Book Review: The Game Café
Stories of New York City in Covid Time
by Eleanor Lerman
I got an advance reader copy in my mailbox. A collection of nine short stories of people who live in New York – or who are travelling there – in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic.
So this is a thin book, just under 160 pages. none of the stories actually feels complete. These are people, mostly single, all out of their regular occupations, but hanging on in a city that many have abandoned. Just as you are getting to know them the story ends and a new one begins. There are some common themes: women with long black hair and a taste for goth makeup. People suffering from severe back pain at a time when normal health services are no longer available. The author of the stories has black hair. Quite possibly she has a back ache too. She knows New York. People are attracted to the Village and Washington Square Park. But often find themselves in the less desirable outer limits of the subway service – but they are still in the City.
The epidemic is not over now. Not yet. But the mood has changed from when this book was written. People have stopped wearing masks – mostly. Travel has restarted but gets disrupted. Restaurants have reopened and people are using transit again, but in lower numbers. Management would like everyone to be back in the office but has to reluctantly accept that remote work is what a lot want to continue. Especially in places where the cost of living is high and rising. In the stories the idea that prices have dropped for desirable places pops up now and again but that is not what is happening now. These stories are of a rare time and a unique space. There is something special about New York City. And that magic – dead at the time of these stories – seems to be reviving now.
The pandemic is now far worse in China, which is where it started, and where lockdowns are still being enforced. Other places were not actually in formal lockdown, thought it might have felt like that. Cruise ships are sailing again. The planes are no longer just flying to reserve their spots at the terminals. But the chaos of lost baggage, delays and confusion are more to do with the impacts of climate – no longer “change” but “crisis”. Huge backlogs of cancellations and missed connections. A whole different set of stories, rather than the folks who managed to hang on in the City even if they no longer had their former well paid jobs, in the stories scraping by wondering what happens next while we readers are in what happens next, which is nowhere like “business as usual” no matter how much business wishes it was.
In terms of overloaded emergency rooms, and rising death rates, plus increasing numbers of people who have had multiple infections or who suffer from “long Covid” the pandemic is nearly as bad as it was at the earlier peaks, but now a high percentage have had multiple vaccinations which work – at least for a few months – but deteriorate rapidly afterwards. Public Health officials are still on the defensive. Simple ideas like hand washing and being kind don’t seem to have a lot of impact on an airborne virus that has the ability to produce a continuous series of variations, each being nastier and more virulent than the one before. We would like to think that we can learn to live with it, just as we have with the flu, the common cold and HIV – but that does seem to be an illusion. Nevertheless, there are indoor parties, the theatres and concert halls are open and the tourism industry seems to be back with bang. There is not a shred of this new reality in these short fictions, where time seems to have stopped. We do not mask very much. There are still many open schools that have no modern ventilation or even box fans surrounded by HEPA filters. Kids are getting sick – and not just with covid but all the other childhood diseases which have resurfaced thanks to a combination of political opportunism and vaccine “hesitancy”. Plus, of course, plenty of deliberate misinformation.
I am not sure that this reviewer can actually recommend this book. Some of the stories have already appeared in magazines and would have been timely then. Now? I am not so sure. Actually I wonder if there needs to be the sequels to some of these stories, so we know how these stories work out. If they did. Certainly good writing.
The following is extracted from the press materials that came with the book. I had not read this before I wrote the review above.
“For award-winning author and poet Eleanor Lerman, New York
City remains the most vibrant and important urban center in the
world. The idea that it would never recover from the pandemic was
an affront not only to New York but to cities everywhere struggling
to deal with the effects of coronavirus.
A lifelong New Yorker, Lerman was disturbed by pontifications that
the city was “dead,” that everyone was leaving, that it would never
regain its place of prominence in American life or be able to offer
the remarkable range of experiences that only a city with a diverse
population and a storied history of welcoming immigrants, artists,
workers, and dreamers, both gay and straight, could provide.
As writers do, she turned her feelings into inspiration.
The Game Café: Stories of New York
City in Covid Time by Eleanor Lerman
Mayapple Press
Paperback; December 2022
ISBN: 978-1-952781-13-1
$22.95; 6 x 9; 160 pages
Book Review: “All the Colour in the World”
A Novel
by CS Richardson
This was a surprisingly quick read. It caught hold of me and wouldn’t let go. The style is unusual – and initially a bit irritating – but you get used to it. It seems like you are reading about a real person. They are certainly real paintings and I have seen some of them. I almost wished that instead of a novel it was some kind of picture book – or perhaps, since it is an ebook, there could be links to the pictures.
There was a real concern among ex-servicemen of my family and other acquaintances that there would be very little sharing of their experiences, once they got back home. They survived WWII, but knew so many who hadn’t. And then there was always Remembrance Sunday. I got the distinct impression that those who made the most performance at such events were not the ones that came back with PTSD. Who often self medicated, drank heavily and didn’t want to talk about it.
I think now that I will go back and read it again, more slowly this time, and actually look up the pictures.
Pub Date 17 Jan 2023 | Archive Date 31 Jan 2023
Penguin Random House Canada, Knopf Canada
General Fiction (Adult) | Historical Fiction | Literary Fiction
Year End Donation for Tax Refund
I am sitting looking at a long list of organizations that send me emails asking for money at this time of year. It starts off with publications. You can claim up to $500 for amounts you paid in 2022 for qualifying subscription expenses. You can find out more about the digital news subscription at that link. (At the time of writing they were still talking about the 2021 tax return on that first link.) I get The Tyee, The Maple, The Narwhal and the National Observer – so that $500 limit isn’t hard to reach.
There should also be some acknowledgment that Canadian not for profit activist organisations are NOT registered charities. One that failed to point this out until AFTER I had sent them money was Greenpeace Canada. So the following are those that while I support them in other ways, won’t give a usable tax receipt: 350.org, Open Media, Lead Now, Sum of Us, Dogwood, Evidence for Democracy, Democracy Watch. And in the US Next City, Oil Change, Inside Climate News, Climate Central, DeSmog, Change.org, Avaaz, Eco Literacy, Stand.earth
So now for the list of the lucky winners
Green Party of BC – which gets a different tax treatment as a political party than charities
Georgia Strait Alliance – which currently has issues with credit cards and PayPal but bank transfers still work
I have added URLs to each of the organisations’ home page – which is not necessarily a donation link.
Fair Voting BC just sent me an email which says
“A brief reminder that there are a couple of days left to make a donation and get a 2022 tax receipt for supporting the case. To donate, please click . “
Fusion Power Breakthrough…Really?
This is from a press release I got this morning. The message is too long to make it feasible for a Mastodon post (500 characters) but I will post a link there back to this post as I think this is important information. TL:DR version – we don’t need a fusion power source – we’ve already got one – the sun! By the time the technology gets up to scale and comparable cost to solar will be TOO LATE. We need lots more renewables now not in the distant future
Guest post from Garry Cinnamon, of Cinnamon Energy
Scientists at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have announced a fusion breakthrough using lasers. The future of clean, limitless energy according to Forbes! A game-changer for climate according to PBS!
Using a laser and power plant system about the size of a sports stadium, the experiment generated a net power output of about one megajoule. This fusion power plant can blast the laser about 10 times a week. Sounds impressive.
Not to burst anyone’s bubble, but one megajoule is equivalent to 0.278 kwh — about the same amount of energy a single solar panel will generate in an hour from that fusion power plant 92 million miles away.
Press coverage somehow missed the fact that the energy output of this test is de minimis. They also missed the facts that fusion releases vast quantities of dangerous neutron radiation, that this radiation will contaminate surrounding equipment (just like fission reactors), that that we have not yet engineered a way to capture the heat from laser or tokamak fusion, and that there is no good source for all the tritium fuel necessary for fusion (other than more fusion reactors).
It takes at least 20 years to get a new nuclear fission plant permitted and constructed. At this point we don’t even have a working prototype laser fusion plant — that could take another 30 years. Realistically, we’re 50+ years away from getting commercial laser or tokamak fusion power plants working at scale. In the mean time, deploying billions of lowly solar panels is the safest, most reliable and least expensive way to generate the energy we need.
To learn more about the realities of a fusion power breakthrough, please listen to this week’s Energy Show.
Join Mastodon
I left Twitter some time ago. Today I learned that Elon Musk has blocked Mastodon on Twitter. So much for his claimed support for free speech.
I would ask everyone who reads this WordPress post to let their contacts know that joining Mastodon is not actually very difficult – as some misinformers would have you think.
You can find me at Mastodon
There is also a Wikipedia page (of course)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network)
Low nutritional quality in vegetarian meat substitutes
I have been very unimpressed by the meat substitutes I have tried up to now. I get that we could cut GHG emissions if we reduced meat consumption. However, human beings evolved as meat eaters. We invented cooking. That meant we had more space in our skulls for brains rather than the powerful muscles needed to chew raw foods. This study comes from Sweden, and it is worth quoting in full. Even the 500 characters I now have in Mastodon could not do it credit.
Photo of vegetarian meat. Credit: Unsplash
The availability of foods based on plant proteins to substitute for meat has increased dramatically as more people choose a plant-based diet. At the same time, there are many challenges regarding the nutritional value of these products. A study from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden now shows that many of the meat substitutes sold in Sweden claim a high content of iron – but in a form that cannot be absorbed by the body.
A diet largely made up of plant-based foods such as root vegetables, pulses, fruit and vegetables generally has a low climate impact and is also associated with health benefits such as a reduced risk of age-related diabetes and cardiovascular disease, as has been shown in several large studies. But there have been far fewer studies of how people’s health is affected by eating products based on what are known as textured* plant proteins.
In the new study from Chalmers, a research team in the Division of Food and Nutrition Science analysed 44 different meat substitutes sold in Sweden. The products are mainly manufactured from soy and pea protein, but also include the fermented soy product tempeh and mycoproteins, that is, proteins from fungi.
‘Among these products, we saw a wide variation in nutritional content and how sustainable they can be from a health perspective. In general, the estimated absorption of iron and zinc from the products was extremely low. This is because these meat substitutes contained high levels of phytates, antinutrients that inhibit the absorption of minerals in the body,’ says Cecilia Mayer Labba, the study’s lead author, who recently defended her thesis on the nutritional limitations of switching from animal protein to plant-based protein.
The body misses out on necessary minerals
Phytates are found naturally in beans and cereals – they accumulate when proteins are extracted for use in meat substitutes. In the gastrointestinal tract, where mineral absorption takes place, phytates form insoluble compounds with essential dietary minerals, especially non-heme iron (iron found in plant foods) and zinc, which means that they cannot be absorbed in the intestine.
‘Both iron and zinc also accumulate in protein extraction. This is why high levels are listed among the product’s ingredients, but the minerals are bound to phytates and cannot be absorbed and used by the body,’ says Cecilia Mayer Labba.
Iron deficiency among women is a widespread, global problem. In Europe, 10 to 32 per cent of women of childbearing age are affected** and almost one in three teenage girls at secondary school in Sweden***. Women are also the group in society most likely to have switched to a plant-based diet and to eat the least amount of red meat, which is the main source of iron that can be easily absorbed in the digestive tract.
‘It is clear that when it comes to minerals in meat substitutes, the amount that is available for absorption by the body is a very important consideration. You cannot just look at the list of ingredients. Some of the products we studied are fortified with iron but it is still inhibited by phytates. We believe that making nutrition claims on only those nutrients that can be absorbed by the body could create incentives for the industry to improve those products,’ says Ann-Sofie Sandberg, Professor of Food and Nutrition Science at Chalmers and co-author of the study.
The food industry needs new methods
Tempeh, made from fermented soybeans, differed from the other meat substitutes in the amount of iron available for absorption by the body. This was expected, as the fermentation of tempeh uses microorganisms that break down phytates. Mycoproteins stood out for their high zinc content, without containing any known absorption inhibitors. However, according to the researchers, it is still unclear how well our intestines can break down the cell walls of mycoprotein and how this in turn affects the absorption of nutrients.
‘Plant-based food is important for the transition to sustainable food production, and there is huge development potential for plant-based meat substitutes. The industry needs to think about the nutritional value of these products and to utilise and optimise known process techniques such as fermentation, but also develop new methods to increase the absorption of various important nutrients,’ says Cecilia Mayer Labba.
Production of plant proteins
- Most existing plant-based protein products on the market are based on protein extracted from a cultivated plant, such as soybeans, and separated from the plant’s other components.
- The protein is then subjected to high pressure and temperature, which restructures the proteins, known as *texturization, so that a product can be achieved that is meatier and chewier in combination with other ingredients.
- Chalmers’ study shows that the nutritional value of meat substitutes available today is often deficient depending on the choice of raw material (often imported soy) and processing conditions (content of anti-nutrients), and on additives (fat quality and salt).
- A meal containing 150 grams of meat substitutes contributes up to 60 per cent of the maximum recommended daily intake of salt, which according to the Nordic Nutrition Recommendations is 6 grams.
* The protein is restructured by high pressure and temperature.
** Milman, Taylor, Merkel and Brannon: Iron status in pregnant women and women of reproductive age in Europe. Am J Clin Nutr 2017; 106 (Suppl): 1655S-62S.
*** Riksmaten Adolescents Survey 2016-2017, Swedish National Food Agency (Livsmedelsverket) report series no. 23, 2018. Swedish National Food Agency (Livsmedelsverket) 2018.
Read the full article in Nutrients: Nutritional Composition and Estimated Iron and Zinc Bioavailability of Meat Substitutes Available on the Swedish Market
The authors of the study are Cecilia Mayer Labba, Hannah Steinhausen, Linnéa Almius, Knud Erik Bach Knudsen and Ann-Sofie Sandberg. The researchers are active at Chalmers University of Technology and Aarhus University.
The study was funded by the Bertebos Foundation, the Swedish Research Council Formas and the region of Västra Götaland.
————–
Chalmers University of Technology in Gothenburg, Sweden, conducts research and education in technology and natural sciences at a high international level. The university has 3100 employees and 10,000 students, and offers education in engineering, science, shipping and architecture.
With scientific excellence as a basis, Chalmers promotes knowledge and technical solutions for a sustainable world. Through global commitment and entrepreneurship, we foster an innovative spirit, in close collaboration with wider society.The EU’s biggest research initiative – the Graphene Flagship – is coordinated by Chalmers. We are also leading the development of a Swedish quantum computer.
Chalmers was founded in 1829 and has the same motto today as it did then: Avancez – forward.
The road to 1.5C is paved with auto retrofits
This showed up in my email today. I have been hearing about people who wanted to hang on to their classic cars but retrofitted them to be electric vehicles. The prices that were quoted were eye watering.
This one is new to me. BC is already one of most electrified car provinces on the country. But this company is on our doorstep. And is worth checking out – or at least watching the short video.
“Blue Dot Motorworks, a Seattle-based start-up developing universal retrofit kits that can convert virtually any conventional vehicle into a plug-in hybrid, is positioned to address this challenge with the most scalable, cost effective, and resource-efficient solution for the largest end-use contributor to climate change — road transportation.
“Despite the recent growth in EV manufacturing, we will not have put a significant dent in the number of conventional vehicles currently on the road by 2050, due to the size and growth of the global fleet.
“Moreover, at $66k for the average EV, the current market leaves behind many people, and excludes them from the benefits of electrification. Blue Dot’s innovations will unlock the mainstream retrofit market in the same way that Ford’s manufacturing innovations with the Model T unlocked the mainstream automobile market: by making the solution affordable to the middle class through mass-production.
“Over the last 6 years, MIT-educated mechanical engineer Tom Gurski has developed, patented, and prototyped (literally from his garage!) the system you can see in action in this two minute video.
We will be piloting our product in BC for a couple of school districts. We are 18 months from commercially available kits, but we intend to make them available in Canada.”
Amtrak November 8 18:30
We left Pacific Central five minutes early and rolled along gently, overtaking a cyclist here and there, until we got to Sapperton.
We were in the dining car with Ivar’s chowder and Des Chutes porter when there was an announcement. They had just been informed that there were track works ahead, and the delay would be 45 minutes to an hour. It seems I was prophetic when I told the desk clerk at the hotel we might be very much later than the scheduled arrival time. There is no wifi on the train until we get south of the border, but when I can I am going to look up taxis in Seattle, just in case there are none in the rank.
The last time we did this eleven years ago the schedule was better and the cars more comfortable. The Talgo train is in the shop, apparently.
At 19:35 we start moving ahead of any time mentioned in the announcements. By 20:30 we are at the border to hand over our customs declaration.
Over the border the train speeds up. There is a very dodgy wifi that seems to drop in and out. To be free of roaming charges which are extortionate I go through the set up menu and turn everything off on the phone.
20:58 approaching Bellingham
We are, they say, an hour and fifteen minutes behind schedule.
~~~~~~~~~
The text above comes from the Notes app that I was using thinking I might make a journal for our trip to Seattle. It made up for the lack of wifi on the train – but in the event I did not write more, but I did take a lot of photos some of which are making their way onto a Flickr album.
This is what the Cascades train is going to look like – in 2026!
WSDOT image
We were late and by the time we got outside the station all the cabs had gone. Of course most people were getting Uber or Lyft. We could easily have walked. That was why I had booked the Best Western on Yesler. For the return journey, very early in the morning, that is exactly what we did. A cab did turn up after a short while and it was a cheap enough ride. Which was just as well since I never did find out the number of a taxi company to call.
The hotel is a listed building. But one thing I had not expected was that the bathroom window had been left wide open, on a very cold night. Of course, we closed it and cranked up the heater – but that did interfere a bit with getting to sleep that night as it relied on a very noisy fan.
I have left Twitter
This is in case there are people who might wonder where I went after I said I was finished with Twitter – because obviously I can’t Tweet about that. And also to get more people who I know onto Mastodon – which is currently swamped – with people who are looking for an alternative to Twitter.
Once upon a time I decided to start blogging and I went to events that explained how you went about that. The most frequent advice was to establish a presence on Facebook and Twitter so that you could build readership for the blog. I left Facebook some time ago. That means I no longer know what my niece is baking. Becky’s cakes are well worth enjoying – but at this distance that won’t happen very often. Leaving Facebook means I lost touch with some relatives. And one or two people who I thought were “friends”. Maybe acquaintances would be more accurate.
This blog has been neglected mostly because I got bored writing the same thing. So much less appears now about issues like why free transit is not a Good Idea, and why Light Rail is actually not a very helpful way to understand the the needs of public transport. But it is still, I think, a viable way to have space where I can voice my opinions and experience – and control the response to that.
Many people now are moving away from Twitter and showing up on Mastodon. I had accounts on both. I will not close the Twitter account because I do not want someone else to assume my identity there. There are many people called Stephen Rees. I am going to control that on social media for as long as I can. In the same way as I am willing to pay for stephenrees.blog.
Today someone called Jennifer tooted
“Today, Elon stated that hate speech is allowed on Twitter now and will not be removed.
“It will be pushed lower with the algorithm
“His absolutist free speech views have already turned it into a cesspool of nastiness.”
That was, for me, the last straw. I have been a the target of hate speech for most of my life. I was a target because my father was a Jew. I was a target because I have “a toffee accent”. I was a target because I am an older white male. I was a target because I was intelligent and had a postgraduate degree. I was a target because I had “just stepped off the boat”. I was a target because I behaved as though women were equals to men. And so on.
For the last few years Tweetdeck has resided as the first tab on my browser window. I could watch what was being posted while the thing I was actually looking at was Flickr, or Freecell or a jigsaw puzzle. That won’t happen with Mastodon as it is over on the right somewhere past GMail.
Canada has made hate speech a crime. That was the Right Thing to do. Elon Musk is a billionaire. But that is by inheritance not skill or effort. He is an idiot. Just like Zuckerman. Or Trump. Powerful but wholly unqualified – for almost anything.
If you want to stay in contact you can find me here – now and again – and at @StephenRees@mas.to
It is perfectly possible that I will stay on Mastodon but look for a better match on “instance”. I am in no hurry to move right now. I am following the advice of Tony Bourdain to get out of my comfort zone.
I am also continuing to post and comment on pictures at https://www.flickr.com/photos/stephen_rees/
Thank you for reading.
My new plug-in hybrid
A month ago I took delivery of a new Toyota Prius Prime. This blog post is about my experience of becoming an EV driver. I can say that since although this car does have an internal combustion engine it has hardly burned any fossil fuel at all since I acquired it. I would have liked to buy an electric car, but the condo where I live is not allowing new EV owners to charge their vehicles. Some people have been using the existing receptacles in the garage – originally intended for owners to be able to plug in a vacuum cleaner now and then. There are very few of these 110v outlets and only a few could be used without either employing long extension “cords” or blocking someone else’s car in. These people are now paying a monthly fee, but the strata council is not allowing any additional users stating that they need to have a plan, since the building went up in 1974 and was never designed to accommodate EVs. The threat is that somehow these cars will overload the system. Actually the threat is very low if you consider that most people would be charging overnight – the cars are smart enough to be programmed that way – at times when everyone is fast asleep and not using much power.
The reason I could afford to buy a new car is the impact of the pandemic on my budget. We have not been anywhere or done anything very much for the last three years. So the money we would have spent on travel, eating out or other entertainments like the theatre stayed in the bank account. I have been trying to find ways of putting that to good use, but since the beginning of this year the markets have been negative, and investing has mostly been at a loss. My Yaris wasn’t costing me very much, as we tend to walk, use transit or EVO for local trips, but attempts to get comfortable with Modo (who now have a Prius parked near our place) did not work out very well.
There is a BC Hydro EV charging station on Arbutus Street near 41st Avenue. Unfortunately this high powered rapid charger (DC Fast 50KW) does not have the connector my car needs (J1772 30km/hr 6.2kW). The nearest one is at the EasyPark lot on Yew at 41st – where there is a parking fee to be paid while charging. Down in Kits there are 3 public charging points on Arbutus next to the Kits Beach park. Another is restricted to Modo. While parking there is free it is mostly fully occupied during the day.
To get to use these points you need a smartphone (or member card) from Flo or Chargepoint. Their apps also provide information about availability, and the use of power while charging. The car itself tends of overestimate how long a charge will take. For example, most recently it had only 10% charge available and expected the full charge to take over 6 hours. It actually managed it in two.
The Prius also has its own app which tells me I have 460 km on the odometer. So far I have spent $31.40 on 50.3 kWh. It came with a full charge of course as well as a full tank of gas. The best value was a parking lot at White Rock which is 45km from where we live and at the edge of the EV range. The electricity was free: the parking wasn’t. We were able to use electricity for the round trip – which included the A/C. The Yaris used to get around 7 litres per 100km so at current pump rates that would be $77.60 – but mostly I am pleased that some significant amount of CO2 was not emitted ( 1 L of gasoline produces 2.3 kg of CO2) .
The one thing I find disappointing – and this is a feature of every hybrid I have driven – is that when you take your foot off the accelerator, the car slows down as if it were an internal combustion engine dragging. This is not necessary in an EV. I was very pleased to note that this maker is going to take coasting seriously as a way to save energy. Good.
A couple of points I think are worth noting. The map that Flo and Chargepoint uses includes charging stations that are not actually available publicly. I have taken this up with them and should have been corrected by now. We spent some time trying to figure out how to access stations which were inside locked private garages at condos. They both tried to blame the map providers, but of course they can only rely on the data given them. I have also had an issue with the EV station at Oakridge Mall. It is available publicly and was working when I tried to use it but my phone was out of cell tower range (inside a concrete reinforced parking structure) or WiFi. In theory the chargepoint should have treated my phone as a credit card – but in case I have a similar problem in future I have ordered a Flo card as a back up. I have also had an issue at Kits Beach but then I was not running late on an appointment and spoke to a representative on the phone – and they started the charge for me remotely.
It is also not actually necessary for condos to spend money on installing charge point machines. The car comes with a suitable cable with a standard three pin plug on on end and a J1772 on the other. It includes a fairly hefty intermediate device which means that if the receptacle is old and loose that charging may not work when unattended. The rate for use can be calculated and agreed as an addition to the other strata fees.
Perhaps next time we go to Richmond we will be able to use this new charge point at Garry Point
Stephen Rees's blog 