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As an American whose entire maternal half of her family tree is of Irish origin, I’m well aware of the ancestral traits that got passed down to me — everything from my love of tea with milk to the “suck it up, Princess” attitude I inherited for coping when things get tough. So it’s not surprising, I suppose, that I’m drawn to topics that illustrate the strong connection that binds the United States and Ireland.
My heritage is at least part of the reason I traced Barack Obama’s roots to Moneygall and was determined to track down the real Annie Moore, the Irish teenager who was the first immigrant to arrive at Ellis Island. This time last year, I even felt compelled to share my discovery that self-described “Jewish boy from Brooklyn,” Barry Manilow, is also one-quarter Irish.
With

“I simply couldn’t cook without my…” Cast-iron frying pan? Ginsu knives? Immersion blender? Mickey Mouse Waffle Maker? Everybody who prepares food at home (or professionally, for that matter) has an implement or appliance or five or ten of them that they consider essential to their culinary practices. But how many of these things really matter in the larger scheme of things? How many are truly essential, or at least very important, to the preparation — and the ultimate consumption — of food (and let’s throw drink in here as well, just to wash it all down with)?
We were sitting around talking about this one day and came up with the obvious candidates: pots and pans, the knife, the oven, the (hey, we’re up-to-date around here) food processor… Then somebody said, well, what about the things nobody invented but somebody figured out or harnessed — like, er, fire, without which cooking as we understand it would never have been born? And what about methods collecting food, means of storing or preserving it, ways of taming it? We started making a list, including not just things we have in our own kitchens (salt, four-sided grater) but also natural phenomena (fermentation) and specialized tools (sous-vide equipment — which we don’t have in our own kitchens yet).
We decided to leave out foodstuffs — miraculous innovations that became veritable building blocks of civilization, like bread, wine, cheese, vinegar, bacon-cheeseburgers — though we did include two substances that we ingest, salt and gelling agents. We left out all the vehicles and devices with which food is planted and harvested (with one exception; see below); we omitted broad concepts like the domestication of animals and the development of genetic studies, though both have obviously had enormous effect on what and how we eat (among other things); we decided not to include means of conveying information about food, from the book to the iPad.
What we ended up with is a list of things that we, yes, simply couldn’t cook — or eat and/or drink —

March Madness is upon us, and it’s going to be totally awesome, baybee!
New stars will be born and more than one shining moment will occur. One bounce of the ball, one slip and fall, and one shot can make a legend or create a scapegoat.
No moment is more indicative as to how one play can create an image more than the Houston-North Carolina State NCAA Championship Game 28 years ago in Albuquerque, N.M.
The game’s last play is part of college basketball lore. As time ran down, an N.C. State pass was nearly stolen by Houston’s Benny Anders near

In the wake of the tragic events in Japan, the Obama administration has precisely defined the period of time one must wait in order to tell jokes about a natural disaster. “‘Too soon’ will now be exactly three months, five days from the time of said natural disaster,” said Humor Czar Morty Woodger. “After that, you can make all the jokes you want. And won’t making people wait just make those jokes even funnier?”
The “Too Soon Memorandum” (TSM) has been rigorously designed by a team of government humor analysts so sufficient time can pass to allow emotional and psychic

As quarter-lifers, when we don’t know much about things, we tend to reach into the farthest depths of our minds, extract a few minor details, and generalize, often inaccurately, from there. In some areas, such as school, this is looked down upon. In others, like our first full-time jobs, we found it often worked out okay. And in food, this practice comes in handy when we host and attend theme parties.
We love choosing themes for dinner parties and party parties–and we think the best theme parties actually embrace

The speculation that the full moon and its gravitational effect on Earth could trigger earthquakes and other natural disasters is getting attention in some quarters. It is not surprising, given the fact that humans have been looking above rather than below our feet for answers since ancient times.
The coming March 19 is a full moon day, in fact, a special one dubbed as “supermoon. On this day, the Moon will be closer to Earth in its last 18 years — it’s full and close. It will approach the Earth at a distance of 221,567 miles — a lunar perigee.
The gravitational pull of the Moon on Earth is evident from the ocean

The 46th floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Japan swayed through dinner in the restaurant made famous in the film Lost in Translation. I sat amazed at the engineering that enabled the Japanese to outsmart the threatening earthquakes that they face on a regular basis.
During one of my many trips to Japan, I remember what felt like a rumbling subway under my feet. I was clueless as to what was happening, until I saw everybody starting to

PLAY > SKIP: New Music for the Week of March 15
It’s time to start your spring break mix tape. So what if you couldn’t get into SXSW? You can still impress your friends with your love of traditional bluegrass, tween pop, tattooed hip-hop/rock, R&B revivalism, and aging Irish punks-turned-activists. You do like that kind of thing, don’t you? Read on for your musical cheat sheet.
MUST-PLAY PICK OF THE WEEK: Steve Martin and Steep Canyon Rangers
SKIP: Miranda Cosgrove,High Maintenance
“High Maintenance” is a five-song EP meant to keep “iCarly” fans happy until Cosgrove releases a full follow-up to her 2010 “Sparks Fly” debut. The track to play is the title tune, co-written by Weezer wunderkind Rivers Cuomo, who also makes a guest vocal

Americans at the pump are worried. They should be. As civil war looms in Libya, oil prices are up 19% in just three weeks, topping $105 a barrel. And even through there has been some easing today, that spells bad news not only for the American consumer, but also for our fragile economy and for our politicians trying to wrangle with the American Debt

The stimulus program passed by the Obama administration in February 2008 never got much respect. Neo-Keynesian voices argued that it was not nearly large enough, and I agree with those criticisms. But, more often, right-wing talking points seemed to influence mainstream beliefs. Too many people seemed to accept that the stimulus was a waste of money and that much less should have been spent.
The wrongheadedness of that view should now be clearer than

Egyptian media are having a field day ripping into ousted president Hosni Mubarak, his family and cronies, with state-run news organizations doing an about-face from traditional kowtowing to authority.
Coverage has ranged from serious to ludicrous, and, given Egyptians’ noted sense of humor, downright hilarious.
Yosri Fouda, a former investigative journalist with Qatar’s Aljazeera and host of a show on Egypt’s On TV, aired a picture of Mubarak wearing a pinstripe suit with his name sewn into the stripes.
Hosni Mubarak’s suit (Abu-Fadil)
Fouda, whose show is entitled “Akher Kalam” (The Last Word) brought an expert into the studio to analyze Mubarak’s state of mind.
The camera zeroed in on the garment to show vertical letters.
Hosni Mubarak’s suit with his name woven into the pinstripes (Abu-Fadil)
“The stripes in the suit have the name Hosni Mubarak woven in English and repeated throughout,” Fouda said, adding that he had noticed it when the photo was enlarged.
The demonstration would have been unthinkable when Mubarak was in power.
Yosri Fouda discusses Mubarak’s pinstripe suit (Abu-Fadil)
Asked for his opinion, the guest said Mubarak’s expression and the suit he wore reflected an attitude of dismissiveness, superiority and narcissism.
“A person who writes his name on his suit indicates self-importance, and that only comes when he feels he’s got absolute power and represents Egypt — there’s no Egypt, I’m Egypt,” the expert said.
It also signified that person had been in power too long and was one with his chair, the expert explained.
Interestingly, On TV is privately owned by Egyptian billionaire Naguib Sawiris, who benefited under the Mubarak regime and whose businesses have cashed in on deals in North Korea.
When the Egyptian revolution first broke out, the opposition paper Al Wafd reported a number of rich Egyptians had prepared their private jets for a hasty exit and that Sawiris had fled to Dubai, but he denied it and subsequently made several media appearances from Cairo.
Sawiris told an interviewer defensively last month: “Not all businessmen are crooks.”
Meanwhile, state-run newspapers like Al Ahram have also jumped on the bandwagon of dissecting the Mubarak regime’s misdeeds.
This week’s youth supplement published an article entitled “Al Fasad Fi Hemayat El Hanem,” (corruption under her ladyship’s protection), in reference to former first lady Suzanne Mubarak (ne Thabet) who was known derisively as Marie Antoinette or Lady Macbeth.
Suzanne Mubarak’s family corruption uncovered by Al Ahram
The piece said Egypt’s January 25 revolution had terminated the empire of her first cousin and Consultative Council member Mustafa Thabet from the Upper Egypt Menia district town of Matay, where demonstrators had apparently set his fancy villa on fire.
The townspeople considered Thabet a tyrant who had terrorized them for years to the point they feared retribution and a return of the old regime if they spoke ill of him, the paper said.
Thabet’s council seat had been a family monopoly — his father had held it before him — and trouble began in Matay when Bahaa Mohamad Ismail of Egypt’s Channel 7 considered running for the same seat last year.
At first Ismail hesitated, given Thabet’s bad reputation, but the former decided to forge ahead, only to begin encountering obstacles such as being forced to pay 1,800 Egyptian Pounds ($330) promotional insurance to the district when the real fee was 1,000 Pounds ($181) — a burden in a relatively poor region.
Further pressures and threats against Ismail and his family, as well as harassment of other candidates “who dared run against ‘the lady’s cousin’, convinced him to withdraw from the race,” the report said.
The Consultative Council was for years the fiefdom of Mubarak loyalist Safwat Al Sherif, who headed the body that rubber-stamped executive decisions.
Safwat Al Sherif (Abu-Fadil)
The octogenarian Al Sherif had served as information minister under Mubarak and was a holdover from the days of predecessors Anwar Sadat and Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The new head of the (discredited and former ruling) National Democratic Party ousted former information minister Anas Al Fiqi (another Mubarak partisan), and accepted Al Sharif’s resignation from the ranks, according to Al Ahram.
The paper’s post-revolution coverage has been a far cry from its historical role as chief cheerleader for the regime and the ruling party.
In January Al Ahram’s journalists issued a statement calling for the resignation or removal of Mubarak from power and disavowed their executives’ decisions to besmirch the demonstrators and write falsehoods about the revolt.
So beholden to the regime were the publisher and top editors that in October 2010, the paper photoshopped a picture of Mubarak to show him walking ahead of President Barack Obama at the White

George Orwell argued that controlling language offered the ultimate tool for getting people to accept the unacceptable — such as the catastrophic risks of operating nuclear power plants. In Orwell’s 1984, each new edition of the Newspeak dictionary had fewer words than the previous one, making it harder and harder even to think a thought that might challenge Big Brother.
So Orwell would not have been surprised to learn, as the New Yorker’s Elizabeth Kolbert helpfully pointed out this week, that there is literally no word for “meltdown” in the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s glossary of atomic-related words and phrases.
A Google search for the past month showed more than 1.93 billion hits for “meltdown. Yet the regulators at the NRC remain wary of listing the word that everyone else in the world uses to summarize the full horror of what will ensue if uranium fuel at the core of a commercial nuclear power plant is left uncooled long enough for it to

Three weeks ago, I highlighted the risks Japan faces, as a nuclear energy-dependent nation on an earthquake fault line, in my review of Into Eternity, a documentary about a nuclear waste repository deep underground in Finland. I also noted how Australia — which was the first choice of scientists in Finland for storage of nuclear waste — had just been hit by a 200-year flood.
Michael Madsen, the director of Into Eternity, elucidated this dilemma in irrefutably simple terms which give the lie to the claims and denials made by what I called “nihilists masquerading as realists” — about the viability and inherent danger of nuclear energy. He also quite clearly addressed the disaster that would ensue if the most likely scenario of water seeping into nuclear storage facilities came to pass.
In just a month’s time, we’ve seen acts of nature — an earthquake on an island that derives 30% of its power from nuclear energy, and a 200-year flood (and tremors) in the nation considered to be the soundest place on the planet to store nuclear waste — that should deliver satori about nuclear energy ad human nature. And yet our president, whom I earnestly respect, and whom is taking on more challenges than I even think (or know) about, manages to say, when asked today about our energy policy and options to get us out of oil dependency: “We’ve been having this conversation for nearly four decades

Although I’m a first-night Manhattan critic who saw Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark for the first time only three days before its most recently scratched March 15 opening, what follows is not a review. Okay, having seen it from start to finish, I admit this is a review to the extent that I agree with the consensus on its unsatisfying qualities expressed by colleagues in responses written just after the previous postponed February 7 premiere.
On the other hand, I’m not certain I’d join one prominent naysayer who suggested that Julie Taymor’s highly publicized production (score by Bono and The Edge, libretto by Taymor and Glen Berger) may rank as one of the worst musicals ever. After all, a writer must be careful about registering such a negative superlative when there’ve been so many bottom-of-barrel-scraping tuners over the past however many decades.
Among them from only as far back as the ’60s, a conscientious critic has to keep in mind Kelly, Via Galactica, Dude, Edward Albee’s slash at Breakfast at Tiffany’s, Rockabye Hamlet, Twyla Tharp’s The Times They Are A-Changin’, all three versions of The Scarlet Pimpernel and — only this season — Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson.
Look, folks, the visual aspects of what Taymor has insisted on calling “a circus rock’n'roll drama” and not a “musical” are, and likely will continue to be, commendable. When Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark opens — if it ever does, June 14, supposedly — expect set designer George Tsypin and costume designer Eiko Ishioka not only to be nominated for Tonys but to win them.
The current version, however, now acknowledged as needing radical revision by its neophyte producers — and by Bono, who first approached Taymor with the idea and now seems to be the guiding hand — could be categorized as just another in a long line of deficient

A revolution in Egypt: 18 days of tumultuous freedom fighting and a dictator is shamefully evicted. Seems straightforward, doesn’t it? It’s not. Egyptians have been working toward this outcome for years, yet the manner in which they achieved their revolution is clear-cut. Risking everything, far too often by dying, Egyptians pushed against the regime to gain the freedom to define democracy for

Israel is facing a showdown with the national-religious messianic movement as international recognition of a Palestinian state moves closer.
In the Middle East’s chaotic reality it is difficult to gain wider historical perspectives, but it is necessary to do so in order to understand our ongoing reality. Netanyahu, very belatedly, has decided to confront the settlers on a limited scale, by dismantling a number of illegal settlements in the West-Bank. The settlers reacted violently. At some point an open conflict with the national-religious movement will be inevitable, because Israel will end the occupation either on its own initiative or through growing international

I recently had the opportunity to see an early version of Heather Courtney’s new documentary, Where Soldiers Come From, a deeply emotional film following a group of young men from the Upper Peninsula (UP) who enlist in the Michigan National Guard following high school, and find themselves in the midst of the war in Afghanistan. The film itself is moving and well-made, contrasting the lives of working class rural young Americans, many of whom have few options in their communities, with the stark reality of war.
In full disclosure, Heather is a close family friend. In all honesty, that has nothing to do with the power of this

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IN TODAY’S SPECIAL RADIO REPORT: Natural disaster, humanitarian disaster, and now man-made disaster, as 50 nuclear plant workers are all that stand in the way of full nuclear meltdown at Fukushima in Japan … All that and more in today’s Green News Report!
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IN ‘GREEN NEWS EXTRA’ (see links below): Politifact says GOP lies about gas prices; 5 myths about EPA agenda; House GOP votes to discard science; CA farmers: pesticides vs. new bike paths;

I actively started running in the fall of 2008. Never would I have thought of running for fun — especially running a marathon, let alone four in a year — forget about it! In the fall of 2009 my boss Willie Martinez (a marathoner himself) approached me with this crazy notion of running 26.2 miles. Although I was logging 18 miles a day 5 days a week (6 miles before work, 6 miles for lunch, and 6 miles after work), a marathon still seemed like an impossible feat.
But after careful consideration, I committed. Thanks to the fairly nice weather along the Embarcadero in San Francisco, the treadmills at Drinker Biddle & Reath LLP’s gym facility, and my dedication, at the ripe old age of 25 I ran the 25th anniversary

Recent political events have finally birthed a new political player, The Republicant Party, the one formerly known as the “The Party.” The new party is hereby announcing itself, with this hot-off-the social media party platform.
Presidential candidates from states formerly or currently owned by foreign countries need to provide verifiable proof that they were born in the Americas.
Republicantism is committed to public funding of private presses to print pink slips for all publicly employed firefighters and police. Republicantism supports private hiring of former publicly employed firefighters and police to secure all property valued over $1M against fire damage and crime. Privately hired fire- and crime fighters can earn salaries no more than fifty percent of their former publicly sponsored salaries.
Public sector employees have pension and health care benefits that are the envy of private sector employees. To alleviate unnecessary envy, therefore, Republicantism is committed to ending public sector pension and health care benefits.
There is no constitutional right to health

“Who would not want to see my film?” asked painter/director Julian Schnabel at the premiere of his new movie Miral. Shown at the UN’s General Assembly, with a quarter of a million dollar screen and sound equipment supplied by Gucci, Miral reflects Schnabel’s scale: out-sized and awesome. Still, his question was provocative and ambiguous, a cry for commerce amidst rumors that the film was not very good and an email campaign by B’nai Brith asking for a boycott, claiming the film is anti-Israel.
In fact, introducing the film in the gigantic space, and for an audience that included Sean Penn, Candice Bergen, Steve Buscemi, Zac Posen, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson, and many more, Schnabel asserted that he loved Israel and that the film if anything is a plea for

Last week, state Sen. Greg Brophy (R-Wray) got on conservative radio and said parents of poor kids 1) use air conditioning, 2) smoke cigarettes, and 3) play Lotto, and 4) therefore they should pay more for their children’s state-subsidized medical care.
KOA’s Mike Rosen didn’t press Brophy on whether he thinks kids in poverty won’t get medical treatment under his proposal. So I called and asked Brophy to find out.
I told him, let’s assume you’re right, that some number of people in poverty could come up with more money for their kids’ health insurance.
But is Brophy willing to risk that some parents, not all of them, won’t pay the extra dough, and some number of our poorest kids will go untreated, get sick, and who knows what else will happen to them?
“I try to tell the truth and then tell you how I feel about it,” he tells me, emphasizing that he believes people “respond to incentives… And I think they will make better choices with their health care, which means, yes, they won’t go quite as