet had hidden inside the dumbwaiter to spy. I got caught before I had even found the dumbwaiter! Nonetheless, she inspired me to listen, to watch, and to write.

S. B. Stein’s new Lucy & James series has the potential to captivate a whole new generation of young readers and to inspire young people to go out into the world, to learn everything they can about it, and most importantly to make it a better place.

Lucy and James are young teens, each with strong senses of self; they are moral and global thinkers. Lucy is from New York City, has been homeschooled, but mostly schooled in the Museum of Natural History where her parents both work as diorama artists. (I want that job). Her parents decide that it is time for her to go to “real” school, something she dreads, as she tried it once before and barely lasted a day. Through her own ingenuity, she finds a perfect school, The World Academy, halfway across the planet, and manages to convince her parents to send her there.

Lucy has a passion for animals, especially endangered species, and has set some lofty goals for herself; she wants to save them all. In the first book, she has set her sights on saving the plowshare tortoise of Madagascar. On the Star Ferry en route to the World College she meets James.  James, like Lucy was home schooled, or more like “world schooled,” having spent most of his life traveling the world with his tour guide family. He is less cerebral and more physically inclined than Lucy, but he longs for more meaning to his life; he finds his match and meaning with Lucy, and together they take an amazing and dangerous adventure to save the turtles and break up a smuggling ring based in Africa.

I hope that S.B. Stein’s next adventure for Lucy & James,  which is set in Iceland, is as riveting as this one! And, I can’t wait for the movies!

 

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Search Engine Bias, or does it know I am White?

I am working on a little side project for a friend of mine who has asked me to collaborate in developing a persona or two for designing a solution to a serious problem. I am not going to go into what that problem is. My friend and I have both have done a lot of research in the domain, and feel confident that we can come up with a persona that will be representative and serve the end goals.

I had finished an initial draft of a persona profile, and started the endless search for photos to go with the persona to bring her to life—her mood board, and day in the life stuff. I wanted to show her family, and wanted her family to be interracial, not because it matters all that much with respect to the problem, but because “we white people” often default to white people pictures in our work, because that is what we have, it is what we know, and it is what is easy. It is precisely because it doesn’t apparently matter that it does!

I wanted a picture of a mom, a dad, and two teen-aged kids. First I searched for families. Lots of great pictures of different kinds of families popped up:

screen shot of family images search
Initially, I was please that so many different types of families were represented, but then I realized that none of these families showed teens.

I quickly became frustrated by the fact that I couldn’t find any pictures of families with teen-aged children, even after I modified my search to include them. I think this speaks to how much our culture dislikes adolescents. We are biased against teenagers, favoring images of families with young, cute little children. How sad. No wonder adolescents feel so disenfranchised; they are! I gave up on that and thought I would go look for individual family members. I began looking for a mother.

I typically used Duck Duck Go as my default search engine. I entered, “stock photo middle aged woman,” very generic, thinking that I would get a mix of images of white people and people of color. This is what I got:

Duck Duck Go search MA women
Not a single “person of color,” in fact this is a very pale set. Even searching “below the fold” did not yield more diverse results!

A lot of white women, even “below the fold.” I went to Google. Same result:

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I went to Bing:

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Holy smokes! I had no idea that there were so few women of color in their middle years. I searched on “middle aged men,” and ended up with the same white result.

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What should we conclude from this? I guess white people are the only people who get to middle age?

I searched on “good-looking men.” All white. Then, “good-looking women.” All white. Who knew?

I told my husband about my discovery, and he suggested that I add “Gen Z” in my search for pictures of interracial families and teens. Darn it, if that didn’t do the trick! I found my family, finally.

I am not sure what to make of all this. I believe this is big data at its worst. Our algorithms are biasing us; they reinforce our bad beliefs, and encourage us to live inside our bubbles. Whatever is going on, it is NOT good. What do you think?

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