This may sound corny...

I can't believe I haven't mentioned how the rush to make corn into fuel (and subsidizing same) has roiled the world with UC. Poor Mexicans can't get cheap tortillas. Somehow milk and egg prices are affected. Yes, well, those animals that we take from eat something. How surprising. And now with corn (it's SUV fuel!) prices rising there is a shortage so ethanol plants don't have raw materials. None of this should have been unexpected. But someone folks feign surprise.

So when you are standing at the pump filling your SUV with fuel and you see that the fuel might be 10% Ethanol, remember: that's someone's tortilla.

All Organ Meat Meal

We had a delicious '97 Burgundy Grand Cru and a 1986 Silver Oak Napa Cabernet last night in celebration of a friend's birthday. This is my foie gras with one succulent bite of the liver already gone so you can see how pink and beautiful it is. Yum. I had sweetbreads for my main course. A most politically incorrect meal. The sweetbreads were probably once the thymus gland of a young calf (dare I say the veal word?).

This delicious meal was at a venerable Austin restaurant whose name will not be revealed here because vandals have the handle as Dylan said. Although the vandals' attack on another restaurant had the effect of costing them in clean-up but making the foie gras sell out halfway through the evening. Go figure. As we are constantly pointing out in this space: things don't always happen like you expect.

I'm sure this meal is supposed to be damning my health, too. I buttered several small rolls to eat along with my two dishes, too.

Birthday celebrations. Hoping for many more. And we eat and drink. But is it really an accident that my most gourmet-minded, organ-meat-eating, vintage-wine-drinking friends are the ones soldiering on with me in the greatest numbers?

Perhaps the biggest unintended consequence of the way I live my life is that it is becoming a sort of experiment. My 90-year-old dad went along last night. He didn't drink too much. He had steak. He told jokes.

Revenge for Not Cleaning Your Plate

[First...apologies for stealing this picture. These are actually clever lamps from this company.] But I've been thinking about all those "there are people starving in China" admonitions we got from our mothers who wanted us to join the clean plate club. Now, Chinese factories are poisoning their food and ours (and our pets'). There's some justice in that.

The Politics of Eating

Eating is getting more and more fraught with politics all the time. There is the organic food movement. Then there are the people who tell you that it needs to come from close to home to save fuel costs. Of course, there are the people who think foie gras is cruelly obtained and then those who would have you not kill animals at all.

Restaurants are eschewing bottled water because of the high cost of containers and shipping and going so far as to filter tap water and infuse water with carbon dioxide for the sparkling drinkers.

Here in Austin, there are those who are up in arms that the owners of Las Manitas got a forgivable loan to move their restaurant out of leased space. (Particularly irate is the barbecue joint owner whose place burned down when, with a fire station within spitting distance, the dispatcher decided that the 911 caller couldn't be serious..."they must just be smoking some meat." He got no help from the city in rebuilding his business even though, as a taxpayer, he should have surely had some expectation of fire protection.) Right on the Avenue (Congress Avenue) we will have two politically fraught choices when we move downtown (assuming they both last). Las Manitas ("Avenue Cafe") with their undeserved boost from the city and Jezebel, proudly serving foie gras...even for dessert. I've made my choice. I used to dine at Las Manitas occasionally and encouraged outlanders to try it for the local flavor and possible celebrity sighting. No more. I'll be eating foie gras down the street, even if I have to elbow some protesters.

I'm wondering, too, about the unintended consequences of the other movements. Where will the displaced long distance truckers and water bottling plant employees get jobs? While I try to buy locally made groceries from time to time, will sales of some things be adversely affected? Long term these movements do good. With the exception of the foie gras thing. I just wish they force fed ducks nearer to home. (Methinks they use ducks, not geese, these days. At least in the U.S.)

Tuna, I think, is the subject of much controversy, too. We are fishing them into extinction or something. But doesn't that plate of seared tuna look good? And if we are to truly eat locally wouldn't that really limit the fish we'd have in Central Texas? I love fish. It's supposed to be good for me. Locally we might get some catfish. A questionable bottom feeder that seems best fried.

Yeah. Eating has consequences. And it's political. But I think perhaps unintended consequences abound.

Kicking off This Blog

Humans like to think that their actions are carefully calculated to elicit certain results. And that if they are strong and brave and righteous that their outcomes will be as they wish. However, there is something to that old saw about Hell (or the road thereto) being paved with good intentions.

The world spins through space, all chaos begetting chaos (and evolution), and we ride along, a species full of ideas about steering our ship.

Whenever I see something that reminds me of this state of affairs I think "that belongs in The Journal of Unintended Consequences." I don't believe there is such a journal. You know, after a quick search on a few search engines, I couldn't find such a journal, scientific, humorous or whatever. There is another blog right here on blogger that seems pitched at this concept. I discovered it while trying to get a blogspot URL for this satellite journal. This journal is called "Unintended Consequences" and seems to be pitched at collecting links. While I'll do that, too, I hope in this space to collect enough info so you can simply read each entry, without following links, and say to yourself "yeah, weird outcome" or "this woman is insane to draw that conclusion."

A few newspaper articles I've read in the last few days really cried out for inclusion in this journal. (Note: links may require you to login to a site to obtain more info. I read the old-fashioned paper papers myself.)

• In Nepal, conservationists have opened a 'café' to serve safe food to vultures who were endangered by feeding on dead cattle that had been treated with a drug that helped the cattle thrive and presumably poisoned people not at all or more slowly. (The article in The New York Times mentions that the drug is banned in India and Nepal but that the ban is widely ignored.)
• The Wall Street Journal reports that blind pedestrians want hybrid cars to emit a sound when turned on. Now, I've noticed sighted pedestrians in parking lots who have not heard my car coming along. It's not a hybrid. But it is a Ultra Low Emission Honda Civic. And it is quiet. Ditto our new Honda Accord. Take away something unpleasant (pollution, noise and otherwise) and you take away something that grounds folks to the danger of speeding cars.
• Out in San Francisco, there is a old, historic armory building. Naturally the heritage-minded don't want the thing knocked down or transformed. So someone is buying the property for adult movie-making. You know they sort of like the bare, castle- and dungeon-like appearance of the place. Folks are protesting. Maybe some of the same folks who would protest if someone wanted to level it and create condos. To me, this has the ring of unintended consequences.

I'll bet, if you read this far, you are starting to wonder (1) what this entry has to do with war (see labels); and (2) what it has to do with Tom Hanks. And for reading this far you deserve that explanation. I took the picture on June 6, 2004 near a phalanx of portapotties at the sixieth anniversary ceremony of D-Day. Tom wasn't headed to those, of course, but rather to his VIP transportation, probably a helicopter. The vets and others who surrounded him might have been headed the the temporary toilets, though, shut out of the nicer ones in deference to their betters like the presidents of the U.S. and France. I've written a journal entry about that day that you can find here. Suffice to say that on that day George W. Bush pretended to salute these vets (all near 80 and above) by inconveniencing their celebration. Just in my opinion, of course. Now, I never knew whether George (or his 'people' or the French security) saw this situation or the irony of it. But it is right up there in the Journal of Unintended Consequences.

So, I've kicked off the companion blog to The Visible Woman. Over there, we talk about whatever. Here we will concentrate on those things that we humans make happen but never intend.