Why is This Stupid Hotel Breakfast So Good?

That was a neat bit of chowhound detection work.

I reluctantly poked my head into the hotel free breakfast, because hope springs eternal. And my first bewilderment came from the scrambled eggs, which were real scrambled eggs, though in a trafing dish, not fresh. Also, the ham looked good. I loaded my plate with uncommon enthusiasm and carted it back to the table, and every bite was wonderful.

This should have brought me nothing but pleasure, but I can't resist a mystery. So as I worked through eggs, ham, stewed tomatoes, sautéed mushrooms, pasty beans, small pastries, a slice of whole grain toast, a roll, some peach jam, and a glass of mixed fruit juice, I pieced it together.

At dinner, this is a legit great 5 star restaurant, more expensive than I can afford. Of course, this is not that. The staff's not here and no one's aiming to dazzle. Their Michelin star is not hanging on the tenderness of my scrambled eggs.

I realized that the breakfast is terrific due purely to muscle memory. The good chef is still home in bed, sleeping off the substances he did after service, and the fancy stuff is all put away, but everyone in front and in back serves some minor role or association to the big show, so they know something, and they have been trained to have standards, so this is the shittiest they can possibly do. They'd like to do worse, but can't.

They'd like to make rubbery scrambled eggs, but it's actually hard for someone with a shred of diligence to produce execrable hotel buffet scrambled eggs. And the olive oil used in those tomatoes is the good stuff (they're not going to haul in cheaper oil just for breakfast service). And the stupid mini croissants are from one of the hotel's snooty suppliers, not a big white truck from an industrial park. The restaurant doesn't have business relationships with drek suppliers.

So, when the second and third string staff of a great restaurant try to serve you shitty breakfast, the result won't completely delight, but it will be 100,000 times better than the shitty breakfast they're trying to cook, and you'd expected to eat. It will be food.

Nonlinear Exertion and Myth

Maximal exertion, in the case of extremely capable individuals, requires nonlinear effort. Duly challenged, exertion becomes a runaway chain reaction.

The legend of the Red Shoes was never about an inability to stop dancing. It was about the peril of confronting the geometric curve where great capability and maximal effort converge to meet daunting challenge.

The legend of Samson was never about a haircut. It was about the plight of extremely capable individuals jarred from the precariously narrow conditions wherein they're able to exert at full capacity.


As a kid I thought a lot about a lonely waterproof heater lost overboard in the Atlantic, trying to heat the whole ocean.

This *IS* Democracy

This is democracy.

Every time I try to clearly frame the situation, that's what I come up with. While I hate every bit of it, this is democracy.

Everyone's treating these political shenanigans like some fresh hell, but it's all stuff we knew about. The extreme right has wanted to dismantle the federal system (and gut medicare and social security) for decades. It was a queasy background rallying cry even for moderate conservatives, who didn't really mean it. Reagan and the Bushes couldn't ever pull that trigger, though President Pat Buchanan would have done so in a hot minute. But this was queued up since forever.

As was reported as early as 1964, a pervasive slab of conspiracism, malice, and gut ignorance—even among highly educated people (MAGAS are mostly boomers, our best educated generation) has always been out there, and never as sparse as we've hoped. It's a ton of people.

So this is democracy. Democracy means everyone gets their shot. Democracy doesn't mean you win every time so it's just how you like.

And, anyway, the cancer is not exclusive to one side. The urge to stifle dissent while hollering about free speech is as unconstrained on the left as on the right. Same for the favoring of certain groups and the disfavoring of others. Truly, it's all fucked, but we're reacting by doubling down. It's a simple process: the left moves extra left and the right moves extra right because no one can stand a whiff of Those Assholes, so we all recoil into the opposing extremism rather than the sane center. And it's a vicious circle because extremists smell worst of all, ensuring the most extreme revulsion both ways.

Democracy doesn't mean you love and support the country only when your side governs. The MAGAs don't own "entitled hypocrisy". Democracy means sharing power and, again, we knew these people and these ideas were out there. We knew we were living in a democracy, yet now we're shocked—shocked!— that they came to power and are making it happen. The shock is because we assumed that the beauty of democracy was our perpetual control, and that's inherently anti-democratic! We're certainly not being pro-democratic by hating the people with whom we share the country and its governance! Think about it!

So now, yeah, the vicious cycle is such that those guys are, in fact, legit killing democracy (for them, it's merely their side controlling things). From my perspective, it's a terrible tragedy. But from the higher perspective, it's a huge slab of the country getting to do what it always wanted to do. It's like traveling by minivan and some want to stop for dinner at Burger King. Sometimes you have to tolerate stopping at Burger King. Even if you're a vegan. Tough sell, alas, for a society of entitled aristocrats far too entitled to happily share power. If you don't want the assholes to ever run things, don't do democracy!

Our notion that half the country must never be allowed to get their ugly, terrible, no-good way is not democracy. If we can ever re-acquire a clean view of what democracy actually is—and what tolerance really is (other people's tolerances are different and if you can't tolerate that, you're the intolerant one)—maybe this won't go all Jew/Palestinian. I'm stating the one and only hope. I know you blame the other guys. And I've been doing the same! I write this not as a sanctimonious preacher, but as a repentant sinner.


We can retain some sanity by reframing like this. But it compels the question: how to proceed? Easy! Play the democracy game! Fight and resist! I don't mean screeching on social media or keying your neighbor's Tesla. We might start with voting. 24-37% of voters in key battleground states did not vote in 2024. Way more than the margin of difference. So could we invest some slim fraction of our bounteous shaming energy on people who don't? Maybe allow an occasional "nigger" for "kike" to slip by unremarked upon while we concentrate our cleansing focus on not letting husbands/sons/daughters/friends/coworkers get away with not voting? Can we use some of our hounding/screeching prowess to bully every like-minded voter in our perimeter to vote every damned time, and to consider pulling only Democrat levers?

I am evidently no pure Democrat, so if I suggest that last part, you've got idealogical coverage. No decent Republicans remain, and in my opinion they must be voted out en masse. But this can't happen if we don't vote. We need to find new channels of resistance beyond keying Teslas and preening in our Resistance drag. Like voting, for starters.

It comes down to whether we're enjoying this—suffering and all—too much to look away from the shouty pizazz and turn up the glaring houselights for a few seconds? To stop dramatizing and actually do a thing? To flip a voting lever?

I had problems with absentee ballots last time, to my enormous shame and regret. But I'm on it for midterms.

Smashing

Thumbs up for smashed windows in Tesla stores! Yay, smashing!

The psychology is not complicated. 1. Adopt a two-dimensional cartoon view of the world, removing humanity, consistency, and morality from consideration. Then... 2. Smash, with relish.

I don't like Elon Musk. I pray for his stock price to keep crashing so his loans get called in so he no longer has infinite money to perpetrate evil. I'll do anything legal and principled to try to stop him.

But Tesla dealerships are not run by Luftwaffe colonels. They're run by actual people, inconvenient as that might be to the two-dimensional cartoon view. I can't believe this needs stating, but a vandalized Tesla or Tesla dealership might be (and probably is!) run by a progressive who was trying to reduce carbon emissions. They're likely trying to get out from under their investment (tricky given the market). They might even be LGBTQ or trans or some other victim group you deem worth loads of extra consideration.

This is just one reason smashing is a bad tactic. The problem with summary judgement is that we're incredibly shitty/sloppy judges.

Smashing stuff smashes the vaunted "rule of law" you're suddenly super in love with this year. If you celebrate illegal smashing, you deserve a Daily Show-style clip contrasting that with your weighty pronouncements about Institutions and The Rule of Law, because—surprise!—now you're the flag-waving fake patriot hypocrite goon.

If you don't want to live in a cartoon world where the rule of law means nothing whenever anyone decides that Baddies need smashing, consider adding the magical third dimension of thoughtfulness and morality. At least don't *egg on* the smashers. Could you manage the milquetoast credo of "No 'Thumbs Up' for Smashing!"? That's not a heavy lift, is it? You don't necessarily need to scold them amid their smashy good fun. Just maybe don't offer your full-throated support.

Because the face-eating hyenas always eat your face in the end. Guaranteed. Not just the MAGAs. All extremists. All smashers. And your admiration fuels them.

Fuck.

Lobster Boil Update

Three years ago, I wrote about the sticky wicket of knowing when to jump out of the pot when you sense an impending lobster boil. I proposed a way to prepare for such eventuality without obligating yourself or going to undue expense or trouble (How to Plan an Alternative Timeline While Remaining Momentarily Complacent (Part 1) and How to Plan an Alternative Timeline While Remaining Momentarily Complacent (Part 2)).

The boil is now explicitly revealing its heat. You're not in immediate personal danger, but it's getting too late for a dilative, comfortably thoughtful appraoch. What is happening is not cyclical. Things are broken that will stay broken, and we are only getting started breaking things. And it's difficult but essential to register that the burn-it-down thirst is broad, and not confined to the Right. That, to me, is the tectonic problem, not Elon Musk's scampering atrocities (I may be wrong, but I imagine he'll be gone sooner or later).

I've repeated this thought twice in the last month not because I'm getting old and forgetful, but because it's super important: Bernie Sanders in 2015 was giving speeches proposing, with populist fire, sweeping, tectonic changes to institutions, while crowds roared appreciatively. There was serious MAGA energy (same vibe, different credo) at the time among the progressive Left, and it hasn't dissipated any.

A fundamental credo of this Slog is that "Recognizing stupidity doesn't mean you're smart, it just means you're observant". Same for spotting delusion, or bad behavior of most sorts. Simply noticing how deranged the Right is does not make you sane.

I'm not taking shots at the Left because I have a political credo to push. My point is that we don't just have a problem on the Right, we have a national problem transcending partisanship. As we learned from the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, it's possible to have extremely legitimate beefs with an opposing group without earning moral high ground for yours. Both of you might be awful. You must add that possibility to your calculus...or else consider moving to the lonely Center.

The Right seems a trillion times worse right now, but that's only because they actually got their shot at it. So I don't see a cyclical problem (which might get better) but a systemic one (which will get worse).

I'm looking ahead here, which is an unusual move amid tumult. But it's not my thing to stand frozen in a stupor repeating "This can't be happening!" I perpetually scan for the next shoe-drop. My life has been more difficult than most, so protracted struggles to accept the here-and-now are indulgences I could never have afforded. I've taught myself to reframe on a dime—to immediately accept the immediate and pay all attention forward.

To conclude: a piece of good news, and a piece of bad (or, ok, "even worse") news:

GOOD NEWS (doesn't start off sounding good, though): America is fast losing its position in the world (destruction is much swifter than construction). How much does this matter to an individual life? By chance, I asked the same question before moving to Portugal: "What do I give up going from the strongest country to a smaller, weaker one?" The full answer would require a separate posting, but the upshot is "not much".

Pundits and columnists are ruing the potential end of the American Century, but that big picture view is what they're paid to consider. For you and me, unless we have a severe case of scorekeeping and a rabid desire to be "NUMBER ONE!!!", it doesn't matter much. Individual lives are small, and living deeper down in the pack offers a helpful reminder of this. I don't need Portugal to be an awesome force in the world, I am completely ok with it merely feeling like home.

It might even make living in America more pleasant in the long run. The vibe is considerably kinder and chiller when you're not living amongst world-ruling titans, who can get a little tramply. So don't get too caught up in the pundit/columnist big picture framing. Tectonic changes are interesting for historians, but none of us are historic figures. So shave that lofty part off of your personal stress load and motivation.

BAD NEWS: Five Eyes, an Anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States, has either stopped, slowed, or plans to stop (depending on news reports) sharing some or all intelligence with the United States. Frankly, I wouldn't pass the crown jewels of my country's safe-keeping past Tulsi Gabbard, either, even if the ultimate destination weren't Donald Trump.

Five Eyes is the most important thing you never heard of. Five Eyes is what keeps us safe, particularly when it comes to terrorism (I read up on intelligence stuff as a hobby). So if you live in a major city center, you might want to move somewhere less targetty. The insecurity urbanites felt in Fall 2001—which thankfully didn't amount to anything but spurred many of your neighbors to leave town, along with the second migration post-COVID—may have quietly passed a tipping point, creating a reasonable imperative, if not immediate panic. Sorry.

A Rarely-Considered Angle on Food-Borne Illness

As a food critic who's eaten in tens of thousands of eateries in dozens of countries, I've felt pretty expert about foodborne illness, both experientially and scientifically. But four months with a seemingly unpurgeable Campylobacter infection—so severe that I lost 35 pounds and filled my kidneys with tiny stones from dehydration—proved educational.

Scientists know a lot, and eaters know a lot, but it takes an ordeal like that to bridge the two. I've pieced it all together, and it's useful knowledge for all chowhounds.

There's a widespread notion that greasy little ethnic joints can make you sick because they're careless and sloppy. And while you can get sick anywhere, odds do seem empirically worse in certain venues. It feels xenophobic to ascribe sloppy carelessness to certain groups. Also, it's wrong. Any human grouping cooking dangerously wouldn't last long. Humans are super good at reproducing, defecating, eating, and cooking. Those things are bedrock for us. Every group cooks healthy for their group (or at least did until modernity shifted diet).

So are the perceived perils entirely xenophobic? No. There's a reasonable explanation: the third world doesn't sweat cross contamination. Not because its standards are lower, but because it's usually unecessary...for two reasons. We'll get to those reasons in a moment.

This is a terrible time to be writing this, with a big chunk of America increasingly vocal about third world immigrants as filthy spreaders of pestilence. I'm doing the opposite. I'm explaining what's actually happening, which is perfectly innocent.

Cross contamination, for the few who don't know, is when hands, implements, or surfaces touch raw meat and then come into contact with cooked meat, contaminating the cooked meat. Absurdly extreme diligence is required to prevent this. I'm hyper-aware of the issue, and even I find it difficult to be 100% conscientious in my food handling.

Cross contamination is a fairly recent peril in the First World which, in the 20th century, industrialized its meat handling (densely packed farms and slaughterhouses, multiple processings, etc.). At some point, it became so laborious—i.e. expensive—to keep meat safe through that production line that we gave up trying. As a result, our meat must be handed like medical waste.

Yes. We are the sloppy, careless, dirty ones. And the Third World is unprepared for our slovenliness. In less developed parts of the world, much of the meat is butchered from known animals within a few miles of home, and reasonable butchering/cooking/storing practices keep things safe for people with healthy digestive systems. And people do have healthy digestive systems. Kids play in streets with dodgy sanitation, stoking the super fortified guts and immune systems we all enjoyed before First Worlders began raising kids in sterile bubbles, leaving them asthmatic, colicky, and eternally sensitive.

The Third World has no concept of meat as medical waste, so immigrants may not treat meat like medical waste. They cope in their home cooking because their guts and immune systems are hardy. And when they take jobs as cooks, they learn the strange practices of avoiding cross contamination. We enjoy their food without problems, as their cohorts, licensers, and inspectors ensure they're up to speed (though restaurants in more insular Indian communities may be more prone to old-fashioned cooking methods for the old-fashioned Indian guts of their clientele).

In Portugal, off-the-boat Indians cook largely Indian-style with no sub-community of native-friendly Indian restaurateurs to spread word about the colicky, sensitive stomachs of locals, or about the medical waste nature of industrialized meat. And their largely Indian clientele experience no problems, so they work with no sense of peril.

The good news is that even in worst case scenarios, most of us can endure food-borne illness without medical treatment. 24 hour turnaround is normal. But not me. For various reasons, I'm unusually susceptible, which has forced me to puzzle this all out.

Even for me, there's a solution. A brief (seconds, not minutes) reheating to a modest 165F/74C (internal) kills relevant cooties.

Disclaimer: This reheating advice covers typical cross-contamination scenarios from conscientious kitchens. Truly hazardous pathogens arising from severe neglect require prolonged boiling or sustained high heat, but such outbreaks would make news and you're generally no more vulnerable than anyone else.

A risk scenario between the two extremes occurs when cross-contaminated food sits at room temperature long enough for bacteria to multiply significantly. While brief reheating will still kill the organisms, their abundant microscopic remnants may still pose risks. Such cases, fortunately, are less common. Reasonably diligent chefs from everywhere know to take pains to refrigerate.

Two notes:

1. Use a thermometer to ensure that interiors hit that temperature (position meats at the bottom of the rewarming pan, close to heat source).

2. Be careful of your own cross contamination. Until heated, handle everything like raw meat.

Since I can't possibly train every immigrant in the knotty practice of avoiding cross-contamination (to them it seems like hysterical paranoia—which, in a way, it is), when I want Indian food, I take it home and briefly reheat. No problem. And any thriving business with non-Indian customers is safe, too. Again, kitchens that sicken customers don't last.

I eat tons of Indian food (my Bengali food is cooked by an Ayurvedic practitioner who is extra-healthy in ways even I can't fathom), and I haven't had a recurrence in quite some time. That said, I haven't figured out how I can safely travel to the Third World. My wanderings may be done.


More general advice on gastric issues

Maslow's Sledgehammer

Once the radicals have thoroughly demolished the economy and the federal government's ability to function, and their supporters are forced to acknowledge how bad it is, most won’t cop to their part in it. They’ll say it’s just more proof that all politicians are liars who let you down, so we need even more deranged outsiders to come in and do things hyperbolically differently.

For most of history, crowds reverted to the mean. Fervor eventually drained, and they moved toward the center. That, I think is gone. Our nation of aristocrats will just keep huffily demanding relief from their imagined oppressors (and from the real ills created by previous relief efforts).

Contemplation in 2025

I sometimes hear from readers who figure that there's something wrong, either with me or them, because they can't easily pick up my gist, and must reread posts.

Either the problem's on my side—because I'm convoluting otherwise simple ideas (I'm not), or I'm just too "brainy" (that might be true if these ideas came easily to me, but I'm a normal guy who thinks long and hard)—or the problem's their's, for being foggily unable to connect as easily as they do with magazine articles and typical blog posts.

Neither is true.

Writers these days aim for easy digestibility above all. Like mama birds, they pre-chew everything to vomit down readers' gullets, terrified by their knowledge of how finicky folks are about unprocessed chunks. For years, I was one of the most easily digestible of writers. I don't regret it, it was fun, and I'm proud of my output (read some here).

But notions and insights percolate that do not lend themselves to glib premastication. Readers must chew a bit on writing which requires—and hopefully rewards—multiple re-readings. In 2025, that's a shocking ask. But while mental exercise isn't for everyone/anyone (super smart people get particularly frustrated when their powerful minds can't effortlessly Hoover everything up on the first pass), a few holdouts like me still demand it. Substance has no economic or aesthetic value in 2025, but it pings my Golden Rule. As a reader, I'd love this stuff.

I'm constantly bombarded by gooey glibness—the same ideas, the same buzzwords, the same framings with just a slight tilt to make it the writer's own. I can go weeks or months without seeing a single fresh idea. The Slog is mostly fresh ideas, and fresh ideas don't swallow easily. Re-reading is necessary.

I've re-read all the postings in the left sidebar multiple times, because I write to firm up nebulous intuition into more solid ideas and to try to connect them. Each time I reread, it firms up and connects better, propelling me toward new epiphanies and connections. I've been doing exactly what you've hopefully been doing - chewing on these ideas. The necessity of doing so is not a bug, it's a feature. It's not that I'm smart, or that you're dumb. It's that contemplation, while a sorely underused faculty, remains an option (for both of us!).

I addressed this seven years ago in a posting called "Cognitive Lozenges", noting that "these postings are cognitive lozenges which, by design, impede speedy absorption (by, for example, forcing you to unpack phrases like "cognitive lozenges"). The ideas that absorb me are counterintuitive and nuanced, and while I always leave a breadcrumb trail, I choose not to spoon-feed (having worked as a professional spoon-feeder for years). I want you to work it all through, as I have, and maybe go further than I could."

Jim's Rubric

Aiming deep leaves you shallow.

Depth sneaks up while you flail.

Substantiality Inoculates Against Scammability

I recently wrote about the scam operations sweeping the globe using the business methods of international mega-corporations. Now with this, too:

....I've been thinking a lot about cons.

The perennial truth about cons is that only the greedy can be conned. Rubio isn't innocent. He put ambition above principle and above even the country he thirsts to lead. Trump merely exploited his original sin. Really, they deserve each other.

There's an alternative, which makes you immune to scams and cons:

Don't do any of that.

Principles first!


Here's why that's hard for people: Most don't have principles; they have placeholders, unthinkingly adopting the slogans and inclinations of their tribe, their class, their family, their workplace, their friends, their role models, some TV show or film. It's extraordinarily thin and propositional, and thus can be replaced by other principles with frightful ease whenever some actually deep drive (ego thirst, greed, fear, etc) supersedes, or merely when tides shift.

This explains, for instance, why conservatism meant one thing in 2015 and a nearly opposite thing in 2016 to tens of millions of people who felt solidly conservative through it all. Hypocrisy? Not really. Just empty tribalism. When a flock turns, the flock turns. They hardly notice.

Building principles deeply and carefully is like cooking deeply and carefully. Results will be meaningful, and that feedback loop solidifies the process. Haphazard cooking and thoughtful cooking are utterly different, and the cooks even more so. The latter stand for something. I haven't heard the word "substantial" used lately, and when I do, it usually refers someone with a great big house. We've lost the very concept! And insubstantial people are easily conned.

A big factor in my scam immunity is that I don't crave cheap shortcuts. Some people get emails from Nigerian princes and at least momentarily dream of $100 million windfalls. That wouldn't fulfill life fantasies for me. A bizarre fluke, nothing more. My satisfaction stems from writing something fresh and compelling, or playing or cooking something beautiful, or helping a stranger (and scramming before it turns kooky). Processing my confusion into insight. Finding a great hidden restaurant. Treasure hunting and treasure creation let me cling closely to treasure! Perhaps I'm the most deeply greedy of all, but I channel my greed differently.

And I don't stoically endure my process of seeking satisfaction—my work. As a karma yogi, I've found that the work itself is the juicy sweet spot. The crafting is infinitely more rewarding than the result. If you scheme to jump to the result—to haphazardly cook one up, or take a cheap shortcut—you're a nowhere man. Just more insubstantiality, our national curse.

"Fame is a by-product of doing something else. You don't go to a restaurant and order a meal just because you want to take a shit!" -- Banksy

If Kim Kardashian locked eyes with me in a bar and told me I seem fascinating, I'd tell her "No, I don't. I actually might be, but you have no way of knowing that. G'bye." Not just to avoid the inevitable con, but because I get no kicks from cheap shortcuts. The shortcut itself is like a scam, and I'm reality-based.

These disinclinations of mine - I don't want a hundred million dollars wired from Nigeria, and I don't want "a shot at" Kim Kardashian, and I don't want to be president, etc ad infinitum - have always made me seem like a loser. A grubby rat scurrying about, fretting over iPad charging cords, painstakingly editing each word like polishing rocks, fraughtly choosing between non-aspirational lunch places, and staying up till 4am to de-commercialize online food discussion. These are not the activities of studly, successful, admirable people. Such people make A HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS. They SCREW KIM KARDASHIAN. They become PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. And so they can be led around like slaves while seemingly ambition-less rats like me are free and impervious.