How to eat

I noticed these directions, in big bold letters, on a huge bag of frozen peas I got from the supermarket:

USE ONLY AS MUCH AS DESIRED

Why is it necessary to be told this?

Maybe the people who wrote that message had been watching Andre talk to Wally in My Dinner With Andre:

Roc used to practice certain exercises, like for instance, if he were right-handed, all today he would do everything with his left hand, all day, eating, writing, everything: opening doors, in order to break the habits of living. Because the great danger he felt for him was to fall into a trance, out of habit. He had a whole series of very simple exercises that he had invented, just to keep seeing, feeling, remembering. Because you have to learn now. It didn't use to be necessary, but today you have to learn something like: are you really hungry, or are you just stuffing your face because because that's what you do, out of habit? I mean, you can afford to do it, so you do it, whether you're hungry or not.

(Transcript from here.)

By the way, in addition to being extremely useful for cooking (throw some into a dish at literally the last minute), frozen peas make a surprisingly good snack eaten straight out of the freezer.

My Dinner with Andre is being reissued.

Finally.

I hope this post is what did it.

UPDATE: My mom's reaction to the reissue:

I have the Fox/Lorber version too, and it's the most atrocious DVD I've ever seen. It's as if somebody made a bad videotape of it when it was on TV, then burned that copy of it to a disc. Yet I've watched it many times. When the movie was out, I saw it in the theater twice -- 2 nights in a row. It will be amazing to see something close to the real thing now, after all these years.

What's the most energy-efficient state in the US?

Apparently the answer is my state, New York.

You can see the info for all states in this interactive map.

(Via the Freakonomics blog. If you're interested in the full report by the Rocky Mountain Institute, here's the PDF.)

Could this be some of the fruits of "elevator environmentalism" in NYC?

Maybe that's part of it, but there seems to be a problem with how the report measures energy efficiency. They did it "by dividing each state’s G.D.P. by the kilowatt hours of electricity it consumed." As a commenter on the Freakonomics blog says:

This study assumes all kinds of weird relationships between energy and GDP that just don’t seem to be accurate. You know why New York is so high on that list? Because banking takes a lot less energy than farming does to produce money. You know why Mississippi and Kentucky are at the bottom? Because farming and coal mining are energy intensive and produce inexpensive products.

So what’s the answer then? Stop farming and make every state convert to a white collar economy? Doesn’t seem feasible to me.

Tellingly, the blog post does ask readers for feedback, but only feedback on "how to close the gap" among the different states, not suggestions for more useful ways to frame the problem or measure the gap.

In fairness, the authors of the study show up in the comments section to defend their conclusions. Do you think their defense is very convincing? They claim to control for a lot of variables. But even taking them at their word, there seems to be a deeper problem, which is that a lot of the energy-intensive activity (farming, etc.) that's done by the lower-ranked states makes it possible for, say, New Yorkers to enjoy the array of modern conveniences that make it so comfortable to live the lifestyle of, say, a reasonably affluent office worker in the Northeast. (I don't want to overstate this as if it were some kind of clear-cut dichotomy: the report ranks California, which produces enormous amounts of food among other goods, as one of the most energy-efficient states.)

In other words, the suggestion that the supposedly less efficient states should simply conform to the more efficient ones may be a nice thought -- but it's easy to wish for the world we're living in to be better. We're able to look at it first-hand, up close, and vividly see its many flaws. It's a lot harder to see how all the interconnected parts of the hulking, complicated machinery of society might be thrown out of whack if we made the proposed sweeping reforms -- even on the overly optimistic assumption that they'd be implemented brilliantly and in good faith. (By the way, for those readers who might think of me as a liberal, I'm try to invoke a conservative principle here.)

And of course,

New York being #1 in GDP/kWh just shows what you can do by fabricating earnings on Wall Street. They will not be #1 on that list for long.

Another commenter has a similar point but, I think, takes it too far:

Look at the list of the most efficient by kWh. 7 of the 10 have little in the way of "real" wealth creation industries - by which I mean either farming/extraction or manufacturing. If you want to create real wealth that doesn’t involve repackaging money or ideas a dozen times, then I think a different metric is required.

I don't know how you can distinguish "real" wealth from non-"real" wealth. Why are farming and manufacturing the only things that are "real"?

Why isn't work that gets done in New York "real"?

This calls for some My Dinner with Andre, specifically Wally's rant:

I mean, is Mount Everest more "real" than New York? I mean, isn't New York "real"? I mean, you see, I think if you could become fully aware of what existed in the cigar store next door to this restaurant, I think it would just blow your brains out! I mean...I mean, isn't there just as much "reality" to be perceived in the cigar store as there is on Mount Everest? I mean, what do you think? You see, I think that not only is there nothing more real about Mount Everest, I think there's nothing that different, in a certain way. I mean, because reality is uniform, in a way....

Another My Dinner with Andre post

Since I brought up My Dinner with Andre in yesterday's post, I should point out that I completely agree with this reviewer:

This is my favorite movie of all time. Period. You can sit in on the most interesting conversation ever and I've done it many times, every time finding myself thinking of different things, contemplating my own life and wondering about how crazy Andre actually is and how seriously to take his ideas about how human life came to an end a few decades ago, leaving us all robots in search of some twinge of real feeling.

And this one:

Someone asked me the other day if I could name a movie that was entirely devoid of cliches. I thought for a moment, and then answered, "My Dinner With Andre." ... I am impressed once more by how wonderfully odd this movie is, how there is nothing else like it. It should be unwatchable, and yet those who love it return time and again, enchanted.

The first quote is from my mom's Amazon review; the second is from Roger Ebert's review.

My mom's review also complained about the shockingly poor quality of the DVD transfer. ("There needs to be a new edition of this great movie, and those of us who bought this sham of a version should be allowed to trade it in.") That was in 1999. Not only hasn't there been a reissue, but even the bad DVD is now out of print. A sad commentary.

We're still waiting for the good DVD to come out!

Moleskines, to-do lists, and My Dinner with Andre

To my 4 readers who follow the blog closely enough to await updates to the cliffhanger posts: my idea for a Moleskine of to-do lists was a dismal failure. As I explained in that post, the idea was: buy a Moleskine "address book," but don't use it as such. Instead, I'd use the alphabetized sections to stand for different types of tasks. This was supposed to be more organized than having random slips of paper with to-do lists floating around, but not as stifling and regimented as some of the ones other bloggers have blogged (see the first link for examples).

But even that was too complex. I'd waste time trying to decide what category to put something in (including a miscellaneous category). I'd worry about running out of space in some categories before others. And it just felt like one Moleskine too many. If you're not checking it regularly, it's not worth doing at all, and I wasn't checking it regularly.

Solution: I'm using a Moleskine "weekly planner," where the days are all on the lefthand pages, and the righthand pages are blank/lined. Naturally, I put the to-do lists on the blank pages. If the items apply just to that week, it's perfect. If they span multiple weeks, I can either copy the unfinished items to future weeks, or make a habit of going back to check past weeks. Since I'd need to use a datebook anyway, this solves the "one Moleskine too many" problem.

There will be times when the format feels too confining -- when you want to record longer-term or more abstract goals. So I put those in my plain Moleskine, the same one I use to write this blog.

The subject of to-do lists always reminds me of Wallace Shawn's great monologue on the meaning of life in the movie My Dinner with Andre:

... I have a list of errands and responsibilities that I keep in a notebook; I enjoy going through the notebook, carrying out the responsibilities, doing the errands, then crossing them off the list. ... I just don't think I feel the need for anything more than all this ...

(Wait for it ... "inconceivable!")