DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Here’s another direct-marketing list broker that sells your name and address data: GETKO Hotline

If you’re a new homeowner, call Getko at 800-642-8732 opt out. Their reps will mislead you by saying you should call the DMA to opt out, but I know Getko isn’t using the DMA’s opt-out list — if they were, I wouldn’t be getting mail from people who bought my name from Getko.

Don’t forget to call Homedata too.

The AP reports:

President Bush on Tuesday signed legislation creating a national “do-not-call” list intended to help consumers block unwanted telemarketing calls.

The bill allows the Federal Trade Commission to collect fees from telemarketers to fund the registry, which will cost about $16 million in its first year. The do-not-call program should begin operation by summer.

Telemarketers say the registry will devastate their business.

So it seems that the telemarketers not only will be forced to comply with this new law — they’ll also have to pay for it. Ha!

The new law is unfortunately not comprehensive, because the FTC has only limited authority over some industries. I understand this to mean that the new DNC law may not affect telcos, airlines, and banks. Also, the law exempts charities, surveys, and politicians. But for all of these low-lifes, who think their right to call you at home against your will is protected by the 1st Amendment, there is still Steve Rubenstein’s “hopeful hold.”

Comprehensive or not, this national DNC system is a huge step in the right direction. Citizens’ time and privacy are now protected by federal law. US States that have already implemented DNC lists can presumably shave those costs back out of their budgets as they transfer control to the federal system. And as a telemarketing victim, you no longer need to plead with each individual telemarketer to be removed from the calling list — you can simply opt out one time.

I’ll enjoy watching the DMA squirm over this one.

Check out the Chronicle’s Year in Pictures — 12 galleries of their best shots from last year.

(You might wish to resize your browser window to obscure that horrible flashing advertisement on the right side.)

Small world syndrome: the owners of the restaurant where I spent three nights last week just bought an old Mercedes diesel for $1500 and outfitted it to run on vegetable oil (for $800 more). They’ll get free fryer fat from neighboring restaurants. The point is, being “part of the solution” in this case does not represent a huge investment, as might, for example, buying a new hybrid. (While I think hybrids are an improvement over traditional internal-combustion-only vehicles, they still burn refined fossil fuels, and thus are inferior to, not to mention more expensive than, biodiesels.)

British correspondent Ade Rixon wrote in to describe a roadblock to the greasecar movement in the UK: the government taxes fuel, and considers it a serious crime for citizens to burn any fuel that has not been taxed: Sniffing out unusually fragrant exhaust fumes, highway patrols have already collared several dozen offenders, who save more than 40p a litre by diverting oil from the kitchen cupboard to under the bonnet. So you can burn cooking oil, but you risk spending seven years in prison if you do.

I know of no such laws here in the US, although I would not be surprised to learn that it’s buried in the so-called Patriot Act, which among other surveillance measures gives federal agents access to customer data from bookstores and libraries, as if domestic terrorists could be identified by their reading lists.

Anyway, bitter sarcasm aside, I had a depressing email exchange with someone last week on the topic of alternative energy sources. It started with that message that’s been bouncing around about boycotting oil companies that buy from Iraq. I responded that I’d rather they drill in the middle east than offshore California (e.g. 15 minutes from my house) or in an Alaskan wildlife preserve — and that the best solution, in my opinion, is to reduce consumption because then we need not worry so much where the oil comes from. She wrote back to accuse me of being a nimbyist (“not in my back yard”) which is true enough, but still an easy condemnation for her considering she doesn’t live anywhere near a proposed drilling site.

She continued, “But the fact of the matter is that gas/oil is a necessity. I wish that it were not, but it is. I hope there will come a day when we don’t rely on it for our transportation or to heat our homes. However, that day will probably not come in my lifetime.”

That’s just so wrong. Certainly the easy solution for her is to drive a gas-powered car and use oil-based heating, but by no means is that a “necessity.” I suggested a number of alternatives, e.g. electric heat, solar power, wind power, motorcycles, diesels, hybrids, electric cars, Segways… and she wrote back, “You must be living in a different world than I do.”

Well, I guess maybe I do. At least I’m looking for answers rather than trying to convince others, in the face of the evidence, that no answers exist.

What scares me about this is her blindness to facts, her closed-mindedness to the death spiral we’re in due to dependence on (foreign) oil, the damage to the environment we do every day with these “easy” answers, and of course the fact that she votes.

[This is part II of a 3-part series. Read part I, intro to chefdom, or part II, soup from concentrate]

One of the most interesting food-service tricks we’ve learned is something I’d first realized when reading Kitchen Confidential — that most restaurant food is prepared in advance. In our case we served a six-course meal, and the only item that was actually cooked to order was what the chefs called the “veg,” the token plain vegetable served on the side of the fancy vegan entree. Everything else was either kept warm after having been cooked earlier in the day, or reheated out of the cooler.

It’s a good lesson for entertaining at home. For small groups, it wouldn’t matter so much, but even then, this approach makes way too much sense.

This afternoon, my task was to make one of the two entrees, jambalaya. This particular dish appealed to me because it was cooked in the oven with minimal fuss. I combined all the ingredients (including uncooked rice) in big “hotel pans,” and then stuck ‘em in the oven. It couldn’t get much easier than that.

The prep took time, though. The “Cajun spice blend” called for in the jambalaya recipe put me back at the spice rack with my calculator and pad, measuring micrograms of cayenne and fennel and file. We were doing 5x the written jambalaya recipe, so I made 5x the spice blend. Toward the end of the process I realized that I’d just combined about $80 worth of dried spices, enough to feed Cajun food to 100 people every day for the rest of the month. Turns out the spice-blend recipe was already multiplied out, and I’d just made 5x more than we needed. I had a big salad bowl of spices and a sheepish grin on my face. The chefs didn’t mind, though; they make batches of this stuff periodically anyway. (Maybe not again this year, though.)

My soup changed dramatically overnight. It was hugely better; the flavors had combined and balanced. As we were getting ready to serve it, I panicked, realizing that the head chef, out front acting as hostess, hadn’t tasted the soup to adjust seasonings. Back in the kitchen, I asked the sous-chef to do so, and she said, “I can’t taste anything; I have a cold. It’s on you!” So I had final say on the seasonings, and we were just about to serve the soup to 30 people.

I’ve never trusted my palette. Great chefs become great because they constantly taste and adjust. Identifying what’s lacking, or what’s overpowering, is a big part of the skill of a talented chef, and that’s the one skill I’ve never developed, or even attempted. I regularly serve food that I have not tasted at all, whether I’ve followed a recipe or not, because the few times I have tasted something I’ve never known what to add.

So, under this enormous (but largely imagined) pressure, I dunked a spoon and slurped some soup. It was fantastic. It needed nothing, and for once I knew it. There was no question in my mind. So we served the soup as-is, and it went on to get raves from everyone — I heard people talking about it in the restaurant. That was pretty cool.

I put in a 2-hour shift in the kitchen, plating all six courses. It was fun for that amount of time, knowing that things would never get too crazy. Afterwards I got to sit in the dining room and eat while other students took over plating. This was a nice end to the process, to return to the front room and act like a customer again, to have shaken every hand that had touched the food, to know the stories and the faces and the personalities and the near-accidents, and to have the recipe book open as I ate dinner.

The best part, though, is that someone else did the dishes.