Go see Enchanted April

Quick plug: We saw Enchanted April in West Hartford yesterday, and it was a lovely play—took me away from my troubles for a couple of hours and left me smiling. You have one more week to go see it, and you really should.

Logistics for the Park Road Playhouse: West Hartford is an easy day trip from Boston: 1 1/2 to 2 hours driving each way, depending on how fast you drive. The theater itself is a couple of minutes from exit 43 of I-84. Parking is free on the street, there’s an ice cream shop/diner next door, candy and sodas are $1 in the theater, seating is comfortable and spacious with an excellent rake (and only 4 rows), and I’d recommend asking for tickets in the B section, which is the center section of seating around the thrust stage. (We were as far as possible from those seats, though, and it was still fine. Wherever you sit, the thrust stage in combination with competent blocking guarantees that you’ll never have the best or worst seat for every scene.)

Disclaimer: I know an overly modest cast member in the production. If you also know him and have been dissuaded from going because he’s not the star of the show, please ignore his modesty and be assured that he has a perfectly fun role.

Plurals

The plural of anecdote is not data.

The plural of datum is not understanding.

The plural of teaching is not tenure.

The plural of graft is not representation.

The plural of test is not education.

Tax the bonuses at 100%

Tax the bonuses at 100%.

It’s really a simple solution. If Congress actually cared about the AIG bonuses and similar abuses, they could amend the income tax to tax those bonuses at 100% with no deductions allowed. Since most states would have their own taxes on top of that, you’d see any AIG employee with a brain declining the bonus, just as working people all across this country have been forced to accept lower salaries and lower benefits than their contracts call for.

Tax the bonuses at 100%.

Anything short of that is just politicians making noise while they continue to let the hyperwealthy finish destroying our entire economy. Cap the salaries, tax the bonuses at 100%, fire the executives, put the companies into receivership, and then tell me that you intend to tackle the significant problems like the 1.4 quadrillion dollar derivatives market.

The news of the bonuses has focused some anger on AIG. Maybe realizing that Congress is rolling over for it will redirect the anger where it will do some good. Tax the bonuses at 100%.

Form 1099-ZORK

In our income tax system, the IRS differentiates between refundable tax credits and non-refundable tax credits. This confuses many taxpayers (and worse, people giving advice to taxpayers), who believe that the distinction is related to refund checks from the IRS. When you file your income taxes, the IRS looks at a couple of different numbers: your total tax (A) and what you have paid (B). The amount you’ve paid includes any payments you’ve sent directly and federal income tax that your employer withheld from your paychecks. When B is larger than A, the IRS sends you a refund for the difference (B–A). As an example, suppose $4000 was withheld in federal taxes from your paychecks last year, and your total tax (as calculated on your 1040) is $3000. You’ll receive a refund check of $1000.

The difference between a refundable tax credit and a non-refundable tax credit is only related to your total tax (A). A refundable tax credit can reduce your total tax to less than 0, while a non-refundable tax credit cannot reduce your total tax to less than 0. Now suppose you have a tax credit of $5000 to add to the earlier example. If the tax credit is refundable, then it can reduce your total tax to –$2000 and you’ll receive a refund check of $6000 instead of $1000. If the tax credit is non-refundable, then it can only reduce your total tax to $0 and you’ll receive a refund check of $4000 instead of $1000. Even though the tax credit is called non-refundable, it still affects your refund check.

When a non-refundable tax credit can only be partly used because it’s greater than your total tax, the remainder that you didn’t use can often be carried forward to a future tax year. In the last example above, the $2000 that you didn’t get to use isn’t necessarily wasted, because you may be able to subtract that $2000 from next year’s total tax.

The tax system is full of these sorts of confusing terms: credit (reduction of taxes) vs. deduction (reduction of income on which taxes are calculated) is another one that many people get wrong, and the dollar difference can be huge. If your marginal tax rate is 15%, then a credit of $1000 is worth $1000 off your taxes while a deduction of $1000 is only worth $150 off your taxes.

I’ve always done my own income taxes as a business owner because I wanted to understand the tax implications of the decisions I have to make. It does add time, energy, and stress to the process of running a business, though. My financial position might be stronger if I let someone else deal with the taxes and I focused on trying to increase my income or reduce my expenses. Sadly, that reasoning is how our tax system got so impossible to understand. The taxpayer makes the sensible decision not to try to understand their own taxes. Once that happens, why bother to understand other people’s taxes? And if the public can’t intelligently participate in public discourse about our tax system, then why should legislators try to understand it?

I’m using both TaxCut and TurboTax in parallel this year, seeing where they agree and where they differ. Both programs give you a choice of answering questions in a friendly interview format or just entering information directly into tax forms and worksheets. Both programs strongly prefer that you follow the interview process. I’ve already run into one form in TurboTax that refuses to do any calculations and forces you to override every blank line in order to fill in numbers yourself. But if you do the interview for that form, then TurboTax is willing to fill in the form itself. TaxCut hates forms entry so much that you’re not even allowed to save your tax return while you’re entering information into a form.

Both programs present the same black box to the user if you try to figure out why the software is filling in particular numbers. TurboTax used to have a “show data source” feature which would let you trace back where a number on a tax form came from, but they decided to remove that feature a few years ago. (Bob Meighan, a VP at Intuit, says that nobody complained when they removed it, but they also removed any way for users to provide feedback.) If you select “override” for a number in TaxCut, the program then gives you four choices: Entry Info, Itemize, Goes To, and Comes From. The “Comes From” option sounds promising, but only tells you where the number came from if it was carried over from another form. For almost all lines where it should show you how the number was calculated or what worksheet the number came from, TaxCut says “This value is carried over or calculated based on the following (This entry is not carried here from another form)”. The “Goes To” option says “This entry is not carried to another form” and leads off with “Dummy”. Gee, sorry for asking.



I’m in the intensive tax period where I spend almost every waking minute on taxes for several days straight. I turned down joining a full-day Diplomacy game recently because I tend to think that I can’t focus on a game for that length of time, but it can’t really be harder than this annual Tax Game invitational. January is the collectible card game phase when I trade 1099-INTs, 1099-MISCs, 1098s, and W-2s, and occasionally find the rare MA 1099-HC. Now I’m wandering the maze of twisty little tax forms, all alike. And I’m pretty sure that if TaxCut calls me a dummy one more time, one of us is going to be killed by a grue.

Salmon masala

Chop two large yellow onions, cook in oil until partly caramelized. At the start of cooking the onions, add salt, garam masala, black pepper, cayenne, garam masala, balti seasoning, cardamom, cumin, a few fennel seeds, nutmeg, and more garam masala. Lightly toast 1/2 cup cashews. When onions are transluscent, add 2 cloves minced garlic, cashews, and some more garam masala. (Our garam masala jar does not pour easily.)

Once onions are at the desired level of caramelization, add 1/2 cup each of plain yogurt and tomato sauce. If you use cream instead of yogurt, add lemon juice or a little vinegar for acidity. Stir together with the onions until heated and taste. You’ll probably decide you went too lightly on the spices and salt, so add more. If your tomato sauce is unsweetened, add a little honey. If you used too much cayenne, add yogurt and tomato sauce. When satisfied, take the sauce off the heat.

In a skillet, cook 1 pound skinned salmon fillet in oil with salt, garam masala, and dill. When almost done, bring sauce back to hot, stir in 1 large diced tomato, and remove from heat. If you got nice color on the salmon, put the salmon on a large platter and pour the sauce around it. If you started with (or ended with) small salmon pieces, mix the salmon into the sauce. Serve with rice and naan.

Busy can be good

Lisa and I had an eventful weekend. On Saturday afternoon we drove down to North Dartmouth, MA to hang out with a group of greyhounds, and then followed signs to Horseneck Beach State Reservation. We were not the only ones with the idea of watching the surf, picking up shells, and casting off our winter mindsets. We saw plenty of people there with their dogs, a couple of nice kites, and one powered paraglider taking off from the parking lot as we pulled in and landing shortly before we left.


Photo from Wikipedia

I had no idea that for less than the cost of a used car, you can buy a parasail, attach it to a harness/seat, strap a gasoline can and a giant industrial fan to your back, and go flying over local beaches. Maintenance shouldn’t be too expensive, but there are clearly also ongoing costs for fuel and psychotherapy.

We also baked brownies and 11 dozen assorted cookies for an arts council reception on Sunday. Most of the planning was done in the last couple of weeks, but we collectively pulled off a really lively and fun event for the council, many of our grant recipients for this year, and a number of state and local officials. The highlight was our retiring chairperson being presented with a state award that I had nominated her for. I’m sure that the people who took a chance on attending this year will be eager to come back next year.

Where’s that Bat Signal app?

We all have tasks that don’t get done because we don’t have the skills or strength or knowledge or motivation. At least, I suspect I’m not the only one who runs into that. And some tasks are simply easier to tackle with many hands, such as unloading a moving truck or painting a house.

The current poll asks what you would like outside help with, in overly broad categories: Moving heavy objects (strength), Sorting papers (motivation), Electrical or plumbing (skills), Tech support (knowledge), Cooking or cleaning (motivation). I separated out sorting papers from cooking or cleaning because sorting papers is typically an infrequent intensive task, whereas cooking and cleaning are continuing obligations. Moving heavy objects and cleaning both usually benefit from many hands, but most of the others really only need one or two people who have the requisite knowledge or skills.

It's snowing again, so it must be time to make ice cream!

After a week of above freezing weather than finally finished off the huge mound of snow the plows piled onto our sidewalk, it's snowing again. The predictions seem to range from 6 to 12 inches by the time it stops tomorrow night. This has been a hard winter for us: 2 full months of non-stop snow cover may seem like nothing in some areas of the country, it's pretty unusual here.

Rather than rushing out for french toast ingredients, how about making lemon ice cream as a way to pretend that its actually summer?

This recipe was originally for lime rather than lemon, but I've used it for a variety of citrus-flavored frozen treats.


Lemon Frozen Yogurt (adapted from Lucy's Cookbook)
1/3 cup fresh lemon juice (or lime, orange requires more juice)
1/2 cup honey
pinch of salt
2.5 cups yogurt

Mix together lemon juice, honey, and salt. When honey is dissolved, mix in the yogurt. Assuming everything was cold to start with, this can go directly into your ice-cream maker.

Note: if you want to use sugar instead of honey, combine 2/3 cups sugar with lemon juice and heat until sugar dissolves. Cool before continuing.

Note 2: You might want to peel off the zest of your lemons with a vegetable peeler. You can chop it up and add it to your frozen yogurt, or you can freeze it for use in another recipe.

Industry standards

Before my meeting with a book printer’s sales rep yesterday, I reviewed a couple of pages I wrote back in 2001 about our manufacturing standards. Many aspects of book production have changed since then. The physical end product is still familiar, though, and I was pleased that none of what I wrote needed to be updated. One explanatory paragraph in particular should never need to be changed:

Are our standards higher than industry standards?

“Industry standards” is a terrible phrase, and seems to be most often used by printers who claim to have “unsurpassed quality” and are then trying to excuse clearly sloppy work. The only standards we care about are our standards and our printer’s standards, both of which must be equally high in order for us to receive books we can use. While we know from experience that some printers and publishers have much lower standards, we also know from our own experience and from conversations with many other publishers that our quality standards are not unusual.

I’ve always hated hearing the argument from any business or institution that they are cutting corners simply because their peers are also. The fact that someone has a lower standard is never a sufficient reason to lower yours. After almost 15 years in my chosen profession, I’m glad I can still do business with people who are not in a race to the bottom.

Ontogeny capitulates again

Paul Spinrad, writing on Boing Boing:

When my friend John started going to the Bronx High School of Science, he was surprised to find that it contained the same cliques that his former, neighborhood school had had—the jocks, the geeks, etc. He figured that because the student body consisted of all the geeks taken from other schools, he would only find geeks there. But no—and when he got to know the school’s Chess Team, the geeks among geeks, he saw that they paralleled the same divisions.

Humans and human groupings always seem to break down into the same archetypes, and this also seems to happen at all levels of granularity, from national character to impulses within an individual.

From id, ego, superego to legislative, executive, judicial, we categorize what we see into our mental models. Never doubt that a single explanatory model can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.

Tasks all done, let’s have pie

Thank you all for voting and commenting on my to do lists over the past week. I dutifully followed through on the leading tasks, and I’m extremely glad to have them done. The house is safer, my car is safer, my piano will be tuned on Tuesday morning, and the books will be read by new people.

I learned that the comments had more impact on my thinking than the votes, and the simple act of making the lists public spurred me to finish a few tasks immediately. The process of trying to balance various tasks to put in the poll forced me to think through which tasks were feasible and how to break some of them into discrete steps, which the GTD system encourages. I feel like it was a successful experiment.

In celebration, there’s currently a poll on what lemon recipe Lisa should post next.

Don't Forget the Potatoes!

Even before I starting following the Specific Carbohydrate Diet, I didn't cook potatoes very often. Now, I don't eat potatoes at all, but for reasons I can't fully explain, I chose not to add them to the "never" list for our Boston Organics deliveries. So every couple of weeks a potato or two might appear on our porch along with much produce I'm more likely to eat.

We had company coming for dinner, and the existence of potatoes and lemons in my pantry reminded me of an old favorite. I have no idea where I copied this recipe from, but I know that I was introduced to Greek Potatoes by my college friend Marianne who taught me a great deal about cooking flavorful food. So even though I couldn't eat them, digging up this recipe reminded me of fun times in Ann Arbor in my first post-college apartment.

Greek Potatoes

If cooking ever sets off your smoke detectors, this recipe is certain to make your house noisy unless you do whatever is necessary to avoid that. Be sure that you reinstall batteries or uncover them before you sit down to dinner!

6 medium potatoes, peeled, chopped into approximately 1-inch cubes
1/2 cup fresh lemon juice (about 2.5 lemons---just make it 3)
1/3 cup vegetable oil
1 tbsp olive oil
2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp black pepper
1.5 tsp dried oregano
3 cups hot water
(parsley for garnish, if you're so inclined)

Toss together the potato, lemon, oils, spices and garlic in a deep flat pan. (I used a deep cookie sheet when I used to make this. This time I used a roasting pan, which had a decided advantage in not spilling over the edge.) Add water. Bake uncovered 1.5 hours at 475°. Stir every 20 minutes, adding more water as needed to prevent sticking. Don't let them burn! In the last 15-20 minutes, let the water evaporate. Garnish with parsley.

A play for Caryl Churchill

Tell her she’s wrong.
Tell her she’s lying to people.
Tell her she doesn’t know our history.
Don’t tell her that.
Don’t pay attention to her. It’s what she wants.
Tell her we’re not paying attention to her.
Don’t tell her that.
Don’t frighten her.
Don’t tell her about the attacks that will happen.
Tell her about the attacks that will happen.
Tell her about the graffiti saying “Kill Jews.”
Tell her that we’ll be assaulted in the streets, in our shops.
Tell her that they’ll set fire to our synagogues.
Tell her it will happen right here in London.
Tell her it’s already happening.
Tell her to look around, to read the news.
Don’t tell her to read the news. She only sees what she wants to see.
Tell her we’ll read the news together.
Tell her this: 250 assaults on Jewish targets in the UK in the past 6 weeks.
Tell her she’s encouraging them.
Don’t tell her that.
Tell her it’s not her fault.
Tell her she’s a special girl.
Tell her she’s famous.
Tell her everyone loves her.
Tell her people hate hearing the truth.
Don’t tell her to think truth, not truth.
Don’t frighten her.
Tell her we don’t want to talk about it.
Tell her we want to talk about it, as long as we talk honestly.
Tell her she has to be honest too.
Tell her she’s not outside history.
Tell her nobody is outside history.
Tell her she has to be honest.
Tell her that words have power.
Tell her that power is not truth.
Tell her that fear is not truth.
Don’t tell her anything.
Tell her anything to make her stop lying.
Tell her that her tongue will fall out.
Tell her that her pants will catch fire.
Tell her that words like hers set fires.
Tell her about the synagogue door.
Tell her we don’t want our synagogues to burn any more.
Tell her we don’t want anything to burn any more.
Tell her we want peace.
Tell her we offered land for peace.
Tell her we offered blood for peace.
Tell her we bleed, we’ve always bled.
Tell her to stop pricking us.
Don’t tell her that.
Don’t tell her about blood.
Tell her. Tell her about the blood that will be on her hands.
Tell her about Jerusalem.
Don’t tell her about Jerusalem. Tell her about London.
Tell her what she’s encouraging in London.
Tell her this is the worst it’s been in London in over 25 years.
Tell her about London. Tell her we’re being attacked in the streets.
Tell her we don’t want to be attacked in the theater too.
Tell her that’s not the way to find peace.
Don’t tell her about peace. She doesn’t want peace.
Don’t tell her anything from us. She doesn’t want to hear anything from us.
Tell her something.
Tell her silence equals death.
Tell her that doesn’t mean that all words are life.
Don’t tell her that.
Don’t frighten her.

GTD progress

The poll wasn’t working for a good bit of yesterday, but installing GFCIs and replacing tires ended up tied. I’ve just finished installing both GFCIs. (I should perhaps clarify that these random tasks are just the optional bits of life that don’t have the same priority level as work or laundry, and the only reason that I haven’t prioritized the tires is that I have another car I could switch to.)

The new task list options: (a) Test surround sound; (b) Schedule a piano tuning; (c) Bake cookies; (d) Clean up back deck.

I’ve long wanted surround sound, and finally have an appropriate receiver and speakers. I need to figure out at some point how that all gets hooked up, so I can order the rights set of cables and wires. The piano tuning involves finding a new piano tuner, since my previous one seems to have retired. The cookies would be for an event that my arts council may be hosting soon (and perhaps for a story reading we’re hosting next week), and cleaning up the back deck is so I can get back to grilling as spring arrives.

Forget about it

If you could take a pill that would permanently reduce the emotional impact of a stressful memory without losing the factual recall, would you want to?

Beta blockers may let you do that: take a pill, deliberately recall the stressful memory, and let the brain rewire the memory a bit to permanently reduce the emotional impact. Repeat as needed, or at least that’s the theory. Researchers are currently testing it with PTSD patients and touting it in the news.

We have natural healing processes that can, when they are working well, help us gradually cope with traumatic experiences. PTSD is typically defined as a set of symptoms that are interfering with a patient’s life more than a year after the initial trauma. Does that mean we should accept being put in a state of fear and anger when recalling a traumatic event for anything up to a year, just because that’s been considered a normal response? Would you rather suppress the fear and anger after a month? After a week? After a couple of hours?

If this became a common treatment, I’m sure people would have widely variable threshholds for treatment just like we do with many other problems, and it seems unlikely to create an affectless society. But before seeking treatment myself, I’d be really concerned what other emotional impacts this might suppress aside from fear and anger. Sit here, take this pill, and for the next several hours try not to think about any of your joyful or spiritually meaningful memories whose emotional impact you don’t want to lose.

For a deeper look, I strongly recommend reading “Better” Memories? The Promise and Perils of Pharmacological Interventions, a 2003 staff working paper from the President’s Council on Bioethics.