Category: Uncategorized

from the Santa Cruz Sentinel, Opinion page, April 8, 2008
[bold added by Cameron Jackson, 831 688-6002]

“Thank you for calling attention to the large Santa Cruz County administrative pay increases reported in the Sunday, April 5 edition. With the hue and cry hyped nationally over unearned bonuses of AIG and others, it is easy to not see the microcosm happening locally. A 27 percent increase of a $200,000 plus salary (exclusive of the generous benefits package) is reminiscent of the millions of “bonuses” awarded to those on Wall Street. A similiar reporting that at least two assistants earned more than $200,000 “with overtime” is equally disturbing. Many small business owners in the county are working long hours of “overtime” just to stay afloat. If overtime hours are needed by county executives in these challenging times, they should be worked without extra compensation just as the majority of county’s taxpayers do to survive (or not). With businesses closing, retiree’s benefits eroding by 40 percent or more and large layoffs taking place, it is time to “reset” the economy to a more fair and equitable basis. Time magazine’s cover story last week argues that such a reset would likely be good for the country, and it can be argued that a similiar rest is past due here at home.”
Dale Brideenbaugh, Aptos

Miss Saigon
6th & Mission

Pros: Clean place, friendly people
Cons: Everything else

Price: $7.94 (main and a glass of water with a slice of cucumber in it)
Style: Traditional Vietnamese in a modern setting

Overall grade: F

Should you happen to have just recently finished your session with a prostitute in one of the local hourly motels this might just be the lunch spot for you. Upon entering, the smell of bleach instantly burns your eyes, which might or might not be the reason why it’s about the only place in the neighborhood that has clean windows. But hey, you needed the disinfecting anyway. A friendly hostess seated me at one of the many empty tables came over. (All the tables were all empty, but I assumed that was because it was early).

The menu had all the staples of traditional Vietnamese restaurants and I opted for a pork and rice dish, Thit heo ram man (“Sliced pork stir fried in hot chilli, garlic sauce” according to the translation). I will admit that whatever arrived about 90 seconds later was sliced, but beyond that I have my doubts. It was somewhat of a sticky sweet taste maybe close to what melted fly paper tastes like. The pork (assuming it was pork, or even meat) had clearly been cooked the day (or week) before a had just then been reheated, somewhat, and probably in a microwave

The final straw came when on the third bite I found something that looked strikingly like the tail end of a cricket. I was later assured that it was part of an “onion”, but I somehow felt the need to head to the nearest (or maybe not exactly the nearest) pharmacy to self medicate. All in all, should you happen to end up in or around this restaurant, save your $8, walk half a block and buy a crack rock; you’ll thank me later.
—

Muracci’s Japanese Curry & Grill

Style: Japanese Curry and Grill says it all (more curry than grill)

Total cost: $8.21 (main + free water)

Plus: different from the norm, made fresh when you order, decent portions
Minus: a bit on the slow side, could be a total pain to deal with when busy, no beer, limited seating

Overall grade: B+

All in all a decent place.

Tiny little hole in the wall with a Japanese cartoon face outside bigger than the actual interior. Staff is friendly and easy to deal with but the actual process of how things are supposed to work in terms of ordering vs. receiving is a be lacking in detail.

Obviously a mom and pop shop, which is always nice to support. Also good to go to a Japanese restaurant actually run by Japanese.

Has a limited number of counter stools to sit at though doing so could be annoying since the place is so small it hardly has room enough for people to both arrive and leave.

Definitely a popular spot for the local office crowd, but certainly being brought back to the desk to torment their co-workers with the ever zesty smell of curry in the afternoon. Curry is certainly the norm, but went with the Katsu Don (image attached) which consists of a breaded pork cutlet deep fried and then placed on top of rice with a fried egg on top of that.

Definitely different from the normal sandwich fare, but not something to be done on a daily basis. At $7.50 plus the new 9.5% tax it hits at the higher end of the price range. Not a bad price, but not a stampede a Walmart employee deal either.

Decent amount of pork and about two pounds of rice, so you could certainly use a walk to the Golden Gate Bridge afterwards; too bad everyone is no doubt stuck staring at a spreadsheet in a rice induced coma instead.

review by JJ

Are people abandoming boats in the Monterey Bay area? Let us know. If so, let’s find happy homes for those boats!! Cameorn Jackson cameronjacks@gmail.com See below story.

MOUNT PLEASANT, S.C. — Boat owners are abandoning ship

Brett Flashnick for The New York Times
Gary Santos, a Mount Pleasant, S.C., councilman, checks a state notice on a forsaken sailboat.
They often sandpaper over the names and file off the registry numbers, doing their best to render the boats, and themselves, untraceable. Then they casually ditch the vessels in the middle of busy harbors, beach them at low tide on the banks of creeks or occasionally scuttle them outright.

The bad economy is creating a flotilla of forsaken boats. While there is no national census of abandoned boats, officials in coastal states are worried the problem will only grow worse as unemployment and financial stress continue to rise. Several states are even drafting laws against derelicts and say they are aggressively starting to pursue delinquent owners.

“Our waters have become dumping grounds,” said Maj. Paul R. Ouellette of the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation Commission. “It’s got to the point where something has to be done.”

Derelict boats are environmental and navigational hazards, leaking toxins and posing obstacles for other craft, especially at night. Thieves plunder them for scrap metal. In a storm, these runabouts and sailboats, cruisers and houseboats can break free or break up, causing havoc.

Some of those disposing of their boats are in the same bind as overstretched homeowners: they face steep payments on an asset that is diminishing in value and decide not to continue. They either default on the debt or take bolder measures.

Marina and maritime officials around the country say they believe, however, that most of the abandoned vessels cluttering their waters are fully paid for. They are expensive-to-maintain toys that have lost their appeal.

The owners cannot sell them, because the secondhand market is overwhelmed. They cannot afford to spend hundreds of dollars a month mooring and maintaining them. And they do not have the thousands of dollars required to properly dispose of them.

When Brian A. Lewis of Seattle tried to sell his boat, Jubilee, no one would pay his asking price of $28,500. Mr. Lewis told the police that maintaining the boat caused “extreme anxiety,” which led him to him drill a two-inch hole in Jubilee’s hull last March.

The boat sank in Puget Sound, and Mr. Lewis told his insurance company it was an accident. His scheme came undone when the state, seeking to prevent environmental damage, raised Jubilee. Mr. Lewis pleaded guilty last week to insurance fraud.

While there are no reliable national statistics on boating fraud, Todd Schwede, an insurance investigator in San Diego, said the number of suspicious cases he was handling had roughly tripled in the last year, to around 70.

In many cases, he said, the boater is following this logic: “I am overinsured on this boat. If I make it go away so no one will find it, the insurance company will give me enough to cover the debt and I’ll make something on the deal as well.”

Lt. David Dipre, who coordinates Florida’s derelict vessel program, said the handful of owners he had managed to track down were guilty more of negligence than fraud. “They say, ‘I had a dream of sailing around the world, I just never got around to it.’ Then they have some bad times and they leave it to someone else to clean up the mess,” Lieutenant Dipre said.

Florida officials say they are moving more aggressively to track down owners and are also starting to unclog the local inlets, harbors, swamps and rivers. The state appropriated funds to remove 118 derelicts this summer, up from only a handful last year.

In South Carolina, four government investigators started canvassing the state’s waterways in January. They quickly identified 150 likely derelicts.

“There are a lot more than we thought there would be,” said Lt. Robert McCullough of the state Department of Natural Resources. “There were a few boats that have always been there, and now all of a sudden they’ve added up and added up.”

In January, it became illegal in South Carolina to abandon a boat on a public waterway. Violators can be fined $5,000 and jailed for 30 days.

“We never needed a law before,” said Gary Santos, a Mount Pleasant councilman.

Emod Istvánmajor, Hungary
Mangalitsa pigs.

Tamas Dezso for The New York Times
IN THE UNITED STATES, TOO Juan Vicente Olmos Llorente, above, takes the meat of curly-haired Hungarian Mangalitsa pigs and finishes it in Spain.
LIKE style on the runway, style for pigs is changeable. With their abundant fat, the curly-haired Mangalitsa pigs of Hungary were all the rage a century ago. But as time went on, they became has-beens.

Now that succulent pork is back in fashion, the Mangalitsa — saved from near extinction on a farm here at the edge of Hungary’s bleak and barren Great Plain — are making a comeback.

Most of those raised here become ham and other cured meats in Spain. But Mangalitsas are also being raised at farms in the United States for chefs who pay as much as 40 percent more for them than for Berkshires, another elite breed.

Last Wednesday April Bloomfield at the Spotted Pig in Greenwich Village served the belly and trotters of a Mangalitsa/Berkshire crossbreed with Agen prunes for $32. (She hopes to have more in two to three weeks.)

“When I tasted this pig,” Ms. Bloomfield said of the Mangalitsa, “it took me back to my grandmother’s kitchen on a Sunday afternoon, windows steaming from the roasting pork in the oven. Back then pork tasted as it should: like a pig. This pork has that same authentic taste.”

Devin Knell, executive sous-chef at the French Laundry, confits the belly of the Mangalitsa (pronounced MAHN-ga-leet-za); roasts the liver, kidneys, and chops, and poaches the saddle sous vide with a garlic mousse.

“Unlike workaday pork,” Mr. Knell said, “Mangalitsa is marbled, and the fat dissolves on your tongue — it’s softer and creamier, akin to Wagyu beef.”

George Faison, an owner of the New York City specialty meats company DeBragga and Spitler, will start selling chefs pork from Mangalitsas fattened on the West Coast this summer. He said the fat was luscious, more like that of duck than pork. Recalling a tasting for chefs last fall, he said, “The belly meat was unctuous, but it was the loin meat that really impressed me.”

Mosefund Farm in Branchville, N.J., sells Mangalitsa pork to restaurants, including the Spotted Pig, for $10 to $11 a pound, about $3 a pound more than what Berkshire pork costs. Ms. Bloomfield said Mosefund sells the Berkshire crossbreed for $7.99 pound.

Mangalitsas were bred for their lard on the Hungarian farms of Archduke Joseph in the 1830s. Herds shrank with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire after World War I and declined further with the introduction of fast-growing white pigs and cheaper, higher quality vegetable oils after World War II.

But Peter Toth, a Hungarian animal geneticist, did not want this Hapsburg legacy to be lost. He has worked to save the pigs here on a farm with buildings of whitewashed stone, with roofs of thick thatch. Dimly lighted wooden pens filled with straw shelter piglets and nursing sows. Breeding boars and sows live in pens open at one end. On a tour of the farm, 100 miles east of Budapest, a bitter wind blew out of the Carpathian foothills just visible to the east.

Their feed is a mix of barley, wheat, wheat bran, alfalfa, and sunflower seeds, but unlike the feed on factory farms, little corn and nothing with soy.

“When Communism collapsed,” Mr. Toth said, “the state farms that served as the last gene banks also collapsed. It was a total anarchy in the country. When I started to save Mangalitsas, to search for them in 1991, I found only 198 purebred pigs in the country. Sometimes, I would rescue the pigs right from the slaughterhouse.”

Today his company, Olmos and Toth, in addition to maintaining breeding stock, fattens some 8,000 pigs and oversees the production of 12,000 more on farms in the surrounding regions.

Because these pigs can cost 40 percent more to raise, Hungarians, who earn less than most Europeans, use them mostly to make lard and sausages.

“The Mangalitsa — many problems!” Mr. Toth said. “We must kill them at 140 kilos” — about 300 pounds — “to make sure that the marbling is maximized and the meat the best quality. If you kill it at 80 kilos” — 176 pounds, when industrially produced pigs are slaughtered — “you won’t have marbled meat. You need time, more than one year, when a normal pig takes five months to raise.”

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