And some more backlogged articles
Dec. 30th, 2010 12:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly
Choreographing a Snowplow Ballet, to Mixed Reviews (Again)
Gotta love the guy in the article whining about how "Nobody cares about Brooklyn". Try living on Staten Island!
In the city’s plan, it is envisioned as something like a ballet of behemoths, with a fleet of more than 2,000 garbage trucks swooping through the streets, brushing aside tons of snow as quickly as possible. But like most things in New York, each snowstorm brings a flurry of disagreement over how well that production has come off.
The blizzard that covered the city Sunday and Monday was no exception. Even before the high winds and snow ended Monday morning, cries of neglect could be heard across the five boroughs.
“They don’t care about Brooklyn, man,” said Tito Ernest, 32, who was trying to dig out a black Honda Accord stuck in the middle of the intersection of Rutland Road and Rockaway Parkway. “They had every chance to come out here to plow since last night.”
The city’ s sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, who oversees snow removal efforts, said he understood people’s frustration, but he asked for cooperation, patience and a little historical perspective. Mr. Doherty said that in 1996 it took the city 34 hours to clear the streets after a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow, roughly the same amount that had fallen by Monday afternoon.
“I would like to reduce that time if I could,” he said. “I’ll have to see how successful I’ll be.”
Despite the complaints of favoritism, city officials said their plan of attack for clearing snow had nothing to do with geographic preferences — say, plowing certain boroughs or neighborhoods before others — and everything to do with the type of street.
The plan divides roadways into three major categories: arterial, secondary and tertiary. Arterial streets are the main thoroughfares, which are typically bus routes and are cleared first. The next focus is secondary streets, which are generally the straight roadways that feed into arterial streets. Tertiary roads, the narrow and sometimes curved residential streets that feed into secondary streets, are the last to be plowed.
That means that much of Manhattan, with its concentration of arterial streets, gets quicker attention.
Within each of those three categories, roadways are assigned numeric values, which are used both to set priorities and to assign routes. Those determinations are made and reviewed each year by the commanders in each of 59 sanitation districts, or commands, which match the boundaries of community boards.
As a storm approaches, the first line of attack is a pre-emptive strike by 365 spreaders, each holding as much as 16 tons of salt. On Sunday, they were deployed before the snow began falling.
Once the snowfall totals two inches, about 1,700 city garbage trucks fitted with plows hit the streets.
Mr. Doherty said those plows could often move on to secondary streets as the snow fell, but the snowfall and drifts in this blizzard kept the trucks on the arterial roadways well into Monday morning. Plows were also hindered by abandoned cars stuck in the middle of secondary streets, and in a few cases plow operators could not see those obstacles through the darkness and blowing snow until they, too, were stuck.
Further, the department must typically replow where car owners have shoveled snow back into the streets.
Mr. Doherty said the secondary streets, which he anticipated being cleared Monday night and Tuesday, presented special difficulties with this much snow: It can be too much for even a 20-ton garbage truck, so front-end loaders must pick it up and move it.
“If you go in there with one of our collection trucks, if you are not careful, you will get bogged down,” he said. “As strong as it is, they cannot push that much snow out of the way.”
The Sanitation Department also looks beyond its own equipment and workforce, hiring as many as 900 day laborers to shovel bus stops and sidewalks. And private operators of heavy equipment like front-end loaders and dump trucks are hired to help out.
Mr. Doherty said that outside operators had been a component of the city’s plan for decades, but that their response for this storm had been low.
It typically takes 36 hours to make a pass through all of the smaller roads, said Vito A. Turso, a Sanitation Department spokesman.
That timeline would beat a 1994 snow plan by the Giuliani administration, which estimated that 16 inches of fresh snow would take three to six days to clear from tertiary streets.
Snow removal has been laced with political overtones since 1969, when an outcry from Queens over the pace of street clearing after a blizzard knocked the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay on its heels. In 1996, Howard Golden, then the Brooklyn borough president, accused Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of devoting more resources to Staten Island, which had been important to Mr. Giuliani’s election.
On Monday, Peter F. Vallone Jr., a City Council member who represents Astoria, Queens, said his neighborhood was being treated poorly.
“The only plow I saw all day was the one that crashed into the corner near my house,” said Mr. Vallone, who added that the Council’s public safety committee, which he leads, would hold a hearing on the city’s handling of the storm.
“We need an explanation,” Mr. Vallone said. “Is it budget cuts? Is it a lack of planning? What caused this storm to be different from every other one we’ve lived through?”
Mr. Doherty said the cutbacks that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had ordered in the Sanitation Department’s budget had not hurt the city’s response. And he laughed off a question about whether political concerns played a role in setting road-clearing priorities.
“No,” Mr. Doherty said. “Because if you play politics, you get fired very quickly. You have to do your job, and you have to treat everybody the same.”
A Variety of Ways Not to Have Christmas
It’s a holiday from work and school. It’s wrapping paper torn and scattered about the tree. For the fortunate, it’s a family dinner with good food and minimal drama. But for two groups of people in particular, Christmas is a time to feel like a minority.
First, there are those Christians committed to resisting the holiday’s materialism; second, there are those who do not celebrate Christmas at all. This week I asked members of both groups what their Christmases would be like. Here is a sampling of what they said:
Rod Dreher of Philadelphia, author of “Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots” and a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church: “Orthodoxy preserves the older Christian understanding of the weeks leading up to Christmas as a time of penance, like Lent before Easter. You can imagine how difficult this is to pull off when everybody else is chowing down on holiday party food.
“But Orthodoxy insists that if the fast is only about abstaining from food, it’s meaningless. You also have to abstain from anger, and everything that separates you from God. I’ve been working on my temper during this Nativity fast season, on trusting God’s providence in difficult situations and on learning how to see God in everyone. It’s hard — but that’s the point, isn’t it?”
David Silverman of Cranford, N.J., president of American Atheists: “On Christmas, I hide under the table and sit in a fetal position. No, that’s not true. I don’t celebrate it. My wife is Jewish by religion, so we have a mixed marriage. My daughter, who’s 13, is an atheist 357 days of the year, and the other 8 days, she is a Jew. She doesn’t hide that at all.
“I never celebrate Christmas. The one thing I do is I go to my friends’ parties. If they have a Christmas party I am all there.”
Heidi Miller Yoder, an assistant professor of religion at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va.: “Some Mennonites have been very intentional about spending no more than $100 on Christmas gifts. It’s a movement not only within the Mennonite Church but within the larger Christian church.
“Other families have deliberately said, ‘We will only do homemade gifts.’ In my extended family, we donate gifts instead, and for the children, we do give them some gifts, realizing that it’s adults who distinguish between needs and wants, and they are learning to do that.”
David Semonian, who works at the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ world headquarters, in Brooklyn Heights: “We don’t celebrate Christmas, and the primary reason is because the Bible doesn’t direct us to do so. Jesus commanded us to commemorate his death, and not his birth. We have the day off, and enjoy getting together with our families and children, but it wouldn’t be a time of giving gifts or any implication we are celebrating the holiday.”
Andrew Krivak, a former Jesuit seminarian and the author of “The Sojourn,” a novel to be published in May: “I grew up in a house where, early on, there was almost as much Slovak as English spoken, the Christmas Eve dinner of fish, soup, and oplatki wafers (and a bit of brandy, of course) seemed almost more important than Christmas Day itself. No doubt because it was a gathering of family without all the trappings of Christmas Day, but maybe, too, because it led right into Mass at midnight.
“So I do the best I can to approximate my grandmother’s and my mother’s old menu, and somehow we always manage to have more than ourselves around the table, which is nice.
“And while it’s hard now to get to midnight Mass with three kids under 5, if someone’s willing to baby-sit, my wife and I slip out to church still, and come back with only a few hours before the whole house wakes up, but satisfied in a simple way that Christmas remains for us a season of holy days.”
Janet Gyatso, professor of Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School: “I grew up Jewish, and my own practice is a mix of Judaism and Buddhism and being a critical intellectual and not identifying with the practice of any of it, per se. But Buddhism teaches one to be as generous and open-minded as possible. Any remaining feelings of being excluded from Christmas as a kid have simply vanished for me as an adult. One just takes pleasure from it all.”
Angel Falcon, a student at Rutgers School of Law in Newark and a practitioner of Palo Mayombe, a traditional Afro-Cuban religion: “I don’t take offense when people say, ‘Merry Christmas.’ When you’re Latino, Christmas and Jesus play an important role even if you’re not Christian. I like to say that Jesus and I don’t have a problem. His crew can be a little annoying, but he’s fine.”
A Tug of War, With Strings of Lights
Back in 2005, after the first of their children was born, Liz McCarthy saw a strange obsession take hold of her husband, Andrew. He began festooning more and more of their home in the Bronx with brightly colored Christmas lights, claiming he was “doing it for the kids.” Every surface became his canvas: the bushes and flower beds, the 40-foot evergreen on their lawn, their siding, their eaves, their mantel, their kitchen.
But Mrs. McCarthy wanted white lights, not unlike those that twinkled gracefully from the nearby Throgs Neck Bridge. She finally persuaded her husband this year to agree to a truce. They would alternate the color of the Christmas tree lights each year.
“It’s almost like this recurring fight; he’s become so neurotic about having colored lights,” Mrs. McCarthy, 36, said. “The tree this year is white lights. It was my turn.”
And so it goes, a battle played out in living rooms across the city and the nation at this time of year: White lights or colored lights?
These divisions often run deep, adding to holiday stresses in a season notorious for bringing family fissures to the fore. To Mrs. McCarthy, having a Christmas tree with white lights meant creating almost a room of her own in a house overrun by riotous color. To her in-laws on Long Island, in the grip of the same debate, the differences are defined by taste. To a New Jersey couple in their 70s, the Codringtons, the divergence of opinions has cultural roots.
The origins of the white-versus-colored holiday light debate are unclear. Electric Christmas lights began replacing the fire-hazardous candles in the early 1900s, and their popularity increased greatly in the wave of giddy consumption that defined the post-World War II years.
Somewhere along the way, white lights came to represent a sort of sophistication; one need only behold the acres of white-only lights blanketing Fifth Avenue in recent years. (Rockefeller Center has it both ways: the big tree is drenched with multicolored lights, but the smaller ones surrounding it have white.)
Of the hundreds of thousands of strings of lights sold each year by one leading vendor, Christmas Lights Etc. of Georgia, 70 percent are white.
Not every style maven is happy about this. Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York — a place that would seem to suggest sophistication — said the notion that white lights implied good taste was “about a quarter-century out of date.”
“It’s very ’80s ‘Dynasty,’ ” Mr. Doonan wrote in an e-mail, referring to the evening soap opera. “People who are pathological about white lights are usually the same people who stuff their TV into an armoire and try to pretend they don’t have one.” Colored lights, by contrast, Mr. Doonan said, are “beautiful and magical” and carnival-like.
“When I pass a suburban house festooned with twinkly colored fairy lights,” Mr. Doonan wrote, “I always scream ‘Bravo’ out of the window of my car.”
As a girl in Sweden in the 1950s, Kerstin Codrington grew up with candles on holiday trees. After moving to the United States for school and marrying her husband, Garrett Codrington, she was horrified by the colored lights American families used.
“When I saw these trees with green and red and orange things, and some had water in them that bubbled — have you seen those?” Mrs. Codrington, 72, said, “I was appalled.”
In the early years of the marriage, the couple, then short of cash, used the colored lights given to them by Mr. Codrington’s family. Mrs. Codrington replaced them with white lights as soon as she could, to Mr. Codrington’s slight dismay.
“We had a few fights about lights,” Mrs. Codrington said. Their home, in Chester, N.J., is now a white-light-only zone, though Mrs. Codrington sometimes catches her husband gazing wistfully at the next-door neighbor’s multihued bushes.
“We’ve had this cultural clash for 50 years,” Mr. Codrington said. “But one surrenders with other victories. For example, she stayed with me.”
Elyse Goldstein, an Upper East Side psychologist, said that while she had yet to encounter couples struggling with the question of white or colored lights, such squabbles can indicate other issues in a partnership. There may be power struggles afoot, or a reluctance to stray from traditions from one’s childhood.
“Changing the eggnog recipe or serving Champagne instead won’t matter,” she wrote in an e-mail, “and represents you and your partner putting your own new stamp on things.”
Yet the echoes of childhood die hard. For three years, Caitlin McCarthy, 30, who lives on Long Island in Oyster Bay, has endured the insistence of her husband of three months, Kevin — brother of Andrew McCarthy of the Bronx — to use not only white lights, but also a synthetic tree.
Caitlin McCarthy maintains, however, that indoor trees should be decorated with colored lights, as was the custom in her childhood home. She plans to lay down the law, she said, once the couple buys a house. “I’ll get my way,” she said.
Necessity Pushes Pakistani Women Into Jobs and Peril
Dinner at Rabia Sultana’s house is now served over a cold silence. Her family has not spoken to her since May, when Ms. Sultana, 21, swapped her home life for a cashier’s job at McDonald’s.
Her conservative brother berated Ms. Sultana for damaging the family’s honor by taking a job in which she interacts with men — and especially one that requires her to shed her burqa in favor of a short-sleeved McDonald’s uniform.
Then he confiscated her uniform, slapped her across the face and threatened to break her legs if he saw her outside the home.
Her family may be outraged, but they are also in need. Ms. Sultana donates her $100 monthly salary to supplement the household budget for expenses that the men in her family can no longer pay for, including school fees for her younger sisters.
Ms. Sultana is part of a small but growing generation of lower-class young women here who are entering service-sector jobs to support their families, and by extension, pitting their religious and cultural traditions against economic desperation.
The women are pressed into the work force not by nascent feminism but by inflation, which has spiked to 12.7 percent from 1.4 percent in the past seven years. As a result, one salary — the man’s salary — can no longer feed a family.
“It’s not just the economic need, but need of the nation,” said Rafiq Rangoonwala, the chief executive officer of KFC Pakistan, who has challenged his managers to double the number of women in his work force by next year. “Otherwise, Pakistan will never progress. We’ll always remain a third-world country because 15 percent of the people cannot feed 85 percent of the population.”
Female employment at KFC in Pakistan has risen 125 percent in the past five years.
Several chains like McDonald’s and the supermarket behemoth Makro, where the number of women has quadrupled since 2006, have introduced free transit services for female employees to protect them from harassment and to help persuade them take jobs where they may face hostility. “We’re a society in transition,” said Zeenat Hisam, a senior researcher at the Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research. “Men in Pakistan haven’t changed, and they’re not changing as fast as our women. Men want to keep their power in their hand.
“The majority of the people here believe in the traditional interpretation of Islam, and they get very upset because religious leaders tell them it’s not proper for women to go out and to work and to serve strange men.”
More than 100 young women who recently entered service jobs told of continual harassment.
At work, some women spend more time deflecting abuse from customers than serving them. On the way home, they are heckled in buses and condemned by neighbors. It is so common for brothers to confiscate their uniforms that McDonald’s provides women with three sets.
“If I leave this job, everything would be O.K. at home,” Ms. Sultana said. “But then there’d be a huge impact on our house. I want to make something of myself, and for my sisters, who are at home and don’t know anything about the outside world.”
So far, the movement of women into the service sector has been largely limited to Karachi. Elsewhere across Pakistan, women are still mostly relegated to their homes, or they take jobs in traditional labor settings like women-only stitching factories or girls’ schools, where salaries can be half of those in the service industry. Even the most trailblazing of companies, like KFC, still employ 90 percent men.
Pakistan ranked 133rd out of the 134 countries on the 2010 Global Gender Gap Report’s list of women’s economic participation.
While there is no reliable data on the number of women who specifically enter the service sector, Pakistan’s female work force hovers around 20 percent, among the lowest of any Muslim country.
Some women, like Saima, 22, are forced to lead secret lives to earn $175 a month. Her father’s shopkeeper’s salary does not cover the family’s expenses. Without a university degree, the only job Saima could find was at a call center of a major restaurant’s delivery department. But she impressed the manger so much that he offered her a higher-paying waitress job at a branch near her home.
She reluctantly agreed, but pleaded to be sent to a restaurant two hours away so she would not be spotted by family members and neighbors.
After three years, her family still thinks she works in the basement of a call center. On several occasions, she served old friends who did not recognize her without a head scarf. Her confidence has soared, but she is overwhelmed with guilt.
“I’ve completely changed myself here,” she said in the corner booth of her restaurant before her co-workers arrived. “But honestly, I’m not happy with what I’m doing.”
The women interviewed said they had to battle stereotypes that suggested that women who work were sexually promiscuous. Sometimes men misinterpret simple acts of customer service, like a smile. Fauzia, who works as a cashier at KFC, said that last year a customer was so taken with her smile that he followed her out the door and tried to force her into his car before she escaped.
Sunila Yusuf, a saleswoman who wears pink traditional clothes at home but skintight jeans at the trendy clothing boutique in the Park Towers shopping mall, said her fiancé had offered to pay her a $100 monthly wage if she would stay at home.
“He knows that Pakistani men don’t respect women,” she said.
Hina, who works the counter at KFC, said her brothers, who also work fast-food jobs, worried that she had become “too sharp and too exposed.”
“They can look at other people’s girls,” Hina said with a grimace. “But they want their own girls hidden.”
Mr. Rangoonwala, the KFC Pakistan executive, said: “Unfortunately, our society is a hypocritical society. We have two sets of rules, one for males and one for females.”
For Fauzia, the hardest part of the day is the 15-minute walk through the narrow alleys to reach her home. She wears a burqa to conceal her uniform, but word of mouth about her job has spread. Neighbors shout, “What kind of job is this?” as she briskly walks by with her head down.
As a solution, some companies spend up to $8,000 a month to transport their female workers in minivans.
A federal law, citing safety concerns, prohibits women from working after 10 p.m. It was extended from a 7 p.m. deadline last year.
Most companies, however, are unwilling to absorb the extra cost of employing women. Even most stores that sell purses, dresses, perfumes and jewelry do not employ women.
Kamil Aziz, who owns Espresso, the city’s most popular coffee chain, said he made it a point not to hire “the other gender” because women could not work the late shift and the turnover rate among women was higher. He said he also did not want to invest in separate changing rooms.
Nearly all of the 100 women interviewed said marriage would end to their careers. But many of them saw benefits along with the hazards.
Most women said that they had never left the house before taking a job. Many spent the first five months missing buses and getting lost. When they first arrived at work, they stuttered nervously in the presence of men.
Now they know better.
“I’ve learned never to take what husbands say at face value,” said Sana Raja Haroon, a saleswoman at Labels, a clothing boutique where men sometimes slide her their business card.
But the employed women are also approached by admiring young women who want to follow their lead.
“Girls envy us,” said Bushra, a KFC worker. “We are considered the men of the house, and that feels good.”
How Not to Wreck a Nonstick Pan
THIS all began when I was trying to come up with a clever idea for a Hanukkah present for my older son. Having exhausted all the sports-themed possibilities, I decided to buy him a griddle since he has become quite the pancake chef.
My son greeted the present with more enthusiasm than I expected. A couple of days later, I realized it would be perfect for making holiday latkes. Usually I use two frying pans, but since we had this nice new nonstick griddle, why not make things easier?
I asked Ben if I could borrow it and he graciously agreed. I fried 89 latkes (but who’s counting) for a get-together. The guests were happy, but the griddle was burned.
I soaked. I scrubbed with little plastic scrub brushes, as suggested. It still looked nothing like new. Before admitting to Ben that I had ruined his present, I looked up “cleaning nonstick griddles” on the Internet.
I came across a lot of advice about cleaning, but also how to use this type of cookware in the first place. And to my surprise, I have been using nonstick pans in an inappropriate manner for, oh, the last three decades or so — in fact, ever since I started cooking for myself.
So as a holiday gift, I am going to share with you what I have learned in hopes of saving you from my mistakes. And as a treat, I’ll throw in a few other cleaning tips as well.
Let’s start with nonstick cookware. Teflon is the patented product made by DuPont, but most people use the term generically to refer to nonstick pans.
For our purposes here, I am not going to delve into the health issues. I did write a column about these concerns about four years ago, weighing the health risks of using pans with nonstick coatings. I didn’t come down on either side, but the reality, according to Consumer Reports, is that nonstick cookware accounts for about 70 percent of all such sales in the United States.
So millions of us are cooking with nonstick pots and pans. But in the wrong way.
“A lot of people buy pans and don’t read the directions,” said Reed Winter, director of research and development for Nordic Ware, a maker of household goods and the manufacturer of the griddle I bought my son.
Ahem. I confessed right away to Mr. Winter that that was true in my case. I barely read the manual when I buy a new car. Am I really going to pore over the directions for a pan?
So this is what I should have known. I should have “preseasoned” the pan by rinsing and drying it and rubbing it with a paper towel with a little oil on it. Pretty much any type of oil will do.
It’s a good idea to rub about a teaspoon of oil or butter on a cold pan each time you use it, Mr. Winter said, because despite the name nonstick, most of the cookware needs some kind of lubricant.
Just don’t pour oil or butter on the pan and then slosh it around (my method).
“Then the oil is not adhering to the pan but being absorbed by the food,” he said. Not only will you have butter-soaked pancakes, but after a while they’ll start sticking because there’s no grease.
But what about PAM or other cooking sprays? I often put a few squirts on my nonstick frying pans.
Not a great idea, I was told. After a time, the build-up in the areas where the heat doesn’t burn the spray off — like on the sides of a frying pan — becomes sticky and pasty. I found this to be true of my pans, but didn’t know why.
Mr. Winter said it’s the soy lecithin in the spray that causes that stickiness. Instead, he recommends just using oil or a spray called Baker’s Joy that also contains flour.
For due diligence, I checked in with DuPont, the makers of Teflon, and a spokeswoman said in an e-mail that “it is acceptable” to use nonstick cooking sprays although “not necessary.” And a spokesman at ConAgra Foods, which makes PAM, said, “You should check with your cookware manufacturer” to see if it is safe to use with PAM.
Another thing I shouldn’t have done is put the griddle on a high heat. High temperatures cause the coating to crack, Mr. Winter said, and don’t even cook the food as well. The food tends to be partly burned and partly doughy, he said.
“Using a lower heat means it will turn out perfectly,” he said.
Also, don’t use any metal or sharp objects to stir or turn food, because it can pierce the coating.
Now as far as cleaning, I did scrub with a plastic scrubby sponge (never steel wool). Then I soaked with baking powder and hot water. Then I used some vinegar and water. It looks better, but not perfect.
Although I don’t usually put my cookware in the dishwasher, I did as a last-ditch effort — another bad idea. Most experts I talked to said to hand-wash nonstick cookware, because the high heat and harsh detergents can ruin the coatings.
In the end, the griddle looks, shall we say, well used. I showed it to my son and apologized. He took it with good grace.
A few more tips. Store your pots and pans properly, said Mariette Mifflin, who writes about housewares and appliances for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times.
If you nest them, they can scratch. Putting a napkin between the pots prevents that.
And realize you’ll probably have to replace nonstick cookware more often than other types. Once the cookware peels or looks pitted, you want to get rid of it.
Much depends on how often and how well you use and clean them, but Ms. Mifflin said even with her vigilant care, her nonstick pans rarely last more than five years.
Here are a few more tips regarding questions about cleaning.
Is there a downside to using the self-cleaning mode on your oven? Since it heats the ovens to over 1,000 degrees, does that put wear and tear on the appliance?
Using the self-cleaning option is a good one, and it’s wise to do it at least twice a year, said Doug Burnett, manager for research and development of built-in cooking products for Electrolux. Otherwise, too much buildup, when incinerated, will turn into smoke that pours out of the oven.
If you are going to clean it as often as, say, monthly, it would be best to use a light soil option on your oven if there is one, he added.
Never use chemical cleaners on a self-cleaning oven. Just a little soap and hot water if you need to do a quick once-over, said Chris Hall, president of RepairClinic.com, a Web site that sells appliance parts and gives repair advice.
And he shared with me his own recent mistake — cleaning the smooth glass top of his electric range with the green scrubby side of a sponge.
“I scratched it and I feel really terrible,” he said. He now knows that some scrubby sponges are safe for glass, but they have to be labeled as such.
Well, that made me feel a little better about my griddle experience. Nonetheless, I think I owe my son another one. I’ll show him how to use it properly, and teach him another life lesson as well — if you give a present, borrow it and then ruin it, you have to replace it.
Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming
THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.
All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.
How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.
For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.
Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.
But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.
The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.
As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.
The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.
The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.
That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.
Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.
It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.
Gotta love the guy in the article whining about how "Nobody cares about Brooklyn". Try living on Staten Island!
In the city’s plan, it is envisioned as something like a ballet of behemoths, with a fleet of more than 2,000 garbage trucks swooping through the streets, brushing aside tons of snow as quickly as possible. But like most things in New York, each snowstorm brings a flurry of disagreement over how well that production has come off.
The blizzard that covered the city Sunday and Monday was no exception. Even before the high winds and snow ended Monday morning, cries of neglect could be heard across the five boroughs.
“They don’t care about Brooklyn, man,” said Tito Ernest, 32, who was trying to dig out a black Honda Accord stuck in the middle of the intersection of Rutland Road and Rockaway Parkway. “They had every chance to come out here to plow since last night.”
The city’ s sanitation commissioner, John J. Doherty, who oversees snow removal efforts, said he understood people’s frustration, but he asked for cooperation, patience and a little historical perspective. Mr. Doherty said that in 1996 it took the city 34 hours to clear the streets after a blizzard dumped 20 inches of snow, roughly the same amount that had fallen by Monday afternoon.
“I would like to reduce that time if I could,” he said. “I’ll have to see how successful I’ll be.”
Despite the complaints of favoritism, city officials said their plan of attack for clearing snow had nothing to do with geographic preferences — say, plowing certain boroughs or neighborhoods before others — and everything to do with the type of street.
The plan divides roadways into three major categories: arterial, secondary and tertiary. Arterial streets are the main thoroughfares, which are typically bus routes and are cleared first. The next focus is secondary streets, which are generally the straight roadways that feed into arterial streets. Tertiary roads, the narrow and sometimes curved residential streets that feed into secondary streets, are the last to be plowed.
That means that much of Manhattan, with its concentration of arterial streets, gets quicker attention.
Within each of those three categories, roadways are assigned numeric values, which are used both to set priorities and to assign routes. Those determinations are made and reviewed each year by the commanders in each of 59 sanitation districts, or commands, which match the boundaries of community boards.
As a storm approaches, the first line of attack is a pre-emptive strike by 365 spreaders, each holding as much as 16 tons of salt. On Sunday, they were deployed before the snow began falling.
Once the snowfall totals two inches, about 1,700 city garbage trucks fitted with plows hit the streets.
Mr. Doherty said those plows could often move on to secondary streets as the snow fell, but the snowfall and drifts in this blizzard kept the trucks on the arterial roadways well into Monday morning. Plows were also hindered by abandoned cars stuck in the middle of secondary streets, and in a few cases plow operators could not see those obstacles through the darkness and blowing snow until they, too, were stuck.
Further, the department must typically replow where car owners have shoveled snow back into the streets.
Mr. Doherty said the secondary streets, which he anticipated being cleared Monday night and Tuesday, presented special difficulties with this much snow: It can be too much for even a 20-ton garbage truck, so front-end loaders must pick it up and move it.
“If you go in there with one of our collection trucks, if you are not careful, you will get bogged down,” he said. “As strong as it is, they cannot push that much snow out of the way.”
The Sanitation Department also looks beyond its own equipment and workforce, hiring as many as 900 day laborers to shovel bus stops and sidewalks. And private operators of heavy equipment like front-end loaders and dump trucks are hired to help out.
Mr. Doherty said that outside operators had been a component of the city’s plan for decades, but that their response for this storm had been low.
It typically takes 36 hours to make a pass through all of the smaller roads, said Vito A. Turso, a Sanitation Department spokesman.
That timeline would beat a 1994 snow plan by the Giuliani administration, which estimated that 16 inches of fresh snow would take three to six days to clear from tertiary streets.
Snow removal has been laced with political overtones since 1969, when an outcry from Queens over the pace of street clearing after a blizzard knocked the administration of Mayor John V. Lindsay on its heels. In 1996, Howard Golden, then the Brooklyn borough president, accused Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani of devoting more resources to Staten Island, which had been important to Mr. Giuliani’s election.
On Monday, Peter F. Vallone Jr., a City Council member who represents Astoria, Queens, said his neighborhood was being treated poorly.
“The only plow I saw all day was the one that crashed into the corner near my house,” said Mr. Vallone, who added that the Council’s public safety committee, which he leads, would hold a hearing on the city’s handling of the storm.
“We need an explanation,” Mr. Vallone said. “Is it budget cuts? Is it a lack of planning? What caused this storm to be different from every other one we’ve lived through?”
Mr. Doherty said the cutbacks that Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg had ordered in the Sanitation Department’s budget had not hurt the city’s response. And he laughed off a question about whether political concerns played a role in setting road-clearing priorities.
“No,” Mr. Doherty said. “Because if you play politics, you get fired very quickly. You have to do your job, and you have to treat everybody the same.”
A Variety of Ways Not to Have Christmas
It’s a holiday from work and school. It’s wrapping paper torn and scattered about the tree. For the fortunate, it’s a family dinner with good food and minimal drama. But for two groups of people in particular, Christmas is a time to feel like a minority.
First, there are those Christians committed to resisting the holiday’s materialism; second, there are those who do not celebrate Christmas at all. This week I asked members of both groups what their Christmases would be like. Here is a sampling of what they said:
Rod Dreher of Philadelphia, author of “Crunchy Cons: The New Conservative Counterculture and Its Return to Roots” and a member of the Eastern Orthodox Church: “Orthodoxy preserves the older Christian understanding of the weeks leading up to Christmas as a time of penance, like Lent before Easter. You can imagine how difficult this is to pull off when everybody else is chowing down on holiday party food.
“But Orthodoxy insists that if the fast is only about abstaining from food, it’s meaningless. You also have to abstain from anger, and everything that separates you from God. I’ve been working on my temper during this Nativity fast season, on trusting God’s providence in difficult situations and on learning how to see God in everyone. It’s hard — but that’s the point, isn’t it?”
David Silverman of Cranford, N.J., president of American Atheists: “On Christmas, I hide under the table and sit in a fetal position. No, that’s not true. I don’t celebrate it. My wife is Jewish by religion, so we have a mixed marriage. My daughter, who’s 13, is an atheist 357 days of the year, and the other 8 days, she is a Jew. She doesn’t hide that at all.
“I never celebrate Christmas. The one thing I do is I go to my friends’ parties. If they have a Christmas party I am all there.”
Heidi Miller Yoder, an assistant professor of religion at Eastern Mennonite University, in Harrisonburg, Va.: “Some Mennonites have been very intentional about spending no more than $100 on Christmas gifts. It’s a movement not only within the Mennonite Church but within the larger Christian church.
“Other families have deliberately said, ‘We will only do homemade gifts.’ In my extended family, we donate gifts instead, and for the children, we do give them some gifts, realizing that it’s adults who distinguish between needs and wants, and they are learning to do that.”
David Semonian, who works at the Jehovah’s Witnesses’ world headquarters, in Brooklyn Heights: “We don’t celebrate Christmas, and the primary reason is because the Bible doesn’t direct us to do so. Jesus commanded us to commemorate his death, and not his birth. We have the day off, and enjoy getting together with our families and children, but it wouldn’t be a time of giving gifts or any implication we are celebrating the holiday.”
Andrew Krivak, a former Jesuit seminarian and the author of “The Sojourn,” a novel to be published in May: “I grew up in a house where, early on, there was almost as much Slovak as English spoken, the Christmas Eve dinner of fish, soup, and oplatki wafers (and a bit of brandy, of course) seemed almost more important than Christmas Day itself. No doubt because it was a gathering of family without all the trappings of Christmas Day, but maybe, too, because it led right into Mass at midnight.
“So I do the best I can to approximate my grandmother’s and my mother’s old menu, and somehow we always manage to have more than ourselves around the table, which is nice.
“And while it’s hard now to get to midnight Mass with three kids under 5, if someone’s willing to baby-sit, my wife and I slip out to church still, and come back with only a few hours before the whole house wakes up, but satisfied in a simple way that Christmas remains for us a season of holy days.”
Janet Gyatso, professor of Buddhist studies at Harvard Divinity School: “I grew up Jewish, and my own practice is a mix of Judaism and Buddhism and being a critical intellectual and not identifying with the practice of any of it, per se. But Buddhism teaches one to be as generous and open-minded as possible. Any remaining feelings of being excluded from Christmas as a kid have simply vanished for me as an adult. One just takes pleasure from it all.”
Angel Falcon, a student at Rutgers School of Law in Newark and a practitioner of Palo Mayombe, a traditional Afro-Cuban religion: “I don’t take offense when people say, ‘Merry Christmas.’ When you’re Latino, Christmas and Jesus play an important role even if you’re not Christian. I like to say that Jesus and I don’t have a problem. His crew can be a little annoying, but he’s fine.”
A Tug of War, With Strings of Lights
Back in 2005, after the first of their children was born, Liz McCarthy saw a strange obsession take hold of her husband, Andrew. He began festooning more and more of their home in the Bronx with brightly colored Christmas lights, claiming he was “doing it for the kids.” Every surface became his canvas: the bushes and flower beds, the 40-foot evergreen on their lawn, their siding, their eaves, their mantel, their kitchen.
But Mrs. McCarthy wanted white lights, not unlike those that twinkled gracefully from the nearby Throgs Neck Bridge. She finally persuaded her husband this year to agree to a truce. They would alternate the color of the Christmas tree lights each year.
“It’s almost like this recurring fight; he’s become so neurotic about having colored lights,” Mrs. McCarthy, 36, said. “The tree this year is white lights. It was my turn.”
And so it goes, a battle played out in living rooms across the city and the nation at this time of year: White lights or colored lights?
These divisions often run deep, adding to holiday stresses in a season notorious for bringing family fissures to the fore. To Mrs. McCarthy, having a Christmas tree with white lights meant creating almost a room of her own in a house overrun by riotous color. To her in-laws on Long Island, in the grip of the same debate, the differences are defined by taste. To a New Jersey couple in their 70s, the Codringtons, the divergence of opinions has cultural roots.
The origins of the white-versus-colored holiday light debate are unclear. Electric Christmas lights began replacing the fire-hazardous candles in the early 1900s, and their popularity increased greatly in the wave of giddy consumption that defined the post-World War II years.
Somewhere along the way, white lights came to represent a sort of sophistication; one need only behold the acres of white-only lights blanketing Fifth Avenue in recent years. (Rockefeller Center has it both ways: the big tree is drenched with multicolored lights, but the smaller ones surrounding it have white.)
Of the hundreds of thousands of strings of lights sold each year by one leading vendor, Christmas Lights Etc. of Georgia, 70 percent are white.
Not every style maven is happy about this. Simon Doonan, the creative director of Barneys New York — a place that would seem to suggest sophistication — said the notion that white lights implied good taste was “about a quarter-century out of date.”
“It’s very ’80s ‘Dynasty,’ ” Mr. Doonan wrote in an e-mail, referring to the evening soap opera. “People who are pathological about white lights are usually the same people who stuff their TV into an armoire and try to pretend they don’t have one.” Colored lights, by contrast, Mr. Doonan said, are “beautiful and magical” and carnival-like.
“When I pass a suburban house festooned with twinkly colored fairy lights,” Mr. Doonan wrote, “I always scream ‘Bravo’ out of the window of my car.”
As a girl in Sweden in the 1950s, Kerstin Codrington grew up with candles on holiday trees. After moving to the United States for school and marrying her husband, Garrett Codrington, she was horrified by the colored lights American families used.
“When I saw these trees with green and red and orange things, and some had water in them that bubbled — have you seen those?” Mrs. Codrington, 72, said, “I was appalled.”
In the early years of the marriage, the couple, then short of cash, used the colored lights given to them by Mr. Codrington’s family. Mrs. Codrington replaced them with white lights as soon as she could, to Mr. Codrington’s slight dismay.
“We had a few fights about lights,” Mrs. Codrington said. Their home, in Chester, N.J., is now a white-light-only zone, though Mrs. Codrington sometimes catches her husband gazing wistfully at the next-door neighbor’s multihued bushes.
“We’ve had this cultural clash for 50 years,” Mr. Codrington said. “But one surrenders with other victories. For example, she stayed with me.”
Elyse Goldstein, an Upper East Side psychologist, said that while she had yet to encounter couples struggling with the question of white or colored lights, such squabbles can indicate other issues in a partnership. There may be power struggles afoot, or a reluctance to stray from traditions from one’s childhood.
“Changing the eggnog recipe or serving Champagne instead won’t matter,” she wrote in an e-mail, “and represents you and your partner putting your own new stamp on things.”
Yet the echoes of childhood die hard. For three years, Caitlin McCarthy, 30, who lives on Long Island in Oyster Bay, has endured the insistence of her husband of three months, Kevin — brother of Andrew McCarthy of the Bronx — to use not only white lights, but also a synthetic tree.
Caitlin McCarthy maintains, however, that indoor trees should be decorated with colored lights, as was the custom in her childhood home. She plans to lay down the law, she said, once the couple buys a house. “I’ll get my way,” she said.
Necessity Pushes Pakistani Women Into Jobs and Peril
Dinner at Rabia Sultana’s house is now served over a cold silence. Her family has not spoken to her since May, when Ms. Sultana, 21, swapped her home life for a cashier’s job at McDonald’s.
Her conservative brother berated Ms. Sultana for damaging the family’s honor by taking a job in which she interacts with men — and especially one that requires her to shed her burqa in favor of a short-sleeved McDonald’s uniform.
Then he confiscated her uniform, slapped her across the face and threatened to break her legs if he saw her outside the home.
Her family may be outraged, but they are also in need. Ms. Sultana donates her $100 monthly salary to supplement the household budget for expenses that the men in her family can no longer pay for, including school fees for her younger sisters.
Ms. Sultana is part of a small but growing generation of lower-class young women here who are entering service-sector jobs to support their families, and by extension, pitting their religious and cultural traditions against economic desperation.
The women are pressed into the work force not by nascent feminism but by inflation, which has spiked to 12.7 percent from 1.4 percent in the past seven years. As a result, one salary — the man’s salary — can no longer feed a family.
“It’s not just the economic need, but need of the nation,” said Rafiq Rangoonwala, the chief executive officer of KFC Pakistan, who has challenged his managers to double the number of women in his work force by next year. “Otherwise, Pakistan will never progress. We’ll always remain a third-world country because 15 percent of the people cannot feed 85 percent of the population.”
Female employment at KFC in Pakistan has risen 125 percent in the past five years.
Several chains like McDonald’s and the supermarket behemoth Makro, where the number of women has quadrupled since 2006, have introduced free transit services for female employees to protect them from harassment and to help persuade them take jobs where they may face hostility. “We’re a society in transition,” said Zeenat Hisam, a senior researcher at the Pakistan Institute of Labor Education and Research. “Men in Pakistan haven’t changed, and they’re not changing as fast as our women. Men want to keep their power in their hand.
“The majority of the people here believe in the traditional interpretation of Islam, and they get very upset because religious leaders tell them it’s not proper for women to go out and to work and to serve strange men.”
More than 100 young women who recently entered service jobs told of continual harassment.
At work, some women spend more time deflecting abuse from customers than serving them. On the way home, they are heckled in buses and condemned by neighbors. It is so common for brothers to confiscate their uniforms that McDonald’s provides women with three sets.
“If I leave this job, everything would be O.K. at home,” Ms. Sultana said. “But then there’d be a huge impact on our house. I want to make something of myself, and for my sisters, who are at home and don’t know anything about the outside world.”
So far, the movement of women into the service sector has been largely limited to Karachi. Elsewhere across Pakistan, women are still mostly relegated to their homes, or they take jobs in traditional labor settings like women-only stitching factories or girls’ schools, where salaries can be half of those in the service industry. Even the most trailblazing of companies, like KFC, still employ 90 percent men.
Pakistan ranked 133rd out of the 134 countries on the 2010 Global Gender Gap Report’s list of women’s economic participation.
While there is no reliable data on the number of women who specifically enter the service sector, Pakistan’s female work force hovers around 20 percent, among the lowest of any Muslim country.
Some women, like Saima, 22, are forced to lead secret lives to earn $175 a month. Her father’s shopkeeper’s salary does not cover the family’s expenses. Without a university degree, the only job Saima could find was at a call center of a major restaurant’s delivery department. But she impressed the manger so much that he offered her a higher-paying waitress job at a branch near her home.
She reluctantly agreed, but pleaded to be sent to a restaurant two hours away so she would not be spotted by family members and neighbors.
After three years, her family still thinks she works in the basement of a call center. On several occasions, she served old friends who did not recognize her without a head scarf. Her confidence has soared, but she is overwhelmed with guilt.
“I’ve completely changed myself here,” she said in the corner booth of her restaurant before her co-workers arrived. “But honestly, I’m not happy with what I’m doing.”
The women interviewed said they had to battle stereotypes that suggested that women who work were sexually promiscuous. Sometimes men misinterpret simple acts of customer service, like a smile. Fauzia, who works as a cashier at KFC, said that last year a customer was so taken with her smile that he followed her out the door and tried to force her into his car before she escaped.
Sunila Yusuf, a saleswoman who wears pink traditional clothes at home but skintight jeans at the trendy clothing boutique in the Park Towers shopping mall, said her fiancé had offered to pay her a $100 monthly wage if she would stay at home.
“He knows that Pakistani men don’t respect women,” she said.
Hina, who works the counter at KFC, said her brothers, who also work fast-food jobs, worried that she had become “too sharp and too exposed.”
“They can look at other people’s girls,” Hina said with a grimace. “But they want their own girls hidden.”
Mr. Rangoonwala, the KFC Pakistan executive, said: “Unfortunately, our society is a hypocritical society. We have two sets of rules, one for males and one for females.”
For Fauzia, the hardest part of the day is the 15-minute walk through the narrow alleys to reach her home. She wears a burqa to conceal her uniform, but word of mouth about her job has spread. Neighbors shout, “What kind of job is this?” as she briskly walks by with her head down.
As a solution, some companies spend up to $8,000 a month to transport their female workers in minivans.
A federal law, citing safety concerns, prohibits women from working after 10 p.m. It was extended from a 7 p.m. deadline last year.
Most companies, however, are unwilling to absorb the extra cost of employing women. Even most stores that sell purses, dresses, perfumes and jewelry do not employ women.
Kamil Aziz, who owns Espresso, the city’s most popular coffee chain, said he made it a point not to hire “the other gender” because women could not work the late shift and the turnover rate among women was higher. He said he also did not want to invest in separate changing rooms.
Nearly all of the 100 women interviewed said marriage would end to their careers. But many of them saw benefits along with the hazards.
Most women said that they had never left the house before taking a job. Many spent the first five months missing buses and getting lost. When they first arrived at work, they stuttered nervously in the presence of men.
Now they know better.
“I’ve learned never to take what husbands say at face value,” said Sana Raja Haroon, a saleswoman at Labels, a clothing boutique where men sometimes slide her their business card.
But the employed women are also approached by admiring young women who want to follow their lead.
“Girls envy us,” said Bushra, a KFC worker. “We are considered the men of the house, and that feels good.”
How Not to Wreck a Nonstick Pan
THIS all began when I was trying to come up with a clever idea for a Hanukkah present for my older son. Having exhausted all the sports-themed possibilities, I decided to buy him a griddle since he has become quite the pancake chef.
My son greeted the present with more enthusiasm than I expected. A couple of days later, I realized it would be perfect for making holiday latkes. Usually I use two frying pans, but since we had this nice new nonstick griddle, why not make things easier?
I asked Ben if I could borrow it and he graciously agreed. I fried 89 latkes (but who’s counting) for a get-together. The guests were happy, but the griddle was burned.
I soaked. I scrubbed with little plastic scrub brushes, as suggested. It still looked nothing like new. Before admitting to Ben that I had ruined his present, I looked up “cleaning nonstick griddles” on the Internet.
I came across a lot of advice about cleaning, but also how to use this type of cookware in the first place. And to my surprise, I have been using nonstick pans in an inappropriate manner for, oh, the last three decades or so — in fact, ever since I started cooking for myself.
So as a holiday gift, I am going to share with you what I have learned in hopes of saving you from my mistakes. And as a treat, I’ll throw in a few other cleaning tips as well.
Let’s start with nonstick cookware. Teflon is the patented product made by DuPont, but most people use the term generically to refer to nonstick pans.
For our purposes here, I am not going to delve into the health issues. I did write a column about these concerns about four years ago, weighing the health risks of using pans with nonstick coatings. I didn’t come down on either side, but the reality, according to Consumer Reports, is that nonstick cookware accounts for about 70 percent of all such sales in the United States.
So millions of us are cooking with nonstick pots and pans. But in the wrong way.
“A lot of people buy pans and don’t read the directions,” said Reed Winter, director of research and development for Nordic Ware, a maker of household goods and the manufacturer of the griddle I bought my son.
Ahem. I confessed right away to Mr. Winter that that was true in my case. I barely read the manual when I buy a new car. Am I really going to pore over the directions for a pan?
So this is what I should have known. I should have “preseasoned” the pan by rinsing and drying it and rubbing it with a paper towel with a little oil on it. Pretty much any type of oil will do.
It’s a good idea to rub about a teaspoon of oil or butter on a cold pan each time you use it, Mr. Winter said, because despite the name nonstick, most of the cookware needs some kind of lubricant.
Just don’t pour oil or butter on the pan and then slosh it around (my method).
“Then the oil is not adhering to the pan but being absorbed by the food,” he said. Not only will you have butter-soaked pancakes, but after a while they’ll start sticking because there’s no grease.
But what about PAM or other cooking sprays? I often put a few squirts on my nonstick frying pans.
Not a great idea, I was told. After a time, the build-up in the areas where the heat doesn’t burn the spray off — like on the sides of a frying pan — becomes sticky and pasty. I found this to be true of my pans, but didn’t know why.
Mr. Winter said it’s the soy lecithin in the spray that causes that stickiness. Instead, he recommends just using oil or a spray called Baker’s Joy that also contains flour.
For due diligence, I checked in with DuPont, the makers of Teflon, and a spokeswoman said in an e-mail that “it is acceptable” to use nonstick cooking sprays although “not necessary.” And a spokesman at ConAgra Foods, which makes PAM, said, “You should check with your cookware manufacturer” to see if it is safe to use with PAM.
Another thing I shouldn’t have done is put the griddle on a high heat. High temperatures cause the coating to crack, Mr. Winter said, and don’t even cook the food as well. The food tends to be partly burned and partly doughy, he said.
“Using a lower heat means it will turn out perfectly,” he said.
Also, don’t use any metal or sharp objects to stir or turn food, because it can pierce the coating.
Now as far as cleaning, I did scrub with a plastic scrubby sponge (never steel wool). Then I soaked with baking powder and hot water. Then I used some vinegar and water. It looks better, but not perfect.
Although I don’t usually put my cookware in the dishwasher, I did as a last-ditch effort — another bad idea. Most experts I talked to said to hand-wash nonstick cookware, because the high heat and harsh detergents can ruin the coatings.
In the end, the griddle looks, shall we say, well used. I showed it to my son and apologized. He took it with good grace.
A few more tips. Store your pots and pans properly, said Mariette Mifflin, who writes about housewares and appliances for About.com, which is owned by The New York Times.
If you nest them, they can scratch. Putting a napkin between the pots prevents that.
And realize you’ll probably have to replace nonstick cookware more often than other types. Once the cookware peels or looks pitted, you want to get rid of it.
Much depends on how often and how well you use and clean them, but Ms. Mifflin said even with her vigilant care, her nonstick pans rarely last more than five years.
Here are a few more tips regarding questions about cleaning.
Is there a downside to using the self-cleaning mode on your oven? Since it heats the ovens to over 1,000 degrees, does that put wear and tear on the appliance?
Using the self-cleaning option is a good one, and it’s wise to do it at least twice a year, said Doug Burnett, manager for research and development of built-in cooking products for Electrolux. Otherwise, too much buildup, when incinerated, will turn into smoke that pours out of the oven.
If you are going to clean it as often as, say, monthly, it would be best to use a light soil option on your oven if there is one, he added.
Never use chemical cleaners on a self-cleaning oven. Just a little soap and hot water if you need to do a quick once-over, said Chris Hall, president of RepairClinic.com, a Web site that sells appliance parts and gives repair advice.
And he shared with me his own recent mistake — cleaning the smooth glass top of his electric range with the green scrubby side of a sponge.
“I scratched it and I feel really terrible,” he said. He now knows that some scrubby sponges are safe for glass, but they have to be labeled as such.
Well, that made me feel a little better about my griddle experience. Nonetheless, I think I owe my son another one. I’ll show him how to use it properly, and teach him another life lesson as well — if you give a present, borrow it and then ruin it, you have to replace it.
Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming
THE earth continues to get warmer, yet it’s feeling a lot colder outside. Over the past few weeks, subzero temperatures in Poland claimed 66 lives; snow arrived in Seattle well before the winter solstice, and fell heavily enough in Minneapolis to make the roof of the Metrodome collapse; and last week blizzards closed Europe’s busiest airports in London and Frankfurt for days, stranding holiday travelers. The snow and record cold have invaded the Eastern United States, with more bad weather predicted.
All of this cold was met with perfect comic timing by the release of a World Meteorological Organization report showing that 2010 will probably be among the three warmest years on record, and 2001 through 2010 the warmest decade on record.
How can we reconcile this? The not-so-obvious short answer is that the overall warming of the atmosphere is actually creating cold-weather extremes. Last winter, too, was exceptionally snowy and cold across the Eastern United States and Eurasia, as were seven of the previous nine winters.
For a more detailed explanation, we must turn our attention to the snow in Siberia.
Annual cycles like El Niño/Southern Oscillation, solar variability and global ocean currents cannot account for recent winter cooling. And though it is well documented that the earth’s frozen areas are in retreat, evidence of thinning Arctic sea ice does not explain why the world’s major cities are having colder winters.
But one phenomenon that may be significant is the way in which seasonal snow cover has continued to increase even as other frozen areas are shrinking. In the past two decades, snow cover has expanded across the high latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Siberia, just north of a series of exceptionally high mountain ranges, including the Himalayas, the Tien Shan and the Altai.
The high topography of Asia influences the atmosphere in profound ways. The jet stream, a river of fast-flowing air five to seven miles above sea level, bends around Asia’s mountains in a wavelike pattern, much as water in a stream flows around a rock or boulder. The energy from these atmospheric waves, like the energy from a sound wave, propagates both horizontally and vertically.
As global temperatures have warmed and as Arctic sea ice has melted over the past two and a half decades, more moisture has become available to fall as snow over the continents. So the snow cover across Siberia in the fall has steadily increased.
The sun’s energy reflects off the bright white snow and escapes back out to space. As a result, the temperature cools. When snow cover is more abundant in Siberia, it creates an unusually large dome of cold air next to the mountains, and this amplifies the standing waves in the atmosphere, just as a bigger rock in a stream increases the size of the waves of water flowing by.
The increased wave energy in the air spreads both horizontally, around the Northern Hemisphere, and vertically, up into the stratosphere and down toward the earth’s surface. In response, the jet stream, instead of flowing predominantly west to east as usual, meanders more north and south. In winter, this change in flow sends warm air north from the subtropical oceans into Alaska and Greenland, but it also pushes cold air south from the Arctic on the east side of the Rockies. Meanwhile, across Eurasia, cold air from Siberia spills south into East Asia and even southwestward into Europe.
That is why the Eastern United States, Northern Europe and East Asia have experienced extraordinarily snowy and cold winters since the turn of this century. Most forecasts have failed to predict these colder winters, however, because the primary drivers in their models are the oceans, which have been warming even as winters have grown chillier. They have ignored the snow in Siberia.
Last week, the British government asked its chief science adviser for an explanation. My advice to him is to look to the east.
It’s all a snow job by nature. The reality is, we’re freezing not in spite of climate change but because of it.
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Date: 2010-12-29 06:37 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2010-12-29 11:12 pm (UTC)