Tawn, Meet Martha

The most important thing for you to know is that neither of the pictures in this entry were doctored.  One of Tawn's heroes is - no surprise here - Martha Stewart, the domestic diva who has empowered women around the globe (and many men, too) to rediscover the joy of the homemaking arts.

In an object lesson for the theory that it is all about who you know, Tawn had the opportunity to meet Martha.  His friend Ble (pronounced "bun"), a fairly well known Thai interior designer and decorator who designed our condo, has a trio of stores in the mid-Sukhumvit area, Eligible, Incredible and Irresistible.  Tori Burch, a fashion designer, has shopped at Ble's stores many times and when Tori's friend Martha came to Phuket for the holidays, Tori told her about these fabulous stores she must come see.

Martha's hosts, the family whose company owns the rights to distribute the Martha Stewart Living line in Southeast Asia, contacted Ble, who has done design work for their stores here in Bangkok, and arranged for Martha to come visit his shops.

Ble contacted Tawn for some PR and hosting suggestions so that Martha and her assistant would be comfortable but not overwhelmed when they came to shop.  Tawn brought one of our our tea sets and several boxes of Mariage Fréres teas that he purchased on his last trip to Paris.

Sure enough, Martha was impressed with Tawn's tea service.  After Tawn offered tea to her, she looked over the set and after tasting the tea and commenting how nice it was, she and Tawn had a brief conversation about where he had acquired the tea.  "Mariage Fréres," she said, "How charming."

While she shopped, Martha and her assistant took notes and pictures and she mentioned that she would write about this visit on her blog.  Perhaps she'll even mention the handsome man who served her a proper cup of tea.  It's a good thing.

From left to right, Eddy, Ble, Martha and Tawn.  She looks a little apprehensive with that body language, doesn't she?  As if she's never been surrounded by gay men before.  Pish-posh!  Anyone notice what Tawn and Martha have in common?

Needless to say, our tenth anniversary couldn't have been better celebrated than with this visit from someone whom we both highly respect.

Can it be ten years already?

Perhaps all couples deal with the confusion about what dates are important to celebrate in their relationship.  For married couples, the date of marriage is the paramount anniversary.  There are other dates, too.  First meeting, first date, first kiss, etc.  Since Tawn and I only recently married, we've long used January 3rd as our anniversary as this is the date we first met.

The whole story about how we met - and I think it is a compelling one that should be turned into a screenplay - is located here.  I won't repeat it in this entry - you can read it at your leisure as I know many of you have.  But I would like to note that it has been ten years - ten years! - since that day.  Ten years finds us in the same city where we spent our first few days together, so perhaps that is telling.

After recently completing my project of having all my old 35mm negatives scanned, I came across the first picture of Tawn and me together.

That's us on January 4, 2000 in historic Ayutthaya, the former capital of old Siam.

Here's us two days ago, January 1st 2010.  No, the baby isn't a recent addition to our family!  We ran into some friends during brunch who just gave birth to their first daughter, Lada.  Notice any changes?  I think Tawn looks as handsome as ever!

Happy anniversary Tawn!

Updating the Nutrition Information Food Labels

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, a nonprofit public health advocacy group, is proposing changes in the way packaged food is labeled.  The CSPI, with whom I've had some disagreements over the years (disparaging movie theatre popcorn and in 1994 calling fettuccine Alfredo "a heart attack on a plate"), nonetheless has played a prominent role in bringing issues of diet and nutrition to the forefront of the public consciousness in America.

Their latest effort is around updating the nearly twenty-year old packaged food label.  This label is designed to provide consumers with the information needed to make health-conscious choices while standing in the supermarket aisle.  CSPI, though, says there are many changes needed to bring the labelling up-to-date and make it an easier tool with more relevant information.

Here is a look at the before and after versions of the labels.  Notice they remain the same size, so no additional space would be required on packages.  You can click on the picture to see the full CSPI graphic about the labels.

Here are the proposed changes I find most interesting:

1. Calorie and serving size information is in much larger type at the top of the label.
2. The ingredient list is much easier to read by printing it in regular type instead of all capital letters.  Also, bullets separate ingredients rather than allowing them to all run together.
3. Similar ingredients are listed together and shown by the percentage by weight. For instance, sugar, corn syrup, high fructose corn syrup and grape juice concentrate are all forms of sugar and would be listed in parenthesis under the catchall heading “sugars.”
4. Products containing more than 20 percent of the daily recommendation for fats, sugards, sodium and cholesterol would use red labeling and the word “high” placed next to the percentage.  Easier to avoid foods that are high in these things.
5. For items made of grains, the top of the lable would prominently display the percentage of whole grains contained in the product.

What are your thoughts about these changes?  I'm a firm believer that knowledge is power and that people are hungry (pardon the pun) for more and clearer information about the food they are consuming.  Updated labels could help give people the information they need to make healthier, more helpful choices.

Additional Links:

A timeline of food and nutrition labeling.
Full CSPI graphic of proposed changes and of the old and new versions of the label.
Original NY Times article that inspired this entry.

Screen Smarter, Not Harder

In the wake of the Christmas Day attempt at blowing up a Northwest Airlines flight heading from Amsterdam to Detroit, security officials have stepped up screening and other activities in an effort to increase safety and security.  Well, that's ostensibly the reason.  One could be forgiven, though, for mistaking the increased activity as mere busyness for the sake of looking busy, rather than as rational steps that actually increase security.

Thankfully, in the days immediately following the tightening of security measures, several of the dumber ones (requiring passengers to remain seated for the last hour of the flight, not allowing any carry-on items including blankets or pillows to be in their laps, and turning off the inflight entertainment systems so as to disable the flight tracking feature which shows where the plane is on a map) were quickly rescinded or pilots were given authority to relax the measures at their discretion.

It seems to me that if we are serious about increasing our security while flying, there are several things we need to do.  There are also things we need to stop doing as they are wasteful and do nothing to increase security.

We need to implement more thorough inspection of people and bags.  This should include the purchase and use of more full-body imaging devices, which can detect nonmetallic as well as metallic items hidden beneath clothing.  There are ways to work around privacy concerns but this is one of the most effective ways to find potentially dangerous devices that can all too easily be concealed during current screening procedures. 

The flip side of this is that we need to get smarter about whom we screen.  We spend too much energy putting grandma and grandpa through secondary screenings when they don't seem to be a likely security threat.  Past affronts like making a mother drink her breastmilk from a bottle she was carrying on in order to prove it wasn't harmful make a mockery of our security procedures and the freedoms we give up in order to be more secure.  Essentially, events like these and the thousands of indignities we suffer at airport security checkpoints across the nation are a sure sign the terrorists have won.

We need to start screening cargo.  While checked baggage now goes through security screening, almost all of the cargo shipped on planes (as well as all of it sent by container ship) does not undergo any inspection, relying instead on the government's "trusted shipper" program.  Without a doubt, this is a serious gap in our security and could easily be something for a terrorist to exploit.

We need to get our intelligence services working together.  Time and again we learn (Monday morning quarterbacking, of course) that we had heaps of information about people who attempted or succeeded in hijacking or bringing down aircraft.  The relevant agencies need a better process for taking the information they have and acting on it.  The Nigerian man involved in the Christmas Day bombing attempt should never have been allowed to board the flight based on information we already had.

We need more accountability at the Transportation Security Administration about the effectiveness of security measures put into place.  Reports obtained by news sources have indicated that TSA screeners miss intentionally concealed weapons on passengers and in baggage at about the same rate screeners did prior to September 11, 2001.  This means that the massive investment and inconvenience we suffer is largely ineffective in increasing security.  The results of those tests need to be public and if improvements aren't made, people need to lose their job.  While I can understand the security reasons for not disclosing which airports have the worst screeners, the composite scores should be available for all of us to see.

People in many countries around the world have to put up with intrusive and time-consuming security measures.  (In some countries that is because we invaded them and made the situation worse!)  That's the price we pay for increased security.  At the same time, the price we pay should be commiserate with the security we are provided.  Right now, I don't see that we're getting a good return on that investment.

A Deep Conversation

Christmas Day I managed to have a muscle spasm in my lower right back.  I wasn't lifting, bending, stretching or doing anything at the time.  The muscle just had an unexplained spasm.  The following day I went to the hospital and had an acupuncturist look at it.  Upon review it was decided that physical therapy would be more effective than acupuncture in this case.  So the following two days I came in for physical therapy.

After an ultrasound treatment (it's a boy!) and twenty minutes of heat pad and traction, I spent an hour working with a physical therapist who stretched, pulled, and massaged my torso and taught me exercises I could do to strengthen my back muscles.

The staff seemed to really like that I spoke Thai.  This therapist in particular, who spoke English quite well, fell into an easy rapport with me and we ended up having a very wide-ranging conversation, mostly in Thai, over the two days he worked on me.

The conversation was, in fact, the longest conversation I've had with any Thai whom I did not already know.  We talked about language, life upcountry (where he went to university) versus in the big city (where he was born and raised), how Bangkok has changed in the past thirty years, and we even talked about the political situation in Thailand.  Generally, Thais are very hesitant to discuss politics with strangers, but he was very candid with me, although he spoke in very veiled terms since lèse majesté laws are strictly enforced in Thailand.  The long and the short of it is that he worries about changes that will inevitably come.

I walked away from our conversation with a deep sense of satisfaction.  Although I've lived here for more than four years, I rarely have the opportunity to interact in depth with Thais whom I don't already know, especially on any meaningful level.  At the physical therapy clinic I must have been viewed as a pleasant change from the usual foreigner so was able to chat with the staff a great deal.

Interestingly, upon learning that I was married to a Thai - and being only slightly shocked that that Thai is a man - I was asked what seems to be a litmus test question: "Do you like Pattaya?"  Pattaya, a seaside resort two hours southeast of Bangkok, has a reputation for trashiness particularly with regards to sex for sale and, less so these days, child prostitution.  I answered that I had been to Pattaya only once, for just a few hours on an errand, and had found it very distasteful.  That seemed to be the right answer.