What is in a cup? [still writing]
An essay about a single cup,stoneware, a touchstone, vessel, works with coffee, tea, jelly beans. 

I have been using a cup that I made in Thailand since 1988. This is an essay about the areas in my life it touchs, the thoughts that are tangent to its exterior, its place in my life. 

I suppose that this starts in about 1972 when I first signed up for ceramics classes in High  School. 
I walked into school as 11th grade was about to start and got in a line. At the head of the line I was given my schedule. I had selected classes as the previous year was ending. These included Electronics, Choir, Trigonometry, I am not sure what else. I was given the schedule and looked at it. I told the teacher behind the desk, ” I can’t take this Trigonometry class”. We went back and forth with him telling me that he could not change it, getting mad when I insisted. Then I let him know that the teacher was my mother. He said, Come back here, lets see what we can do. I remember that the schedule after changing the Trigonometry class was really limited. I needed a different class for 7th hour. I tried Metals shop, Drafting, Hebrew language, Physics, Photo, probably others. There was something left called Ceramics. I think that I had to ask what it was. That is how I got started. 
We did some American Raku firing during the class. When you do this you get surfaces that are outside your direct control. They have an air of naturalness at times. By this time in the semester I was reading books about ceramics every week, lots of books. A few were about this technique, Raku.
Raku, at least in some ways, revolved around a Japanese aesthetic principal, Wabi Sabi.  Wabi Sabi describes an appreciation of the worn, the old, the imperfect, in some ways just nature. While I have been told that it is Zen in origin, I think the real origin is closer to Taoism.  In my first year in college I took a course from  Dr. Walter Spink who described a person who was perfectly in tune with the Tao, the nature of nature. This person walked down to the bridge over the raging flood in a rocky mountain stream, disrobed waited a few seconds and jumped in. Perfectly in tune with the Tao, he washed up a bit down stream perfectly clean and walked back up to get his clothes. He understood the way, the way of the world, and without much effort could chose just the time and place to jump in and get washed out. Images of streams and rocks are seen as symbolic of The Tao. The ideas and practice of Taoism predate the Buddhism and particularly Zen by many centuries. However, Wabi Sabi is attached with Zen. I am not an expert in either, nor a practitioner.  
Raku is really the granted title of a person who made teabowls. It then named the process and style of their making. The title is hereditary. The current holder is Raku Kichizaemon XVI. I met  Raku XV at The Archie Bray Foundation. I found it not that remarkable a time except that  I found it ironic that the slide projector we were using for his slide show caught fire. 
Making work in this genre that really does it for me is difficult. The skill and sensitivity is something I cannot quite grasp. Excellence always involves the intangible, but for teabowls it often seems further from my grasp.  I really started to appreciate the aesthetic early and in high school built a wood burning raku kiln in my backyard. 
I ended up in undergraduate school in Kansas City, Missouri at The Kansas City Art Institute. The department head there, Ken Ferguson, was enthralled by Wabi Sabi. The museum next door, The Nelson Atkins museum always had a few pieces of Japanese teaware on display. Between Fergusons interest, the pots at the Nelson and the general tone of American Studio Pottery at the time we were all sucked into the aesthetic.  
In the 1970’s there was a strong “back to nature” cultural push. The organic foods movement got a big boost. Gas crises helped create a low energy mindset. Home grown and home made, local production and consumption all had strong cultural support. Natural looking fired surfaces were a rage, and in some ways still are.

A group of potters associated with the late Warren Mackenzie who was an apprentice of Bernard Leach taught at Minnesota State University and a group of potters gathered in the area. Many of them were dedicated to natural surfaces in their work and used the kiln as the creative instrument to make the surfaces. They fired with techniques now know as “atmospheric firing techniques” but not raku. Raku makes good ceremonial ware, but is not a good choice for daily use. The techniques used were wood firing, salt firing, a kind of firing called residual salt, and an offshoot of salt firing, soda firing. These techniques were used at high temperatures with non-porcelaineous clays to give the works rough natural surfaces. 

Bernard Leach worked in Japan with a potter Shoji Hamada. Along with Soetsu Yanagi they were interested in what has been translated often as Folk Craft or in Japanese, Mingei. In school, Ken Ferguson was standing behind Gail and said, “I wonder how you could combine Mingei with Minnesota. Concentrating on something else Gail said, “Minegeisota”. Clearly already having this word at hand but now having someone else to blame for it Ferguson tried to use it as a putdown to these potters. Instead of it being a putdown, they embraced it. What had been known as the Warren Mackenzie style or school of pottery making became known as The Mingeisota School. 

Prior to these names, atmospheric firing, Mingeisota, or knowing the phrase Wabi Sabi, I was already enthralled. I preferred wearing jeans until thread bare. The same is true of shirts. The use, the wear, the rips, all tell a story. The story “new” tells is a false cloak of respectability. Respectable cloths do not impact the respectability of those wearing them. You are how you look is only an “ism” an illness of an imperfect society whose focus is on trivialities rather than realities. 

But when Yanagi, Hamada and Leach talked about Mingei, they were talking about ceramics outside of schools, outside of galleries, indigeneous, humble. I do not think that they were even at the beginning talking about what they made, it was too expensive. They were talking local production for local use. 

Repair rather than replace is either the mark of people without much cash, or a sign of someone who values the natural of materials, the work of hands, the environment, or economy.  People like this have values. New clothing is an affectation. I find it hard to label its draw to some as a value. 

The affectation of the worship of the new, is in some a desire to show that they earn money. This desire is understandable as our language continually mixes up values and value or qualities with quantities. I am reminded of Lung Gaeow, an old friend in Thailand with little money or possession but a great human full of humor, compassion, and hard work. 

While in school in Kansas City we were given an opportunity to order books from Kodansha Publishing on kilns in Japan and their wares. There was one book for each pottery village, sometimes two different ones. These books was about  18 inches by 12 inches with huge high quality color photographs and cost less than $5 each. A Japanese student, Akio Takamori who the community sorely misses, picked up the books and shipped them. These books introduced us to Japanese potteries, “The Six Ancient Kilns” and many others were included in these series of about 50 books. I fell in love with Bizen and Shigaraki, although there were countless others it seemed that also held my interest. 

Bizenyaki, the Bizen potteries, fire much of their work to just the temperature that the clay starts to be vitrious, but can still maintain the orange color if protected from the flame and ash. How the kilns are stacked in Bizen became the primary decorative technique leaving some areas orange, some brown. Stacking with rice straw left markings from the alkali metals in the straw.  

In graduate school a fellow student, from Thailand showed me slide images of a pottery in NE Thailand called Dankwian. The pots were almost exclusviely 20 gallon water storage jars, wood fired, no glaze, fired to about cone 7, a lot like Bizen pots. But these had never been snarfed up as teaware. They were intended for humble use. Most pots like this were long gone in Japan. 

The graduate student, now retired Professor Poonarat Pichayapaiboon, and I took courses together. His English was spotty so as I helped him with English he taught me a bit of Thai. A few years after graduate school I heard that there was a Thai potter visiting the Archie Bray Foundation. I walked up, and in Thai said, “Hello! Where is the bathroom”. She pointed. I then asked what I though meant, ” Do you know of the village of Dankwian?” Not really meaning that she responded in English “What do you mean?”. Turns out she owned a pottery there. 

In the evening on December 25 just after my children got in from a very rare snowfall in South Texas a Tsunami struck South East Asia killing a quarter of million people in 14 countries. It was devastating for countless communities and families. I remember the little video coverage I could bring myself to watch. I wondered if the couple we met at their beach house at Hat Takua Paa (Lead (Pb) Forest Beach) survived. I am nearly certain that the house did not. The beaches we visited on Phuket were certainly inundated. There is a little more about this below. The amount of fun we had that day from a very unusual snowfall was in such start contrast to the calamity that I had a profound, yet irrational sense of guilt that I was unable to exorcise for weeks.

About a week after the disaster we went south for something. It could have been an exhibition, or a La Leche League conference or perhaps just to visit the Brownsville Zoo. I am not sure. However while we were down there I was scanning around on the mobile ham radio that I have in the car. I picked up retransmission of relief efforts for the tsunami and listened to a ham on a military aircraft surveying and reporting on what he saw near Phuket. This radio transmission went to a land based Thai station and was sent via the internet using a ham radio chat program to the person in charge of what really can be thought of as one world-wide partly line or conference call who was located at an Emergency Operations Center in Alaska.

These hams were not the only ones operating. Fortunately, if anything about this tragedy can be called fortunate, the Indian Government had decided to allow a DX (ham radio jargon for long distance contact) Expedition to go and operate in Port Blair on the Andaman Islands. Hams collect records of contacts and Islands without permanent radio operators have operators visit every so often so that other hams can collect contacts with the Islands. The person who contacts the most places wins a piece of paper. When the tremor that caused the tsunami hit VU2RBI Mrs Bharathi Prasad was already set up and operating. She was able to yell “tremors” into the microphone before her power went out. Her station became the only contact with that Island operating with her hotels emergency generator.

VU2MYH S. Ram Mohan set up a station on Car Nicobar Island. He was also running a DX Expedition and had to resort to morse code for much of his communication. Morse code requires much less power, really the same thing as saying it is louder for the same strength signal or that it is much easier to pull out of noise conditions then voice. As an example my 0.43 watt morse code radio, a kit I built has been heard as far as Michigan, 1700 km. Radio is amazing.

“When all else fails there is still ham radio.” After the 9/11 attaacks in New York City some of the earliest communications out of the city were via ham radio. During Hurricane Katrina a ham provided reports of the conditions while the storm was happening. What ham radio can be during an emergency is a huge network of equipment and trained operators distributed across the world, in most countries and certainly all across the US. I am not particularly trained or equipped but I can be set up with a new antenna, and long distance radio gear powered by a car battery in less than an hour. My local communications gear is quicker. Red Cross and governmental emergency services makes frequent use of ham radio.

I am not particularly well trained, and not involved as I should be, but while I am typing I keep thinking about a “net” tomorrow morning. A net is an on- air meeting. It is, at its most basic level, a practice session for emergency communications via radio. You cannot all talk at once on one frequency and then be able to understand anyone. There needs to be a procedure and nets are where we practice. The person in charge is the Net Operator or Net Control. They ask for emergency traffic. Emergency traffic involving life always has priority on ham radio as it should. After that they ask for checkins. People check in, hopefully one at a time. The Net Control reads back the list of checkins and then asks if there are anymore. Then Net Control goes down the list and checks in with each checkin. They exchange information, but everyone gets to listen.

So, after the tsunami I thought that I should figure out how to talk with Thai Hams through a computer program that links radios up worldwide via the internet called Echolink. It is how the audio from the military aircraft got to Alaska. At my end I was talking through a computer and in Thailand my audio was coming out via ham radio repeaters across the country. The first time I got on I was nervous, my Thai language was shaky, but the Thai hams were gracious and thoughtful, and very happy to be able to talk with an American ham. There were hundreds of people that wanted to talk with me at first, and I always needed someone in Thailand to manage it. First, they know the customs on the air, and I still cannot always tell what a radio operator wants me to do, and second there is often a one second lag between here and there, sometimes longer and if people don’t allow for it communication could be quite difficult. This audio latency in Echolink has gotten better as “The Web” has gotten faster.

That initial checkin started about a ten year period of almost daily checking into a Thai Radio net called a “Check-Net” in Thai. This net just calls for checkins and then people exchange signal reports ( reports of how good your signal is). A report of 5 is excellent. A report of 3 means fair, two is poor. 1 is terrible. You would think that the function of a net like this is so that you can daily check your radio. I will not say that this is not true, but it is in my view more important in that it trains people to understand how to operate in a net. It also brings people together for a common activity. As mundane as a check net is, it creates a sense of community. You think that all you are communicating is a call sign and a signal report but there are more important and also more subtle things.

Signal reports are generally given on ham radio as 3 numbers in the format RST where R is the readability on a 1-5 scale , S is strength (1-9) and T is the quality of a morse code tone (1-9) . In the US there is a little signal inflation, reports come back better then they really are. Sometimes it is just easier to say 5 or 59 or 599 depending on the mode of reporting then to say 588 or some other report. Sometimes it seems as a put down. In Thailand, which only uses the R part on UHF voice radios, a signal has to be pretty bad with most operators before it will get a 4 report. This would seem to remove half the value of the net, But most communication is in the subtext, and all of the other operators hear you helping a weak signal ham feel good. Many of these hams are operating 30 year old radios, have cobbled together power supplies and are mostly limited to 10 watts. Its not much power.

This Check-Net is run almost every day of the year. Net control operators seem to last a few years and then get tired of it. They either change daily or sometimes weekly. I was net control once at the HS8AD Club station for the HAM CU SIAM checknet. I saw it as a big honor. It was difficult as it was all in Thai and there are records to be kept. I did OK.

For a long time there was a woman ham running the NET a few times a week. Judging by her vocabulary she was well educated, very polite, fun to talk with. She has a very sexy voice. The first few times she was on I thought, and I think it is accurate, that some hams were a bit embarrassed or shy to talk with her. It seemed that I could hear it in their voices . This improved over time people became more comfortable. It was fun to listen to. In Thai there are different words for “you” depending on how old you are, sometimes your profession, and relative to the age of the person speaking. As a foreigner if you speak Thai they will forgive almost any mistake in this. The fact that you speak Thai is enough to cover almost any language error so long as someone does not think you intend disrespect.

Khun is you. As a foreigner this is safe way to address people in most circumstances. Thaan might go as “sir” but it usually should not be used for someone younger than you. There might be exceptions. I am not sure. These days with my white hair I get call “uncle” a lot. But when at a school I am almost always addressed as “professor”. On the radio things are split but, the Thais show their concern for my feelings by not forgetting to call me professor, not that I care, but I do hear the concern. I let them, even though I prefer Louis. They feel obligated, I don’t want them to be uncomfortable. It is not my culture to try and reform.

If you are a craftsman, a woodworker, potter, a metal worker, I am not sure of the limits of this term, then you are called craftsperson or “chang”. So if I was not a professor I might be called Chang Louie. .A friend or relative that is older is refered to as P. My elder brother is P Ralph. Since I am younger he calls me nong (younger) Louis. My name is said with a rising tone like a question in Thai. Professor Louie? Your friends mother might be called “mom” mae ( Mæ̀) . Don’t get the idea you are learning to pronounce these words OK? I will try and put something together about Thai language and learning. We brought two Thai potters to the US for a conference in Tempe Arizona. One was Chang Jork which translates as Craftsman Drinking glass, and Uncle Shot Glass. They deserve a whole ‘nother essay.

Anyhow, listening to the nets, and talking informally I learn where people live, what they do, what kind of radio they have, when they spend time with family and about their family. I learn how they treat others, I try to make sense of their jokes. Very little that is serious gets talked about on radio. While it is OK to talk about politics and religion between hams in the US, these topics are not allowed between US hams and hams from other countries. The world wide ham radio laws are written to encourage countries to allow radios and to foster friendships and technical skill as well as emergency communication. I do not know if these topics are illegal on ham radio in Thailand but I don’t hear them often.

The year after the tsunami hit I was spending three hours a night talking and listening. At the end of the year I could call myself fluent in idle chit chat. My vocabulary has increased to where I can pass vocabulary tests if the apparatus, the organizing questions are asked in English. I do OK on a list of 3rd grade vocabulary. But much of this is because I am a good test taker. I cannot even come close to reading a newspaper and a third grade schoolbook is way beyond me. But I am still improving.

In 2009 I wrote a piece about a Silent Key. This is ham radio speak for a deceased ham, in this case HS4CTT. The piece, the letter. is about subtext. His call sign comes to my thoughts whenever I talk about Thai nets, and I still hear his rich voice.

HS4CTT SK

Walking to work today connected through Echolink® via my handheld and simplex node, I found out that good friend, and a fine ham HS4CTT
became a silent key. I would never have predicted it but found myself with tears streaming down my face unable to speak with HS8PID who gave me the sad news.

I have been talking with Thai Hams daily since about one month after the tsunami struck South and Southeast Asia on December 26, 2004. I use Echolink® and try to check in at least once a day.

HS4CTT was good friend. It is surprising how little I seem to know about him. I do know the important things. He was a good friend, had
a warm gracious heart,  and could be counted on. The mundane details are few and relatively unimportant. He sold radio equipment I think,
liked ballroom dancing and fishing, and seemed to like travel. When his health was good he was on the radio everyday with welcoming
conversation. I don’t even know his name, although I sent condolences to his wife.

All we ever talked about was, “How you doing”, weather, signals, what time it is. We just did it every day for years. Each greeting is connection even if small. They add up.

I speak Thai. My wife and I taught ourselves Thai from Foreign Service Institute Tapes before a research trip there in 1988-89. My Thai was sketchy in early 2005 when I started my daily chats with Thai hams. It was sufficient for long conversations about where I
lived, what grows here, the weather, and normal “idle chit-chat”. It was not sufficient to follow most communications between the Thais
themselves.

Early on I was asked to check in to the ‘Checknet’ net on the Thailand conference. The Thai checknet is a daily check-in and signal report net held in Thai Language on the Thai conference servers. It is an hour long, and handles about 60 check-ins. People check-in,
greet and thank the net control operator, give a signal report,  and ask for a signal report. Then net control returns with the same
information.

I listen to this net daily and it would seem boring, but it is not. Actors speak about ‘subtext’; the information carried in the tone
used, and in the speed and inflection. In a theatre this ‘subtext’ is more important than the script. It is the heart and soul the true
interpersonal dialogue. In real life this is true as well. It is no less true during the Checknet than other conversations. During the
Checknet I learn all sorts of things about people. I learn whether or not they are shy with women (the Checknet control operators tend to be women)
how they react to stress from difficult signals, whether or not they like a good joke, and a myriad of things too subtle for me to
verbalize. You learn their balance between politeness and functionality.

In 2007 I went to a conference on development in Siem Riap, Cambodia and on the way back to the US stopped in Thailand. The Thai hams were
very gracious. The word most similar to gracious in Thai is Nam Jai or literally water from the heart. In Thai it seems to be an open welcoming with arms wide and a smile, although do not expect hugs. The visitor is made special. It is Nam Jai, among other things, that makes Thailand a delightful tourist destination.

In Phuket I was lent a handheld [ radio] to use. Within 10 minutes of using it there was someone at the hotel where I was staying wanting to take me to breakfast. At breakfast there were 5 hams who had come together to meet me. That afternoon I had coffee and snacks at a beachside
restaurant with another group of hams. At this location, all the hams had handhelds, all the radios were on. One [thing] I found annoying as the
squelch was too low and static was breaking the squelch frequently. I think someone read my face. Rather than explaining why the radio was
on he showed me the high water mark from the tsunami. If I had a radio, I might have had my squelch low too. [They were being careful and listening for evacuation signals.]

However delightful being in Thailand as a tourist has nothing on  the joy of being a Thai-speaking ham from the US. It was hard to sleep as
people wanted to do so much with me. HS9BA drove me from Chumphon to Phuket to keep me from needing to take a bus. HS9DEK came up from the
south to Bangkok ( a full day’s drive)  to meet me. HS0NRL drove me around Bangkok. HS4CTT drove a full day for an eyeball with me. I
will miss the delight he expressed when speaking with others and his infectious graciousness. I will always remember our friendship
through radio.

Louis Katz
W0IT / HS0ZGJ (expired Thai callsign is HS0ZGJ)

I grew up in a family where protein was the most important nutrient. And while I want a certain historical sequence to this short essay, it seems smart to start after I turned 18 and leave discussions of my father’s heart disease and my thoughts about generational taste buds either to the ending portions of this or to another essay.

In school  a friend taught me to bake bread and make tofu. The same friend also introduced me to a series of books including, Diet for a Small Planet, The Book of Tofu, and The Book of Miso. Another friend had me read The Limits to Growth. Diet for a Small Planet by Francis Lappé was about how to sustain humans with limited resources and how it coul be done using less land, and less energy by emphasizing plant protein.  The book of Tofu and to some extent  The Book of Miso just restated the arguments in Diet for a Small Planet (DSP) to promote particular products normally made from soybeans.

Proteins are made up of Amino Acids. There are nine amino acids that people need that the human body cannot make itself. They must be consumed .  Meats are considered “complete”
proteins because meat constains all of these amino acids and that you can consider a diet with sufficient protein from meat to have sufficient supplies of each of these amino acids. Plant sources are not complete or less complete. They do not have the balance of amino acids needed. Much of DSP was involved in discussion how to mix vegetable sources to get a balanced amount of amino acids. My take away was that a small amount of beans with a large amount of traditional grains was a good easy mix that met these requirements. A generation of people were inspired by this book to get more protein from vegetable sources. Only a few of my friends became vegetarians. 

The amount of protein needed by an adult male is aobut 50 grams minimum. If you are big, you need more. If you are working hard you need more. It is not a firm line.There is also a maximum amount. If you exceed it you start to have kidney and other problems. 

If you eat a varied diet that is not based on certain protein poor sources you likely are getting enough protein.  In 1981, ten years after the books initial publication, she said,
“

In 1971 I stressed protein complementarity because I assumed that the only way to get enough protein … was to create a protein as usable by the body as animal protein. In combating the myth that meat is the only way to get high-quality protein, I reinforced another myth. I gave the impression that in order to get enough protein without meat, considerable care was needed in choosing foods. Actually, it is much easier than I thought.

With three important exceptions, there is little danger of protein deficiency in a plant food diet. The exceptions are diets very heavily dependent on [1] fruit or on [2] some tubers, such as sweet potatoes or cassava, or on [3] junk food (refined flours, sugars, and fat). Fortunately, relatively few people in the world try to survive on diets in which these foods are virtually the sole source of calories. In all other diets, if people are getting enough calories, they are virtually certain of getting enough protein.

“

By 1981 I was having blood sugar problems and my diet rich in wheat flour needed changing. Having consumed way too much sugar as a child my blood sugar was out of control and I started having large mood swings, fitful naps in the middle of the afternoon that left me feeling worse rather than better, and headaches. I started to wean myself of large amounts of grain, with the exception of oats. They seem to digest slow enough to not cause a spike in my blood sugar. I should note that almost all of my consumption was whole grain, brown rice and whole wheat flour.

The advice from my doctor was to increase my protein intake.  This worked OK but only for a week. What took long for me to understand was that what needed doing was not only reducing my high glycemic index foods (simple carbs and sugars) but increase my fiber. It is the increase in fiber that made the difference.  Ten years later I started a 15 year period where I could eat a more normal diet, that is without my allergens of milk and potatoes.

One of the more interesting things that came up was that the normal meat and grease heavy breakfast, really did not work for me. Eating Eggs, bacon, hashbrowns worked for an hour or two but by 10 am I was always hungry again. Eventually I found oatmeal. Once I started eating that breakfast was easy, cheap, and kept me feeling fed until lunch.  I started using it as a night time snack and I stopped waking up with a headache and desparately needing food.

At some point I bought a used copy of a cookbook, “The No Fad Good Food 5$ a Week Cookbook. For a 9 month school year I kept track . $3.27 a week for food. Using the cookbook’s guidance I met my adult daily requirements for everything according to the US government. I exceeded the minimum requirements for protein, and roughly got over 100grams per day. I was not thriving, but this was partly due to eating too much dairy and potatoes, things I am allergic to. The other part is that flour, whole wheat or not, has a pretty high glycemic index.  The advice “whole grains” is too general, although invariably the whole grain is better than the related refined version.  The other part is that I was using grain syrups on the bread, and eating a lot of bananas. 

My father had started his anti-vegetarian schtick which was entirely unhelpful, ” you can’t survive as a vegetarian”. I was expected to accept this verbatim because after all, he had a degree in biology and was therefore a “Scientist”.  Therefore, this harassment (3 or 4 times a year) had the tacit endorsement of my mother too. Since by this point I knew ten or twenty vegetarians that seemed to be surviving just fine, and I was not a vegetarian, by any stretch of the imagination,  it was irritating. Vengeance  did come. After his bypass and then valve replacement his cardiologist told him “it won’t likely lengthen your life, but will improve the quailty of it if you become a vegetarian”. He decided to give it a try. I started to introduce him, “This my father, he is a vegetarian”.

I was in rather desparate shape physically and monitarily and I was at a meat market for Art Professors, a conference “The College Art Association Conference” in NYC. I was asked by the interviewer, “What books have you read recently?”. 40 years ago now, I do not remember the  name of the book, but when asked what I learned from it I said, “Prior to the great potato famine in Ireland, the average Irish male ate more than 7.5 pounds of potatoes a day. Interested in survival, I looked it up,  7.5 pounds of potatoes have almost enough protein from a small male to survive. It is not particularly balanced protein, so it is not a good sole source of protein. Beans and squash seeds are good sources of these amino acids.

When I was working teaching and I had both a morning and early afternoon class I had only 40 minutes for lunch. Sanwiches did not work well. They left me hungry after only a few hours. During these semesters I was very good about bringing in food. I made up packs that could be microwaved.

To make the packs I would cook al dente about a pound of noodles. I would take two cans of rinsed beans, one can of diced tomatoes and then mix them with about 10 pounds of frozen mixed vegetables. I would mix it up, but not homogeneous, I wanted variation. Then I would add to different sections of the mixed veges, some Thai curry paste in coconut milk, some chili powder with peanut sauce, and then a section of soy sauce, hot sauce, garlic and sesame oil and pack it into bags, one bag per day. In general I would end up with 30 bags.  I would microwave them for lunch.  These meals were very low in protein, but would last through an afternoon. It was an eye opener for me. I had thought it would just get me through class. I did not need protein as much as a lot of fiber, and only a small amount of carbohydrate. The food was good. I shared packs with hungry students.

There are a bunch of protein based glues. One is casein. It is the protein from milk. The easy way to make it is to rinse cottage cheese until the curds are left without gooey stuff. Then cover them just barely with hot water and add a tablespoon of borax per 10 ounce container. In a few days you will have a gooey gluey substance that can be used as a glue or as a paint pigment binder, a medium.
Fish Glue, Hide Glue, are collagen protein glues used in furniture, and still used in musical instrument making. They are nicely reversable and stick to themselves making them valuable in repair.
Egg tempera is a paint medium using egg yolks, but the whites are also used as a binder.

By the end of my first year of ceramics classes in high school I was taken enough with the medium to want to work at home over the summer. I bought a wheel, a Pacifica Kit, and started to build a kiln in my back yard. I had no knowledge of propane, natural gas would have required copious plumbing and inspections. I built a wood fired raku kiln.
The softbrick were purchased about 7 miles from my house. I borrowed some red brick that was not in a returnable state when I was done, and found a sewer tile for the top of the chimney. Even with this I did not have enough brick for a firebox. Fortunately our soil where I lived was a pebbly glacial clay. It was full of lime, but for this purpose it did not matter. I dug a firebox. I was worried about it collapsing so I lined it with 3″ logs, and roofed the back of it near the kiln with more wood, covered on top with soil. I figured the wood would take a long time to burn and I could replace it. This worked out to be at least 4 hours of firing. My first few firings were started with small two inch cuttings picked up on the street, and finished with piano keys that I had salvaged ebony and ivory off of for my father’s harpsichords that he built as a hobby.
For a high schooler I was not poor. I had a two night a week dishwashing job at Oriental City restuarant, and I sang in a professional choir for a local synagogue. In three hours singing I earned about 1.5 times as much as an 8 hour shift washing dishes. But still I preferred spending money on other things and buying ceramics supplies was about 2 hours of driving during the week when time was often scarce.  Wanting glaze, and having already read perhaps 25 books on ceramics I decided that I could make my own with 20 Muleteam ® Borax and ground bottle glass. It worked! Later I started adding Colemanite to the mix. For raku, not kitchenware this was fine. I needed colorants. Blue bottle glass did not have enough blue in it to see over my clay, so I made some colorants. I got iron oxide by burning steel wool that I got from my father and copper oxide was gotten by heating copper wire up and then bending it to get the oxide off.  I had taken Chemistry in 10th grade. Knowledge is power!
Lots of other things happened in that kiln, most things were mundane except that the pots and surfaces added to my thoughts, and the process was educational. But at some point I began wondering how three dimensional I could get glaze to be, and then it dawned on me that I could add grog to my glaze. I gave it a go. I was not great at recording images of my work back then. I did not have my own camera, and using a roll of film for one or two objects did not make sense but I did get an image of one of these raku pieces. Its not much of an image. I never did much with these glazes but it was interesting. A
After the Wood buring Raku kiln I made other kilns, several at the summer camp I worked at. The first used charcoal and a blower. and about seven bricks. It fired one teabowl at a time. Another, a few years later visiting a friend was inside a hollow piece of tree trunk. Like the raku kiln firebox, the kiln provided some of the fuel. Years later I built a small kiln out of used phone books. Phone books were how we found phone numbers. You would get updated versions each year and in generall they covered the city you were in and nearby ones too.



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Why common sense is not.

When we think of common sense we think about things that intuitively make sense. They are necessarily based on what we have seen, thought or been taught before. The effects of gravity on earth make sense. The historical context of this is interesting as a force it was discovered. Before gravity common sense said that a released ball fell because there was nothing holding it up. Gravity, at least as it is seen to affect us on the planet earth is the force the pulls the ball down. We have lived as a species with the concept for so long that it is common and makes intuitive sense.  Lots of other things make sense. That heat flows from one object to another, that when you mix two vessels of air at different temperatures you get air that is the average temperature.
But there are lots of other things in our common everyday environment that are not known via sense that is common. One I learned as a child, What are the chances that in a class of 23 students some two students will have the same birthday?  It would seem that the chance me having the same birthday as you is 1/365 so with 23 students that would be 23/365. But that is not it.
Not counting the fact that there are more people born on weekends and during some seasons of the year, when you have 23 people I could have the same birthday as 22 of them. So really the number now seems like it should be 22X23/365 . This works out to a probability of over 1, more than always true. It makes no sense. The problem is more complicated than that, and I told myself I would keep math simple, intuitive for this essay. It works out to just over a 50% probability for 23 students. There is a nice wikipedia page on this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birthday_problem
Einstein’s E=MC**2 is another example. Without an understanding of speed and satelites none of our modern navigation would work.
But for me  thermodynamic problems are both simple and counterintutive. They do not make common sense, although the sense that they do make is not so hard to understand. The basic law of thermodynamics, the first law is conservation of energy. Its been around long enough that it makes common sense. You cannot create or destroy energy. This that run contrary to this or seem to run contrary do not make common sense.
A heat exchanger is something that transfers heat from one medium to another. I like to think of these and explain them as devices that exchange air in your house with outside air. I live in Texas so I think more about airconditioning than heaters and will use a cold house for an example. Lets say that you have a kitchen exhaust fan and you cool your house to 80 degrees F and outside it is 100˚F .If you just exhaust the smokey air from your kitchen the air that sneaks into the house to replace it is 100˚F and your air conditioner will cool that down.  Its not cheap if it runs often.
So, lets say you develop a device, a metal tube with fan pushing air  outside maybe 6″  in diameter and another maybe 4″  tube placed inside it arranged with a fan to push air from outside to the inside. Just for simplicity lets say that you recover half the cooling, that the air released into the house has passed half the difference to the air going outside and they are both at 90˚F. This seems like the best you can do, it makes common sense.

But if you now place another identical device feeding air outside, and inside and place it on the inside end of your first device, coming from the outside you now have air at 90˚ and on the inside air at 80˚ so this device should do a similar thing and cool the outside air that is coming to only 85˚F . If you keep adding devices, sooner or later you get air coming in at the inside temperature and leaving at the outside temperature. If you ignore condensation you can recover nearly 100% of the coolness or if you prefer the heat. 90% efficiency is not hard to achieve for heat exchangers for the home. To really understand how these work you need calculus. But they work. Common sense would limit you  to 50%,, recovering half the heat.

Air conditioners and heat pumps are even harder to make sense of with common sense. It just is not common. These do not create heat or cool, they just move it from one place to another.

If we just used some common sense, almost no modern technology would work. If we went back to before people figured out the world was a globe we would not be able to go from Europe to Japan via New York without going back over Europe. Common sense evades sense.

I am failing at finding a way to tie this essay together so will just get writing.
Clean.

I grew up in a home with kosher food. My mother had promised her mother that she would keep a kosher home. I suspect that my grandmother was a believer, but never met her. She was deceased before I was born. 
There are a couple of proscriptions that became very important in some ways in my life. The first is not eating milk and meat, and pigs not being kosher food. The issue of pigs, pig fat, sea food, will have to be dealt with in another essay. The need in a kosher home for four sets of dishes is another. The laws of kashrut, keeping kosher, are a boon for ceramic producers. This too is a separate issue and deserving of its own essay. But today getting ready for the beginning of Passover is the topic, or at least the start of it.

Passover is the holiday commemorating the Exodus from Egypt. There are a lot of parts to this, many separate aspects, but I want to focus on cleaning up of leaven, grains that can be fermented into bread or alcohol, and its impact on my life. So first you have to understand this.

Before the start of Passover, at least in the tradition that was my house, and most Jewish cultures, you have to get rid of all of your grain, and things made of it. This seems pretty simple. But like many things in Orthodox and Conservative Judaism, trying to keep the letter of the law, and trying to make sure of it, gets complicated.

Left over products in the refrigerator and cabinets, rice, flour, starch, sugar, almost everything, was given to someone who was not Jewish. This could include the woman who cleaned once a week, the mailman,  and others. If it could not be given away it was thrown away. The only exception to this as I remember it was unopened cans and hard liquor. The cans and booze went into our cold cellar in the basement, really a long term pantry, it was not that cold.

The kitchen was cleaned. One year the glasses of mine that were lost were found behind the fridge as it was pulled from the wall. The coils on the back were cleaned and the floor underneath it scrubbed. As I remember it, the coils were my brother’s job. I cleaned the blender.

At some point we got an Osterizer® blender with ten speeds controlled by buttons. It was going to be used over Passover, so it had to be cleaned. The buttons got really grimy over the year so it had to be disassembled. This was my job. I remember it being difficult the first time. When finished there was no visible gunge anywhere.  We used this blender over Passover. Somehow this sort of cleaning was not acceptable for other kitchen appliances except the stove, fridge, dishwasher and sink.

In high school one of my jobs was to wash dishes for a Chinese Restaurant. Work started at 4pm by cleaning the dirty dishes from lunch, running them through the dishwasher and getting ready for the evening rush. Each evening at about 8 there was an additional cleaning task, although a few times I got to help mass producing egg rolls.

Chinese restaurants were a target for food safety inspectors. Consequently where I worked was one of the cleanest restaurants I have every worked in. It seemed like we got inspected every two weeks, fined threatened with closure, harassed. One time I remember the inspector decided he was going to target the stock pot. The stock pot held about 12 gallons of broth. It was left running 24 hours a day. Good stock was used in any dish that needed cooking liquid and in all the soups. He said something about food poisoning. I got a little argumentative even though I should have held my breath. I was just the dishwasher. But it worked he left us alone. I was left with the impression that my white skin was bigger influence than what I said.

On weekends we cleaned. Often the cooks helped. The cooler was emptied and cleaned. The floor and walls were left immaculate. The corners had to always be scrubbed. The smell of bleach could be overwhelming. On Sunday afternoon we cleaned the grease traps or filters over one set of woks and then the other. This was hard work. I wish that I knew then what I know now about removing grease.

When I got to The Kansas City Art Institute I eventually got a job in the school cafeteria. Although it did not pay as well as my previous job, the shorter travel time made it a better deal. At first I was the weekend cleaner. The first week or two I was given directions and a special job. By week three I was left alone. “Are you doing the coolers and  grease traps every week?” “Yes”.

I worked hard for Marion League. Once I knew what her life was like I worked harder. She was the foster mother for a group of disabled children and had a hard time making ends meet. At school no one starved. She would feed students if they were hungry even if they were broke. I do not know the limits of this, but one friend got fed for a few days every month. I do not know if they paid her back.

After about a year I was asked if I wanted to be the Saturday short order cook. I said OK.  This was sandwiches, eggs, hash browns, biscuits and gravy, bacon and sausage. Also coffee. Marion said that we had to turn $120 to break even. I made it my business to do what I could. I cleaned the coffee urn when I got there in the morning, especially the filter holder. I increased the strength of the coffee and let people know. I cut lunch meats and but the “sawdust” from this process to sprinkle on the gravy. I also put paprika on top. Bacon grease was used in the gravy. To me this was still pretty yucky but I knew others would like it. Not growing up with much bacon in my life it was not an easy flavor. I would rather just eat the biscuits.

I was given a couple of options for biscuits. There was mix or I could make it from scratch. I aways made it from scratch. They got better as I worked there longer but not much better. But along with the gravy the biscuit sales went up. We started to make a second urn of coffee just before lunch. The last innovation was “garbage omletes”. I did not yet know the value of a good name. Anyhow, just before closing you could order a 2 or 3 egg omelette and I would stuff it with what ever there was that I was going to have to dispose of after the shift. We closed at 3 and stayed closed on Sunday. Leftovers were disposed of. Most vegetables were disposed of and replaced early Monday morning. There was a lot of food to put in these. If there was not any, I used cabbage and onions. I also made the hash browns from scratch. They are best if left on the griddle for a long time.

After a few months, Marion pulled me aside, “I know that you cannot be stealing from me, where is all the money coming from?” I asked if she looked at the register tape. She said that it made no sense.  How do you sell 25 omelettes in the last 15 minutes of business? Even the coffee sales are better than some weekdays.  I explained it to her. 

The food there was wholesome for the most part.  The year after I graduated they replaced her with a food service.

So, why this essay? Just the thoughts running through my head as I clean the Kitchenaide® mixer, full of bread residue, as I get prepped to regrease it. I am thoroughly impressed with the beefy engineering of this 4.5 quart mixer. Serviced every couple of decades it could last forever. Now, even the slots in the heads of the screws have been cleaned.

Kitchenaid ® is a registered trademark of Kitchenaid I guess.