As the weather hotted up, I pulled out the last of the garden beets. There weren’t many, since a few had already gone to seed, turning their red tubers fibrous and woody. I wanted to use them in a particularly delicious salad from Julia Child. The basic recipe goes like this:
You need:
• 2 cups cooked rice • 2 cups diced cooked or canned beets • 4 Tbsp finely chopped green onion • 3/4 cup vinaigrette (recipe below; you can use a good bottled vinegar & oil-style salad dressing) • 1 1/2 or 2 cups mayonnaise (bottled or home-made; recipe below) • fresh or dried herbs, such as tarragon, marjoram, basil, thyme, summer savory, etc. • salt and pepper to taste • 1 cup of cooked vegetables, such as peas, green beans, cauliflower, broccoli, carrots, asparagus; you also can add such things as diced raw apple, grated raw carrots, cut-up cooked beef, pork, poultry, or fish, canned tuna or salmon. I defrosted some mixed frozen veggies for my version. • garnish such as olives, anchovies, sliced hard-boiled egs, watercress, or parsley
In a good-sized bowl, toss the cooked beets, onions, and rice together with the vinaigrette. Allow this combination to marinate for awhile in the refrigerator. Meanwhile, make mayonnaise and add a handful of chopped fresh herbs or a tablespoon or so of dried herbs. If you’re using bottle mayo, add the herbs to the mayo in the course of the next step.
Shortly before serving, add the rest of the ingredients to the beets and rice, and then fold in the mayonnaise. Season to taste with salt and pepper. Garnish as desired with one or more of the suggested condiments.
I didn’t have enough beets, and so I decided to add a can of cannellini beans to the rice-and-beet mixture. The result worked wonderfully: beans absorb vinaigrette with every bit as much enthusiasm as rice does.
Here’s how to make enough vinaigrette for this recipe:
You need:
• a measuring cup, at least 1 cup capacity • 1/4 cup lemon juice or wine vinegar • enough olive oil to fill the measuring cup to the 3/4 cup line • a clove of garlic, minced • salt and pepper to taste • maybe a dash of dried herbs—fines herbes or herbes de Provence work nicely
Combine the ingredients and whip with a fork to mix thoroughly. Pour this over the warm rice and beet mixture and fold together well.
And here’s how to make mayo in a blender…lo! Mayonnaise that actually tastes like REAL MAYO!
You need:
• an egg • 1 tsp Dijon-style mustard • 1/2 tsp salt • 2 Tbsp lemon juice or vinegar • 1 cup olive oil, or 1/2 cup olive oil and 1/2 cup mild salad oil
If you’re using two kinds of oil, combine them in your measuring cup. Notice that real mayonnaise doesn’t contain sugar. I don’t think bottled mayo did, either, when I was a kid. I never could stand that sicky-sweet Miracle Whip gunk, but now even Best Foods (Hellman’s in the East) is full of sugar. I guess they must have been forced to add it to compete with Miracle Whip, what with America’s sweet tooth so carefully cultivated by the foodoid industry.
Break the whole egg into the blender jar. Add the salt and lemon juice. Cover the blender jar with thelid (!!) and puree the ingredients at full blast for about 30 seconds. The egg mixture should be thick and foamy. Now, with the blender buzzing away, uncover the jar (most lids have a capped opening that you can undo for this purpose) and dribble in the oil in a thin stream of droplets.
The mayo will get thicker and thicker. If it gets too thick to absorb all the oil, add a few drops of lemon juice or vinegar.
For this recipe, you want to add lots of green herbs to the mayo. I add them just before the sauce is finished, before it gets very thick, just to keep things relatively simple. For the salade, I used a handful or so of fresh garden herbs…out in the backyard, I found thyme, marjoram, basil, and tarragon.
Because so few beets were available, this week’s version was not as colorful as a real salade à la d’Argenson is supposed to be. If you follow Julia’s recipe, the result is a brilliant purple-red. I find it very appealing, and it is delicious. But you should be aware that some people either don’t care for beets or think the Day-Glo magenta comes from food coloring, and they won’t touch it. I’ve taken this salad to first to a church social and later to a potluck gathering of people whose tastes I thought would be more urbane, only to come home with a whole bowl of uneaten salad…so, don’t try to feed it to strangers! 😉
I’d stopped secreting a copyright notice in the body copy of my posts, because the splogging of my site had slowed down enough to make that not worth the trouble. Besides, most of these chuckleheads simply steal the first few words and then insert a link back to my site, which tends to up one’s page rank, stupidly enough.
But here’s a real, unvarnished word thief: http://johnjtarthur.net
This low-life is stealing my articles and publishing them as his own, amid garlands of advertising. It’s now more than just a matter of principle: he’s stealing revenue that I sorely need because of the coming layoff.
Will you please go to this site right here and enter a complaint about the thefts shown at these URLs:
On some of these, he’s contrived to make the pingbacks go to older posts that have nothing to do with the post he stole, so obviously he knows he’s violating my copyright and AdSense policy and is trying to hide it.
When you get to the AdSense support site, click on “Report a Policy Violation.” Then follow the steps. Enter the johntarther.net homepage URL where it asks for the name of the offending site, and then copy & paste the URLs of the post he stole from Funny about Money and put those into the box to report the specific offense.
If you would like to report the specific FaM pages he has ripped off, they are as follows:
Thanks for your help. AdSense may send you a reply saying you have to jump through other hoops, but I’ve been told that Google actually will act on complaints sent through their report-a-violation site without correspondents having to take further action.
As McArdle puts it, people who declare serial bankruptcy “have very different financial profiles from the average American—less savings, more debt. When an adverse event occurs, they have no margin for error.”
It’s hard to argue with this logic. While there’s no question that some people fall into the financial tar pits through no fault of their own—catastrophic health problems in a country that provides little or no reliable health care coverage being a major cause—I’ve known several people who have brought themselves to the brink of homelessness. By and large they do it with behavior that is overtly self-destructive, so much so one wonders if it’s a strategy to attract attention and sympathy.
Some people see the profligacy allegedly modeled by Andrews’s wife, Patty Barreiro, as a moral failing. I don’t think so. In my experience, it’s a pathology: a mental illness that needs to be treated with therapy and medication. If you look at the way the sufferers behave, you see a pattern, one they seem to be unaware of:
• a series of self-destructive decisions; • self-destructive behavior that continues for years; • inability to recognize or pull out of self-destructive behavior; • inability to distinguish between self-indulgence and practical need; • a tendency to set up scenarios that naturally lead to one’s own victimization; • a flair for choreographing real-life melodrama; • appeals for sympathy and help to family and friends, often centering on a specific “target” individual.
Living beyond one’s means is self-destructive; it naturally leads to financial melt-down. Self-destructive behavior is pathological behavior: it’s a symptom of mental illness, not a moral failing. People who experience serial bankruptcies are telling us they’re suffering from mental disorder.
One woman I’m thinking of exhibits an extravagant pattern of feckless financial behavior. When you look at the bigger picture of her life, though, you realize that her financial irresponsibility is part of an even larger pattern of consistent self-destructiveness.
• In her twenties, she marries the scion of a wealthy family. He appears, on the surface, to be a good choice, until you learn that he was thrown out of some expensive private schools for his wild behavior and drug abuse.
• She stays married to him despite his recreational cocaine use.
• She remains with him after he proposes that they engage in a f**k-fest with a group of swingers, which he thinks might be titillating.
• They charge up vast amounts on credit cards, much of it covered by his parents, who each transfer the $10,000 a year to their son and daughter-in-law, adding $40,000 a year to the son’s teaching salary. This makes the two appear to be more affluent than they are; they do not save the money—they spend it.
• When she begins to speak of leaving him, their home is vandalized and utterly destroyed. Their insurance company pays to gut out the interior and rebuild it, as well as replacing all the clothing and furnishing that were destroyed in the attack. Terrorized, she cleaves to her husband and drops all talk of divorce.
• Over time, she grows more unhappy in the marriage and again begins to mouth it around that she is going to leave him. This time she is kidnapped by a group of thugs, driven into the desert, tortured and terrorized. They cut off her ear, torch her car, and chase her into the bush.
• Although the police state they suspect the husband of complicity in this attack, she denies it and flees back to his arms.
• His father buys her a new car and also goes in with her husband to purchase an outrageously expensive house, far beyond the couple’s means.
• Despite increasingly bitter and dangerous marital discord, she begins to have children by her husband. She accuses him of raping her but remains with him.
• After the second baby is born, the husband states unequivocally that he wants to stop having children. She wants another child. So, she lies to him, telling him she’s on the pill, and deliberately gets pregnant again.
• Furious, the husband rejects the third child, refusing to have anything to do with his second son. She stays in the marriage despite increasingly abusive treatment and constant discord.
• The husband takes the two favored children on a spring-break student trip he is supervising for his school. While he is gone, an arsonist breaks into the expensive home as the young woman sleeps with the toddler in her bed with her. He douses most of the house with gasoline, sets up gasoline bombs in the hallway outside the bedrooms, and torches the place. She and the child escape through French doors in the bedroom. The house is a total loss.
• Despite the unprovable suspicion that the husband had something to do with this second assault and evident attempt to kill her and his unwanted offspring, she remains in the marriage. The insurer rebuilds the house and then cancels the couple’s coverage.
• As time passes, the old man becomes disenchanted with the son’s irresponsible behavior and conceives a violent dislike for the young woman; he cuts them off, leaving them with enormous house payments.
• She finishes a degree in nursing, and so the two manage to cover the house payments on their combined salary—just. They continue to spend well beyond their means, racking up thousands on credit cards. They never seem to think of selling the house, which before the bubble was worth well over $600,000; when this is suggested to her, she insists they need the space for their three children.
• By now the two hate each other but stubbornly remain together.
• He installs a camera in one of the home’s showers, with which he videotapes the couple’s teen-aged babysitter in the nude. She finds the tape and confronts him, but still remains in the marriage.
• She announces she has kidney cancer and says she is being treated for it in another city. She goes through an elaborate charade that includes cutting off her hair and claiming to undergo chemotherapy and radiation therapy, to which she commutes by automobile. Amazingly, those closest to her seem to buy this story, even though she’s climbing mountains in a local desert park. Not until her sister comes into town, summoned to say goodbye to her, does the whistle get blown: the sister, who has worked for years in medical offices and herself is training to be a nurse, tells their father that there’s no way the woman has cancer. Subsequently, she undergoes a miraculous remission.
• She picks up a sh*thead in a bar and begins a passionate affair, going so far as to move her bed into the guy’s house. Still, she makes no move to divorce the husband and continues to live in their house.
• She gets pregnant by the boyfriend. This man has shown no inclination to support his other illegitimate child, and he now takes up with another woman.
• She refuses to terminate the pregnancy. She returns to the husband and demands that he support her paramour’s child.
• They continue to spend money on expensive vacations and vehicles. Behind her husband’s back, she buys a Toyota Sienna (a $30,000 van), financing it on the strength of her own salary.
• They declare bankruptcy. They do this minutes after the law is changed in favor of creditors. As a result, they are forced to sell the house.
• That notwithstanding, after the proceedings end the first thing they do is spend three weeks vacationing in San Diego!
• When they finally divorce, they go at each other tooth and nail. He, of course, has bottomless pockets—the old man is now dead; the widowed mother is wealthy in her own right and finances the most high-powered lawyers in town. They make a project of destroying the young woman. She fights back, hiring her own high-powered lawyers, who abandon her when she runs out of borrowing power to pay their fees.
• The issue of the illicit filming of nubile young girls comes up in court; through the machinations of her lawyers, it is brought to the attention of the school board, so that the husband is fired from his high-school teaching job. Now the kids have no health insurance. She is forced to take a salaried nursing job to obtain health insurance, leaving her higher-paid contract nursing work.
• She rents a series of amazingly expensive houses, one of them on an artificial lake, each of which costs well over $2,000 a month. When advised that she needs to seek more modest housing, she insists that she needs lots of room to accommodate the four kids. She is evicted from these, one by one. She buys a car, which is repossessed when she defaults on the payments; to take the car, the repo man breaks down the garage door at the rental house where she’s living.
• When advised to raise some cash by selling some of the piles of stuff she has accrued, she refuses to do so.
• Her eldest son, now a young teenager, accuses his father of sexually abusing him. He walks from his home to a nearby police station to report this. Because of the rancor involved in the divorce, however, his accusation is disbelieved by the court, despite the fact that a prior judge had formally ordered the father to desist from his habit of sleeping in the children’s beds.
• She fails to file income tax returns. She claims she thought her husband was filing; in the last year of their marriage, he filed separately. She says she did not know he had done so. That notwithstanding, in following years she continues to file no income tax statements. The IRS inquires.
• As her credit rating drops into the sub-basement, she is forced to rent from a fly-by-night landlord who buys junk houses and rents them, unmaintained. She engages him in a fight over the decrepit structure. In the course of photographing some substandard thing she wants fixed, she steps out onto a second-floor balcony, camera in hand. The rotted balcony gives way under her weight. She falls through the floor to the pavement below, sustaining a life-threatening head injury.
• After she gets out of the ICU, she no longer can work because the resulting brain injury makes it impossible for her to remember doctors’ orders, to focus mentally, or to comprehend numbers.
• She finds a lawyer who will file suit against the negligent landlord, on a contingency basis. A month and a half goes by and he does nothing.
• She stays in the substandard house, unable to move or work. As her unpaid leave of absence from her job draws to a close, her health insurance runs out. She is is too incapacitated to deal with the complex issues of COBRA (and does not even know about the ARRA discount, of which her employer does not inform her) and is now helpless, with $5,000 to her name, debt beyond belief, and nowhere to turn.
• Her father tries to take over her finances, get her on disability, and enroll her in the state’s substandard answer to Medicaid. He learns the lawyer has done nothing and manages to hire another lawyer, who apparently is willing to do something for her.
• Faced with a lawsuit, the landlord defaults on the house’s mortgage and allows it to be foreclosed. She receives a notice from his lender informing her she must move out by the 16th of this month: that is 12 days from today.
• She has no credit for another rental; she has no place to live; and she is too ill to move. Her father lives in a two-bedroom house in a retirement community, has no desire to house her and her unruly brood (the older girl is so sexualized that the mother’s male friend refuses to be present in the same building with her without another adult present), and has tickets to leave town on the 16th.
It’s very likely she’ll end up in a homeless shelter, at least until her father can get back into town and get her into Section 8 housing, for which she undoubtedly qualifies. She will have to declare bankruptcy again—if she legally can.
While the most immediate cause of her troubles is profligate spending and failure to live within her means, you can see that this is just a small part of a larger pattern of self-destructive behavior. We have
• an unwise marriage to a man of questionable moral character; • persistence in the marriage through a series of abusive tactics and mutual misery; • apparent inability to evade abuse; • inability or unwillingness to flee a man who may have intended to harm or kill her; • deliberate spawning of children she could not support; • dependency on a hostile husband and, later, on an elderly parent well past the ability care for an adult child and a hoard of kids; • involvement with a second, even more undesirable man; • consistent spending beyond her means; • repeated cries for parental help to deal with the self-inflicted results of these acts.
Other bankrupts I’ve known exhibit similar patterns. Like Edmund Andrews, they lack the element of marital abuse, but also like him, they have financial problems resulting from a long series of decisions, many of them nonfinancial, that were at base self-destructive. They do things to harm themselves, and irrational money behavior is only one of those things.
Has our society suffered some kind of collective madness, with the widespread frenzy for buying outrageous houses, expensive cars, costly communication plans, and wildly expensive electronic gear? I doubt it. Most people are not in bankruptcy. By far the majority of Americans live reasonably in affordable homes; if they’re about to be foreclosed, it’s because of job losses or the crime of being an American with an expensive medical condition.
My point is that people who experience serial bankruptcy indeed are “different” from most people: they’re mentally ill, made vulnerable by some compulsion to harm themselves. This is not a moral failing.
The moral failing has been in the greed and recklessness fostered by an intellectually bankrupt political, religious, and social leadership. We are all suffering from an institutional collapse brought about by short-sighted, avaricious, and foolish leaders. That is separate from the individual stories of individual citizens. As usual, because of an institutional failure, the mentally ill and those who depend on them or who have to care for them suffer the most.
So I got up at 5:00 this morning to do a job I’ve been putting off: the community college district sent, to everyone who has applied for a job there, a notice that if you want to stay in the system you have to go back to the HR site and re-enter all the data you’d already uploaded. They’ve made some sort of change, and in doing so erased everyone’s data and required everyone to jump through their endless set of hoops again. This considerate move apparently comes to us courtesy of PeopleSoft, the bureaucracy’s bureaucracy.
It took an hour and forty minutes to complete the needless, pointless chore. I quit early because the system would not allow me to upload the hideous, endless “CT” document: a form in which you have to enter every…single…college…course you have ever taken. Lower-division, upper-division, and graduate. D’you know how many courses you end up taking in pursuit of a Ph.D.????? This thing consumed over two hours the first time I did it, and I will be damned if I’m going to waste another two hours doing it all over again.
In addition to typing each course number, course title, number of credits, semester, and year of every course you’ve ever taken in your life, you also have to turn in official transcripts, rendering the stupefyingly time-wasting list redundant.
Maybe they’ve decided to give up on that stunt. Probably not, though: they still have the blank form posted for you to download.
What excuse is there for PeopleSoft? Its metafunction evidently is demonstrate that employers do not give one thin damn about their workers: any company or institution that would offload HR and payroll tasks to an outfit that treats people this way cannot wish any good to its employees.
LOL! Someone once said that “bureaucracy exists to serve itself.” What on earth it’s serving remains to be seen!
Speaking of the GM bankruptcy, as individual dealerships crash and burn, some of them are taking customers with them. CBS MarketWatch reports that car dealers are failing to pay off loans on traded-in cars and often are not sending in payments for registration and taxes. This is usually not done with criminal intent but happens because the dealer’s creditors freeze its funds as its cash flow stops. Understandable, but it doesn’t change the fact that consumers are left holding the bag.
If you’re buying a car through a dealership, you need to be careful. A few things to consider:
• Don’t buy a car now unless you absolutely must. If the purchase is in any way optional, delay it until the chaos afflicting the industry settles out.
• If you still owe on your present car, sell it privately rather than trading it in. This will allow you to pay off the loan yourself. Also, private sales usually bring a better price than trade-ins.
• Try to get the dealer to let you send payments for the taxes, title, and registration yourself.
• Purchase only the most reliable vehicle brands, such as Honda and Toyota. There’s some question whether state lemon laws will apply after a dealer closes, making purchases of less reliable vehicles even riskier.
• Be aware that when a used car dealer buys new vehicles wholesale, the warranty starts running at the time the dealer buys the car, not at the time you buy it. Thus even though you’re the first owner, you’re still buying a “used” car without the full warranty.
• If you’re buying used, consider spending a little extra to go through a private sale. This will at least assure that you can pay the taxes, registration, and title yourself.
What a pain! My Sienna is ten years old. I’d planned to trade it in this year, but with my job ending in December, obviously I can’t do that. I never pay for cars on time, but sure can’t afford to pay in cash now…or any time in the predictable future. As a practical matter, I may never be able to afford another car, certainly not new. My plan now is to drive the gas-guzzler for at least another five years; ten if it’ll last that long.
After that? Well…in five years, the light rail will come right past my neighborhood. Maybe I won’t need a car after this one gives up the ghost.
So…General Motors declares bankruptcy (!), and the stock market heads for heaven. The Dow reached 8760 and ended at 8721, better than it’s done in quite a while.
Dang! Let’s have every corporation in the land declare bankruptcy and see if we can’t push the Dow back to 14,000.
😉
Well, of course, this is far from the first time. Many times in the past, the Dow has shot up on news of some megacorp’s massive layoffs. But General Motors? Geez…it’s like it IS America.
Of course, I haven’t bought an American car since the last piece of junk that took up near-permanent residence at the repair shop. As a matter of fact, I believe that was a GM product: an Olds. Before that, there was the amazingly lemony 1967 Ford Fairlane—luckily, we lived within driving distance of the Ford dealership, so I could stroll to the shop, pony up another chunk of cash, go to the grocery store, have the car towed directly back to the shop, and carry the groceries home in my arms.
Dunno about you, but though I feel just terrible about all the Americans who are losing their jobs and all the American entrepreneurs who are losing a major customer, I can’t work up a lot of pity for GM itself. This is, after all, the outfit that brought us vehicles shown to be unsafe at any speed. Does anyone recall the rolling bomb called the Corvair? These are the people who told us Americans were not interested in safety, did not want seat belts, did not want better gas mileage, and were such fools for style that it didn’t MATTER that a new vehicle could be expected to start falling apart after three years, because no American worth his salt would keep a car longer than that.
I personally got real tired of being insulted by GM’s leadership and put at risk by the company’s shoddy products. The first time I bought a Toyota—almost 40 years ago—marked the last time I wanted an American car.
Yep, I sure as hell did regret not being able to buy American. But never once have I ever regretted owning a Japanese car. I can’t say that for the Fords and Chevvies I’ve owned.
