Toast of the town

The invention and beautiful design of everyday, useful applicances is the purest form of creativity. Such inventions make common tasks not only easier, but more enjoyable as well. Enjoy.


Toast of the Town
Which appliance delivers the best browned bread?
By Tom Bartlett
Posted Tuesday, March 28, 2006, at 11:40 AM ET

In 1905, chemist Albert Leroy Marsh invented Nichrome, the heating element that enabled the creation of the electric toaster. Yet, as far as I know, 2005 saw no parades, musical tributes, or star-studded celebrations to commemorate the 100th anniversary of this breakfast-altering achievement. It's a shame, too, because the toaster has given us so much over the years. And by "so much," I mean toast.

To correct this egregious oversight, I have taken it upon myself to seek out the best toaster. For the past several weeks, I have pushed eight toasters to the very limits of bread-browning. (I steered clear of toaster ovens and novelty toasters—e.g., those that also cook eggs or hot dogs.) I have crammed oversized bagels into too-narrow slots. I have poured crumbs into the toasters and then tried to clean them. I have gingerly fished out English muffins with a plastic knife. I have cranked up temperature controls to test their limits. I have also overloaded the electrical system in my house and set off the smoke alarm. Twice.

I threw a toaster party as well, inviting over friends and family who, as it turns out, have strong opinions about toasters. People argued. Lines were drawn. Punches were thrown. Not really, but my point stands: Toasters are a more controversial topic than you might imagine.

METHODOLOGY

Toasting quality (10 possible points): A good toaster should brown evenly on both sides. In addition, different slots should not produce different results (unless, of course, they have independent temperature controls). Toasting should be consistent. For instance, if I set the dial on 4, I want the same piece of toast every single time.

Design/Ease of use (10 possible points): Nobody wants a challenge first thing in the morning. It should be possible to operate a toaster without consulting an instruction manual; this will henceforth be known as the "hungover-houseguest rule." It's fine to have nifty features (a warming rack or a bagel button, for example), but don't get too fancy. It's a toaster—keep it simple.

Cleanup (10 possible points): Very important. A toaster should trap crumbs and make it easy to dispose of them. This is not asking too much.

Value: You can pay several hundred dollars for a toaster, or you can pay 25 bucks. If it's on the high end, it better make some damn fine toast. To calculate value, I added the scores in the three other categories, multiplied that number by 20, then divided by the price.

Here are the results, from charred to a perfect golden brown:

T-Fal Avanté Deluxe 4-Slice, $60
If you were thinking about designing the world's worst toaster, don't bother: Ask T-Fal for the blueprint. There's plenty to hate about the T-Fal, but nothing is worse than the bread slots. They are at a slight angle. As a result, bread tends to slide toward the front of the toaster, bringing it into contact with the hot metal, burning the bread. It's also remarkably difficult to retrieve the toast. The crumb trays are terrible; it's nearly impossible to clean. The layout of the buttons is weird. Plus, why is it so big? It's enormous!

Toasting quality: 3
Design/Ease of use: 3
Cleanup: 2
Value: 3
Total: 11


Michael Graves 2-Slice, $34.99
Michael Graves is a famous architect. His toaster? Not so great. While not everyone at my toaster shindig agreed, I think it's the ugliest of the bunch. The crumb-disposal system isn't quite as awful as the T-Fal's, but it's no joy, either. The lever is tricky to push down and doesn't always "catch." But what's truly outrageous is the temperature control. You can't read it. Which way is the dial pointing? I can't tell. Is that a 6 or a 2? I'm not sure. I am sure about this much: I would never buy this toaster.

Toasting quality: 6
Design/Ease of use: 2
Cleanup: 5
Value: 7
Total: 20

Dualit 4-Slice, $320
Some people swear by the Dualit. They swoon over its sturdy, simple design. They brag that it makes the perfect piece of toast. In an online review, a mother talked about handing it down to her children like a precious heirloom. These people are suckers.

I'm not saying the Dualit doesn't make good toast. It does. The browning is even and the toasting is consistent. The toast doesn't "pop up"; instead you use a lever to raise the bread when it's finished cooking. But the timer sounds like a windup toy. (As my wife put it, "I keep expecting the thing to bark and flip over.") What's more, according to the instruction manual, the toaster works best if you "pre-heat" it—meaning that you have to turn it on for a couple of minutes before you make toast. Mock my shameful indolence—I don't care. Toasters are about convenience, and preheating is inconvenient. My criticisms may not dissuade Dualit devotees, but the toaster is not perfect, and for $320 ($220 for the two-slice), I expect perfection.

Toasting quality: 8
Design/Ease of use: 6
Cleanup: 7
Value: 1
Total: 22

Cuisinart 4-Slice, $90.30
This toaster is fine. It has a bagel button, a defrost button, and a reheat button, all of which worked well enough and were clearly marked. My main concern is that different slots toast bread slightly differently even if the settings are the same. This isn't a deal-breaker, but it is annoying. I'm also not crazy about the antique-radio design. If you like its looks, go for it. You have my somewhat reluctant blessing.

Toasting quality: 7
Design/Ease of use: 7
Cleanup: 5
Value: 4
Total: 23

Proctor Silex 2-Slice, $25
The name is ugly and the toaster's not much prettier. But what the Proctor Silex lacks in curb appeal it more than makes up in price. It held its own against models that cost 10 times as much. It makes a perfectly acceptable piece of toast. The controls are simple to operate and easy to read. It has no fancy features, and the crumb tray doesn't work very well (to really clean it you need to turn the toaster upside-down and shake it over the sink), but on the upside, it costs $25. You could do better than the Proctor Silex, but you'll certainly have to pay a lot more.

Toasting quality: 6
Design/Ease of use: 5
Cleanup: 3
Value: 11
Total: 25

Krups 2-Slice Digital, $80
I'm very fond of this toaster. Its slots are wide—the widest, in fact, of the models I tested, so getting a bagel in and out of this baby is a dream. Its well-designed lever makes retrieving English muffins a breeze. What I really love is the ingenious, built-in warming rack. The top of the toaster is slightly concave, so that you can rest rolls or sandwiches on it. Hit the warming button, and a couple minutes later your cold leftover is a warm, delicious treat. Brilliant!

As much as I like the Krups, though, it does not pass the crucial hungover-houseguest rule. It's not nuclear physics, but I did have to consult the manual. As one friend said, "This is the first time I've looked at a toaster and not known what to do." A drawback, to be sure. Still, the Krups is a handsome, thoughtfully designed machine.

Toasting quality: 8
Design/Ease of use: 6
Cleanup: 7
Value: 5
Total: 26

KitchenAid Pro Line 2-Slice, $249.95
The Dualit gets all the buzz, but if I'm going to shell out an insane amount of money for a toaster, I'd go with the KitchenAid. Like the Dualit, toast doesn't pop up—you raise it with a lever that slides smoothly up and down. The idea is that the bread stays warm in the toaster until you're ready to eat it. The KitchenAid only keeps it warm for about five minutes, so I'm not sure how useful this is, but it's still a nifty feature.

The KitchenAid is a 10-pound tank of an appliance. It has no special features and no warming rack (though, as with the Dualit, you can buy an optional sandwich cage—a small cage with a handle that allows you to slip an entire sandwich into the toaster). But it consistently makes excellent, evenly browned toast. The stainless-steel crumb tray has a nice, big handle. Overall, it has a smart, pleasing design. A soft blue light tells you it's working. The numbers are printed on the side of the temperature knob so you don't have to stoop and squint to read them.

This toaster says you're serious about toast. It's a pleasure to use, and it may even be worth the money. Which is saying a lot.

Toasting quality: 8
Design/Ease of use: 9
Cleanup: 9
Value: 2
Total: 28

DeLonghi Aluminum 2-Slice, $129.99
Meet everyone's favorite. The DeLonghi elicited actual oohs and ahhs. When you place a piece of bread in the slot, the toaster senses it and the bread automatically descends. When the bread is finished toasting, it rises slowly to the surface. This rising is accompanied by a pleasant "ding!" If your temperature control has already been set, it's possible to make toast without ever touching the toaster. It's magic, I tell you.

Everything about this toaster is a delight—especially that it's delightfully easy to clean. The entire base of the toaster is the crumb tray. When you want to clean it, lift up the top of the toaster, remove the bottom, and dump it out. This is the most elegant solution to the crumb problem I've seen.

Simplest to use, easiest to clean, and the best-looking to boot: It's a toaster trifecta! The DeLonghi is not cheap, but you won't feel ripped off.

Toasting quality: 8
Design/Ease of use: 9
Cleanup: 10
Value: 4
Total: 31

Tom Bartlett is a writer in Mount Rainier, Md. Minor Tweaks is his blog.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2138803/

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC

Pets of Mine

We all got em. Pet Peeves.

Top O my list at the moment is cell phone rudeness. This rudeness occurs anytime a cell phone is on in my presence. The most irrritating aspect of this pet peeve is that I am my biggest irritating presence. I can't stand me when i use a cell phone. So to remedy this - I am now going to start doing the following.

Whenever i am in the presence of any other person, alive or dead, friend or foe, male or female, child or adult, criminal or angel, white or black or green or purple or blue or yellow ot brown or chartreuse (i was chartreuse just last Sat nite) , i resolve to turn my cell phone OFF.

This will accomplish several things: it will signal to my companion of the moment that i actually value their immediate presence more than i jump to the demands of others wanting my time at their convenience. What a revolutionary idea ! Appreciating the present and those present !

Whenever i am NOT in the presence of the aforementioned, i will turn my cell phone OFF. In this way - i will be able to concentrate on matters at hand and i can still turn the phone ON - say - twice a day to check for and return phone messages. It would be even better if those folks with whom i deal regularly know IN ADVANCE when i will be calling in to get messages. This is actually how life was lived - say - three years ago, way back at the turn of the century.

THERE ! Whew - i already feel better that that is now off my chest ! I think i will call a few friends on my cell to tell them !

Sky Dog

If you love animal stories, you'll love this one. Plus, you'll earn how getting exactly what you want does not have to cost a lot of money. Just time and love. Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 26, 2006
The Thrifty Millionaire
From Lap to Lap, Via Internet and Airline
By TRACIE ROZHON

IF you want something badly enough, you'll find a way to get it. Even a pedigreed dog.

We bought Reilly, our Irish terrier puppy, over the Internet. She was shipped in by Northwest Airlines in a tiny plastic carrier, arriving in upstate New York on a bitterly cold night in January, after a 12-hour trip from North Dakota.

That's the bad stuff. Here are the good things: 1) She flew in a heated compartment, the airline assured us. 2) She arrived just as feisty as she had left, or so we imagined. 3) She came not from a "puppy mill" but from a loving family with whom we exchanged countless e-mail messages and photographs before we took the plunge.

Although we weren't trying to be cheap — honest — we paid only $200 for her, and another $200 for her plane trip. Earlier, when we tried to buy an Irish terrier, a fairly rare type of dog, from a breeder closer to home, we were told that it had none, and that even if it did, the cost would be $1,200 to $1,800.

But let me repeat: we weren't trying to be cheap. It just turned out that way.

Desperation had set in because an Irish terrier was the only dog my husband would have. After years of seeking agreement on yellow Labs, chocolate Labs, wire-haired and Welsh terriers, I had to give in if I wanted a dog. He had never actually owned an Irish terrier before; he just liked the way they looked, and he laughed off warnings of how difficult they were to train. ("Can be quite a handful," said www.dogbreedinfo.com. "They can be difficult to housebreak.")

We both liked the American Kennel Club's description of an Irish terrier's temperament: "It is of the utmost importance that the Irish terrier show fire and animation. There is a heedless, reckless pluck about the Irish terrier which is characteristic, and which, coupled with the headlong dash, blind to all consequences with which he rushes at his adversary, has earned for the breed the proud epithet of 'Daredevil.' "

No wonder these dogs are rare. We finally found Reilly on Puppyfind.com.

That was one of the sites that popped up when we entered "Irish terrier" in the Google search box. After poring through the various chat rooms for Irish terrier lovers and seeing if several of the listed kennels had puppies — they didn't seem to — we entered the breed in the "Find a Puppy" tab on Puppyfind. (Last week on the site, there were 27 Irish terrier puppies, a handful of which had been sold. But Troy, Donnie, Dolan, Shawn and Shane — twins — Male One and others were still for sale, at prices of $350 to $1,350.)

The kennels that list their litters with Puppyfind make various pitches, some more elaborate than others. Shane, for example, offered by Rockledge Farm Kennels in Ava, Mo., was "sired by an Irish imported male that is by an Irish and European champion." The mother, too, is also an aristocrat, according to the lengthy blurb.

No such descriptions were offered for Reilly, who in her younger days near the North Dakota border in northwestern Minnesota was known only as Female No. 1.

After finding the puppy we wanted, at Crooked Creek Kennels in Climax, Minn., we started a correspondence with Trudy Hofer, who runs the business.

Our first e-mail message began this way: "We are seeking an Irish terrier puppy and are struck by your photo of Female No. 1 in your current litter."

Ms. Hofer wrote back: "Hello. Here are some pics took just tonight of Female No. 1."

And so it began. The pictures of this auburn-haired puppy were impossible to resist: One showed the dog standing beautifully between two very large (or so it seemed) hands, with their cardinal-red nail polish gleaming. Others were close-ups of the puppy's head, with her soulful "adopt me now or you'll regret it for the rest of your lives" expression. There were also candid shots of Ms. Hofer's daughter playing tug with the puppy on the floor.

In late December, all the arguments about waiting until spring had turned to slush. We wrote: "The pictures are enchanting. We wish to buy your Female No. 1!"

Ms. Hofer wrote back: "Hello and Merry Christmas. I have put a collar on your puppy as she is now sold. You are getting the cutest puppy in the litter. You will be very pleased with her!"

We had (foolishly) asked if she was housebroken. Ms. Hofer replied: "Crate training has started, but with a few of her siblings in the same big wire kennel in the house, sometimes they forget their business, if you know what I mean. But they are quick learners. All of these puppies appear very smart."

Well, two and a half months later, we have realized that Reilly is, indeed, very smart. We also have decided that the people who wrote that Irish terriers were "heedless" and "reckless" were understating it.

But in the end, it doesn't really matter. We love her madly. And Daredevil is right on the mark.

E-mail: thriftymillionaire@nytimes.com.
###

The Color of Money

All categories are illusions, but some are more fun illusions than others, and the following article is a fine exaample of this. Choose YOUR category ! Enjoy.

moneybox
Are You a Thrillionaire or a Realionaire?
The five kinds of rich people.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Friday, March 24, 2006

Pity the poor American millionaire. Retailers and financial institutions look at him and see only a giant pile of money, not the living, breathing, laughing, loving person buried in it. Admit it, even you have cruelly judged plutocrats by nothing more than the content of their wallets.

This must end.

In 2004, there were some 8.9 million households in the United States with investable assets of $1 million or more (this excludes homes and retirement accounts). The simplistic way in which we view millionaires—be it as high-living Trumps or as the bourgeois penny-pinchers of The Millionaire Next Door—isn't helpful to those who are trying to sell products and services to the rich. As Susan Hirshman, managing director and wealth strategist at JPMorgan Funds, notes, "to serve them, we have to understand the underlying person and what his or her value system is."

Which brings us to Larry Samuel, who aims to do for the American wealthy what Margaret Mead did for the Samoans. He is the anthropologist of plutocrats. Samuel, who has a Ph.D. in American studies from the University of Minnesota, runs a market research firm, Culture Planning, that studies the rich on behalf of JPMorgan. Samuel and his researchers examine the habits and behavior of the rich in their natural habitats and reach conclusions based on close observation and thick description. Today, after all, being affluent isn't just a matter of assets, it's a matter of lifestyle. And because the opportunities for conspicuous consumption are so much greater today than ever before, millionaires are no longer confined to a tedious regimen of Cadillacs, country clubs, and clapboard Colonials.

Samuel has thus classified American millionaires into five archetypes, each with its own Passion Points, consuming habits, and style, as follows:

Thrillionaires. These are Thorstein Veblen's conspicuous consumers: generally insecure people who thirst for privacy and exclusivity, and for whom objects and a first-class lifestyle are a constant reminder of status and success. Well-known exemplar: Donald Trump. Natural habitat: Las Vegas; Boca Raton, Fla.

Coolionaires. These rich aesthetes may not work in creative fields, but they view creativity as the essence of life. They plow cash into fine art, cool architecture, and benefits at the New York Public Library. Money is, in Samuel's words, an "opportunity to express one's status as a person of refinement and sophistication." Well-known exemplars: disgraced opera impresario Alberto Vilar, money manager/utopian community developer Boykin Curry. Natural habitat: Manhattan below 14th Street.

Realionaires. Practical, unassuming types. These people like to live under the radar and stay out of gossip columns. While they hate to spend money unnecessarily, "they're willing to splurge on things that matter to them," said Samuel. "Ivy League Schools, Stickley furniture, professional appliances." They have an affinity for big-ticket, brand-name items because they deliver value, not status. Well-known exemplar: Warren Buffett. Natural habitat: The Midwest.

Wellionaires: Spiritual rich folks who view life in holistic terms. They're willing to splurge to make sure they look good, feel healthy, and stay in good shape. They're open to therapy, New Age thinking, and alternative medicine. Well-known exemplars: disgraced former Time Warner CEO Gerald Levin, Los Angeles Lakers coach Phil Jackson, Oprah. Natural habitat: Sedona, Ariz.; Santa Monica, Calif.

Willionaires: What used to be known as Old Money. These are people who recognize their privilege and responsibility to leave the world a better place than they found it. Social entrepreneurs, they're interested in their legacy and maintaining traditions. They view philanthropy as a way of life. Well-known exemplars: David Rockefeller, Bill Gates. Natural Habitat: Maine, Park Avenue.

Such archetyping is a fun enterprise. Most anthropologists conduct research while living in a hut in rural Indonesia. Samuel and a group of stringers fan out into markets thick with millionaires and take notes. When I spoke to Samuel this morning, he was in the field—in Miami: "There's a DJ and hip-hop conference going on here, and there's lots of bling, I've seen several Rolls Royces." (Clearly, rappers are thrillionaires, not willionaires.)

But Hirshman says Samuel's distinctions are meaningful. And not just because a JPMorgan adviser will think to offer a coolionaire advice on how to choose an art consultant rather than how to trick out a Ferrari. "It's about dealing with them and connecting with them on a personal level," says Hirshman. "The overall goal is to bring up the satisfaction level of your service." If a thirsty thrillionaire comes into your office, you better serve him bottled water in crystal. By contrast, a realionaire won't be fazed if you present him with tap water in a paper cup.

Samuel doesn't make any moral distinctions among the archetypes. But it's pretty clear there's a hierarchy, from a social perspective and from a business one. If you're in the asset-management business for the long term, you want people who are going to save and invest for the long term (realionaires and willionaires) rather than ones who are going to blow their cash on Maseratis and young third wives (thrillionaires), Jeff Koons sculptures (coolionaires), or personal yoga instructors (wellionaires).

Samuel first identified the five archetypes in 2000. And he notes a change in the mix since then. As baby boomers age and their minds become filled with thoughts of mortality, we're starting to see more wellionaires and willionaires, and fewer thrillionaires.

Samuel and Hirshman note that the archetypes aren't mutually exclusive. And of course, the truly outstanding millionaires—i.e., billionaires—can transcend the categories. Larry Ellison of Oracle, with his giant yachts and Japanese-style compound, is clearly equal parts thrillionaire and wellionaire; Bill Gates, with his Friday-casual khakis and massive foundation, is a little bit realionaire and a little bit willionaire.
Daniel Gross (www.danielgross.net) writes Slate's "Moneybox" column. You can e-mail him at moneybox@slate.com.

Article URL: http://www.slate.com/id/2138486/

Copyright 2006 Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC###

The Doctor is IN - but only for 7 minutes

Until a sea change occurs in the way doctors treat everybody - from patients, right on to nurses with whom they work , our health care system will remain the envy of ... no one.

The New York Times
March 22, 2006
Op-Ed Contributor
The Doctor Will See You for Exactly Seven Minutes
By PETER SALGO

WHEN politicians speak of America's health care needs, they often miss an important point: the doctor-patient relationship has become frayed. Patients aren't unhappy just because health care costs too much (though they would certainly like it to be more affordable). Rather, people sense a malaise within the system that has eroded the respect they feel patients deserve.

There has been a shift in attitude within the profession. I see examples of it every day. I was making rounds in my intensive care unit recently when one of the interns presented a case. "This is the first admission for this 55-year-old male," he said.

"Stop," I said. "He is a man."

"That's what I said," the intern replied.

"Not exactly," I answered. Clearly, the intern didn't get it. Neither do a lot of other health care professionals anymore.

The problem has been sneaking up on us for almost two decades. As health-care dollars became scarce in the 1980's and 90's, hospitals asked their business people to attend clinical meetings. The object was to see what doctors were doing that cost a lot of money, then to try and do things more efficiently. Almost immediately, I noticed that business jargon was becoming commonplace. "Patients" began to disappear. They were replaced by "consumers." They eventually became "customers."

This may seem a trivial matter, but it is not. You treat "patients" as if they were members of your family. You talk to them. You comfort them. You take time to explain to them what the future may hold in store. Sometimes, that future will be bleak. But you assure them you will be there to help them face it.

You treat "customers" quite differently. Customers are in your place of business to purchase health care. You complete the transaction such a relationship suggests: health care for money. And then they aren't your customers any more. Taken a step further, you can make the case that the less time you spend with your customers, the better your bottom line will be. This gets everyone's attention.

"Length of stay" became a buzz phrase in hospitals in the 1990's. So did "throughput," an awful neologism for the number of patients per hospital bed per week. One of my colleagues joked that a hospital stay was a lot like a taxi ride. The institution collected a big fee when a patient got admitted, just as a cab driver saw most of his fare when he first turned the meter on.

The additional money collected over time wasn't nearly as impressive as that initial charge. The economics of the situation favored short trips, or lengths of stay, and lots of new riders, or throughput. The arithmetic worked, but I didn't notice a lot of people laughing.

Doctors in hospitals all over the country began hearing the same business language and facing the same pressures to "keep things moving." I used to be asked how well my patients were doing. Suddenly administrators were asking how long I was planning on keeping sick people in the intensive care unit. Each day a patient spent in my unit was a day some other paying patient would have to wait for a bed. Eventually, I was warned, some of those patients "in orbit" would go elsewhere, and we would not only "lose their business," but we risked losing future referrals from other centers.

It wasn't just hospitalized patients who were taking up space other "customers" could use. Outpatients "consumed" health care "resources," too. Publicly traded H.M.O.'s, for example, began restricting doctors to an average seven-minute "encounter" with each customer. This apparently kept shareholders happy. But it reduced the doctor-patient relationship to a financial concept in a business school term paper.

Doctors know you cannot provide compassion in seven-minute aliquots. But we have felt powerless to change things. The medical establishment has, many of us feel, simply rolled over and gone along to get along. It has sacrificed patients' best interests on the altar of financial return.

This leaves the solution to the problem in the hands of our patients. You, the patient, are the system's best hope. In the age of seven-minute health care, you need to realize that you employ doctors. That is, your doctor works for you. Although doctors shouldn't think of patients as customers, you can, and should, adopt a business mind-set when shopping for health care.

Evaluate what it is you expect from your doctor, then ask for it. If you are unhappy with your doctor, fire him. If you cannot get more than a seven-minute face-to-face encounter with your doctor, he needs fewer patients. The true power in the health care economy rests not with the doctors and certainly not with the backroom business staff. It rests with you. If you insist on being treated with care and respect, you will be. And the system will improve as a result.

A pediatrician I know put it quite succinctly. "There are a lot of doctors in town," she said. "There's no need to settle for one that doesn't treat you well."

In one respect the business people are right. Restoring the doctor-patient relationship will not save anyone any money. But I submit that it doesn't have to. There are other ways to curtail health care costs. Some involve high technology; others do not. None of them requires patients to sacrifice their self-respect.

We can and must reduce health care expenses. But we cannot do it at the expense of patients' well-being. The doctor-patient relationship is critical to the integrity of the health care system. It is not disposable. Turning doctors into shopkeepers who regard patients as customers is unacceptable.

How will the M.B.A.'s and the politicians respond to what can only be termed a "patient-driven revolution"? They will have to cope. I suspect doctors will be thrilled.

Peter Salgo, a professor at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons, is an internist and anesthesiologist, as well as the host of the PBS series "Second Opinion."
###

Wash those hands !

The greatest advance in medicine in the late 19th century: hand washing by doctors in the operating room.

The New York Times
March 21, 2006
The Consumer
Hand Sanitizers, Good or Bad?
By DEBORAH FRANKLIN

What started out as an informal classroom experiment at East Tennessee State University has turned up disturbing evidence about some alcohol-based instant hand sanitizers — the antiseptic gels and foams that have become popular as a quick way to disinfect hands when soap and water aren't available.

Many such sanitizers — whether a brand name or a generic version — work well, and are increasingly found in hallway dispensers in hospitals, schools, day care centers and even atop the gangways of cruise ships as one more safeguard against the hand-to-mouth spread of disease. Several studies from such settings have shown that use of the alcohol-based rubs on hands that aren't visibly soiled seems particularly helpful in curbing the spread of bad stomach and intestinal bugs.

But a study published in this month's issue of the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases found that at least one brand of sanitizer found on store shelves, as well as some recipes for homemade versions circulating on Web sites about crafts or directed at parents, contain significantly less than the 60 percent minimum alcohol concentration that health officials deem necessary to kill most harmful bacteria and viruses.

"What this should say to the consumer is that they need to look carefully at the label before they buy any of these products," said Elaine Larson, professor of pharmaceutical and therapeutic research at Columbia's nursing school. "Check the bottle for active ingredients. It might say ethyl alcohol, ethanol, isopropanol or some other variation, and those are all fine. But make sure that whichever of those alcohols is listed, its concentration is between 60 and 95 percent. Less than that isn't enough."

Scott Reynolds, a specialist in infection control at the James H. Quillen Veterans Affairs Medical Center in Mountain Home, Tenn., discovered the problem inadvertently, in the course of giving a simple demonstration on the merits of hand washing to a friend's class of biology students at nearby East Tennessee State.

Mr. Reynolds had the students place their hands on agar plates of growth medium before and after one of several experimental conditions: rubbing their hands briskly under tap water; sudsing with hospital-grade soap and then rinsing with water; or rubbing their hands with a dollop of one of two types of alcohol-based hand sanitizer. The sanitizers used were a foam version from the hospital that contained 62 percent ethanol, and a gel version Mr. Reynolds's wife bought at a local discount store.

The next day, much to Mr. Reynolds's surprise, the culture plates from hands doused and rubbed with the store-bought gel were covered with clumps of bacteria that had, in some cases, formed a visible outline of the student's handprint on the plate.

Only when he flipped the bottle around to read the label on the back did Mr. Reynolds see that the gel's active ingredient was "40 percent ethyl alcohol."

"Otherwise, it looked like all the rest you see in the store," he said. "Same price. Same claims. Same pump bottle."

In a more formal follow-up study, Mr. Reynolds and two colleagues replicated the results, and confirmed that the lack of sufficient alcohol was to blame. If anything, he said, the faulty gel seemed to mobilize the bacteria, spreading them around the hand instead of killing them.

Allison Aiello, an epidemiologist at the University of Michigan who has studied the use and relative effectiveness of alcohol-based gels and antibacterial soaps by consumers as well as hospital workers, said she wasn't surprised by Mr. Reynolds's results from the low-alcohol sanitizer, but she was concerned to read that such a product was on the market.

"I used to work in a virology lab," Dr. Aiello said, "and we knew — it has been known for decades — that an alcohol concentration under 60 percent won't kill the microbes. It's really frightening to think that there are products out there that contain levels lower than that."

Sometimes much lower. One recipe Mr. Reynolds and his colleagues discovered on the Internet for a bubble gum-scented sanitizer aimed at children called for half a -cup of aloe vera gel and a quarter cup of 99 percent rubbing alcohol, with a bit of fragrance. That translates to a concentration of roughly 33 percent alcohol, Dr. Aiello said.

Since 2002, officials at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have recommended that health care workers routinely use high quality alcohol-based gels instead of soap and water on their hands when moving from patient to patient — as long the worker's hands aren't visibly soiled.

Alcohol doesn't cut through grime well, so dirt, blood, feces or other body fluids or soil must be wiped or washed away first, if the alcohol in the sanitizer is to be effective. In such cases, hand washing with soap and water is advised.

In October 2005, a committee appointed by the Food and Drug Administration met to discuss, among other things, whether consumers should also be encouraged to use the alcohol-based hand sanitizers.

Dr. Tammy Lundstrom, representing the nonprofit Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology, argued that they should. The committee's decision is expected this month.

"About 60 percent of surgery these days is outpatient," Dr. Lundstrom said last week in a phone interview. "We have so many people caring for ill family members at home. Maybe you're without running water because of a hurricane or blackout, or you've got a bad hip and can't move easily to get to the sink as often as you should to wash your hands. What about after you sneeze in the car, or stop to put in contact lenses?"

In all those cases, she said, alcohol-based hand sanitizers — of the correct formulation — could be a godsend, not to replace soap and water, but as an important supplement.

Dr. Aiello sees even more potential uses in the office. "Studies show that the computer keyboard, the phone receiver, and the desk are worse than the bathroom in terms of micro-organisms," she said. "Washing with plain old soap and water should be your first choice. But if you're stuck between meetings and about to grab lunch at your desk, or just use somebody else's keyboard, using a hand sanitizer before and after could be a really good idea."

How much goop should you use? Vigorously rub all sides of your hands with enough gel or foam to get them wet, and rub them together until they are dry. If your hands are dry within 10 or 15 seconds, according to the C.D.C. guidelines for health care workers, you haven't used enough.
###

Saving things

Living Well often menas preserving that which deserves saving. But how do we decide ?

Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 19, 2006
Amid the Facades, Furrowed Brows
By JEFF BYLES

ON May 22, 1936, the photographer Berenice Abbott ambled along the Brooklyn waterfront, thrilling to river-wrapped vistas and old warehouses that glowered with imposing grandeur. Crossing the narrow streets on one of her celebrated sorties to shoot the surging metropolis for the federal Works Progress Administration, she turned her lens upon a sleek new structure rising at 11 Water Street, beneath the Brooklyn Bridge.

Abutting the bridge's Brooklyn tower, the two-story Art Moderne warehouse was just a steel skeleton when Abbott photographed it. It would become the New York City Department of Purchase Storehouse, known as the Purchase Building, a low-slung work of brick and concrete ribbons. In 1977, when the building was declared part of the Fulton Ferry Historic District, preservation officials even noted its quirky boiler house, admiring its "boldly designed, tiered and faceted chimney-stack."

Yet at a public hearing on Feb. 21, the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission voted 7 to 2 in favor of demolishing the Purchase Building to make way for Brooklyn Bridge Park.

Like a growing number of decisions involving landmark designations, it came in the wake of a stormy dispute. At the hearing, Adrian Benepe, the city's parks commissioner, deemed the Purchase Building "a substantial barrier" to the Brooklyn park, a 1.3-mile-long waterfront area that planners have already hailed as the city's third great open space, in league with Central Park and Prospect Park. Lining up on the other side, preservationists deplored the decision, calling it "short-sighted," "a failure of imagination" and "anti-preservation."

But beyond the particulars of the Purchase decision, some preservationists found evidence of what they saw as a more worrisome pattern. The commission's action, they contend, was the latest sign of a sea change in landmark designation in the city, the culmination of decades-long trends that have put the landmarks commission in the middle of a land-use maelstrom.

"This vote was the low point in the history of the landmarks commission," said Andrew S. Dolkart, a professor of historic preservation at Columbia University, adding: "It's disgraceful. I think the commissioners fell down on their duty, which is to preserve landmarks."

Robert B. Tierney, the chairman of the Landmarks Preservation Commission, defended the vote to forward a favorable advisory report to park planners as "a fair outcome based on a fair and open process." Extensive study of the Fulton Ferry district, he said, convinced him and other commissioners that razing the Purchase Building was the right move, if a wrenching one. "I struggled with it," he said. "I am passionately concerned about all of the 23,000 buildings that we have under our jurisdiction. It is not with pleasure that I take a decision like this."

Pitting the ineffable virtues of Moderne styling against the incalculable glory of a world-class waterfront is no one's idea of fun. But, as the statements by Professor Dolkart and Mr. Tierney suggest, the stakes may go far beyond the Purchase Building. Many on both sides of the preservationist fence are wondering whether, given such factors as a bubbling real estate market, a rising city population and a new role for the City Council, the landmarks commission, rightly or wrongly, is entering a new chapter in its 41-year history.

Small Board, Vast Responsibility

The 11-member Landmarks Preservation Commission was born in 1965 amid the destruction of the old Pennsylvania Station, a traumatic alarm to the preservation community. Since its first designations later that year, this small agency has shaped the built fabric of the city perhaps more profoundly than any other public entity.

Led today by Mr. Tierney, who served as counsel to Mayor Edward I. Koch and was appointed chairman by Mayor Bloomberg in 2003, the commission oversees a vast portfolio of landmarks stretching from the castlelike Fonthill country house in the North Bronx, built in 1852 for the actor Edwin Forrest, to the 1670's Conference House, where Benjamin Franklin and John Adams strode on the southern tip of Staten Island. Visitors to the commission's public hearings, held regularly at the agency's Municipal Building conference room, will hear remarkably refined discourse about board-and-batten siding in Clinton Hill, the nuances of bracket signs in TriBeCa, or the precise hue of bricks to clad a proposed apartment tower on the Upper West Side.

Such civilized debate, however, belies an increasingly brass-knuckles reality.

New York's still-hot real estate market has spawned more development than at any time in recent memory. The Bloomberg administration has embarked upon a string of rezonings to help accommodate a booming city population. Low-rise neighborhoods outside Manhattan, absorbing the brunt of new development, are desperately campaigning for historic protection. City Council members, meanwhile, are seeking a louder voice in preservation affairs. And for dramatic effect, there was the head-splitting saga over the preservation of 2 Columbus Circle, Edward Durell Stone's "lollipop" building.

"The importance of landmarking has been recognized by more groups and in more parts of the city than ever before," said Mitchell L. Moss, professor of urban planning and policy at the New York University Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. "Landmarks is no longer a small peripheral entity, but is now a pivotal part of decision-making in all of the communities in New York."

At the same time, growing stresses upon the agency have frayed nerves within preservation circles. A 2004 report by the Women's City Club of New York, endorsed by more than 60 preservation groups, called for reforms to increase the commission's openness and communications with the public. That theme was amplified at City Council hearings last year, when Councilman Bill Perkins effectively put the commission on notice: "There is a constituency out there that's concerned about these issues that may be broader, more diverse, more sophisticated, more committed, than any other constituency that is identified with any other city service or city function."

The most frequent lament from that die-hard constituency is the contention that the 11 commissioners' staff is far too small, at 57 people. Despite a growing workload, the staff is down from 80 in 1991, though it has recently been on the rebound. Moreover, the loss of the survey department, which happened under the Dinkins administration, has meant that while once commission staff members roamed the streets checking out potential landmarks, they now rely on private preservation groups to bring prospective designations to their attention.

That, say preservation advocates, has contributed to an atmosphere of crisis. As Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council, put it: "Very few people wake up in the morning and say: 'I love my block. I want my block to stay as it is forever. And I want it to be a landmark.' " Instead, residents wait until the church goes up for sale or wreckers pop up at the house next door. "You have a situation where almost everything that comes across the transom at the commission is by its nature very, very urgent."

Others contend that the commission has been on a starvation diet over three mayoral administrations. Its current $3.6 million budget, they say, is a pittance compared with other departmental coffers.

In a related concern, preservation advocates cite a huge slowdown in the number of landmark designations that stretches back to at least the Koch administration.

Today the commission aims to designate 16 individual landmarks and historic districts per year. In the 2005 fiscal year, that came to a total of 46 buildings, a trifle compared with the 2,374 designated in 1981. To be fair, designations have historically been cyclical — it takes years of painstaking work to designate a district with hundreds of buildings. And the staff devotes heroic efforts to an annual load of more than 9,000 applications to alter landmark structures. As the real estate market has grown flush with low-interest loans and as property owners rush to renovate, those applications have mounted fast and furiously.

Acknowledging that the commission's resources are not what they were, Mr. Tierney cites trends that he calls encouraging. The staff has grown almost 20 percent over the past four years. "Is it enough?" Mr. Tierney asked. "Maybe not yet. But it's a big, big step forward."

A Rocky Past

As seen through the eyes of other preservationists, the picture looks almost rosy, at least compared with yesteryear.

"These storms going on today are nothing compared to the storms that went on routinely," said Kent Barwick, president of the Municipal Art Society and chairman of the commission from 1978 to 1983. Mr. Barwick battled opposition to designating landmarks in Queens and Staten Island, and "an absolute prohibition on designations in Lower Manhattan, a place most people would consider the architectural treasure house of the nation." Even the Upper East Side Historic District, today accepted as one of the city's premier landmark districts, resulted from a brutal fight against real estate interests.

Indeed, commission hearings were rarely sedate affairs. The case for Lever House, for instance, may look simple after the fact. "At the time it was up for designation it was a terrible fight," Mr. Barwick said. "And it is certainly not easy for a commission operating today, because there's still an argument over whether some of these buildings are worthwhile." That argument played out in pitched fashion over 2 Columbus Circle, which became a cause célèbre after the commission declined even to hold a public hearing about its worthiness as a landmark.

Regardless of such dust-ups, others call the current administration as preservation-minded as any, given Mayor Bloomberg's urbanist credentials. "I don't think anyone can say he's not a great supporter of preservation," said Sherida E. Paulsen, who preceded Mr. Tierney as chairwoman of the commission. "He's always shown a great interest in making sure the environment is of very high quality."

And more market-oriented urban observers have long argued that regulation can go overboard. "Cities are living organisms and as living organisms they have to change," said Peter Salins, provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs of the State University of New York and an expert on housing and planning policy. "There has to be the flexibility for the community to live and to breathe."

Council Flexes Its Muscles

That brings us to another factor in preservation calculus: resistance to the permanent protection of modern architecture like the Purchase Building, especially among members of the City Council who are empowered to approve, modify or deny landmark designations.

Late last year, the Council caused a stir when it revoked the designation for the Cass Gilbert-designed Austin, Nichols & Company building on the Brooklyn waterfront, a 1915 structure denounced as "a piece of trash" by Simcha Felder, then chairman of the Council's landmarks committee. Although a Council overturn of a landmarks ruling is a relative rarity, that vote represented the second time in two months that the Council had rejected a decision by the commission, coming just after the 1968 Jamaica Savings Bank was stripped of its designation. One possible explanation: Neither structure fit the mode of lavish ornament and classical detailing that to the untrained eye typically says "landmark."

But aesthetics were only part of the story. For one thing, the Austin, Nichols owners bitterly opposed the designation, hoping to add a rooftop addition for condominiums. For another, the building came up for designation at a moment when the Council was powerfully flexing its muscles vis-à-vis decisions on landmarks.

The trend dates to about 15 years ago, when the Council became a player in the designation process after changes to the City Charter. After 2001, when term limits kicked in, a more activist group of Council members began responding more pointedly to the landmarks commission, both asking for designations and rejecting them.

In some eyes, that's not a bad thing.

"The commission is a group of experts with architectural expertise and historical expertise, whereas the Council is reasoning with different criteria," among them economic development imperatives, zoning considerations, and the views of their constituents, said Ms. Paulsen, the former commission chairwoman. "I think the two things do have to be part of a dialogue." (By law, the 11 commissioners, all of them appointed by the mayor for three-year terms, must include at least three architects, one historian, one city planner or landscape architect, and one real estate agent. The commission must also include one resident of each borough.)

Complicating matters further is that New York has added 845,000 residents since 1990, spurring demand for housing. Jumbo-sized new construction has catalyzed preservationists in neighborhoods that suddenly seem at risk. The recently designated Fieldston Historic District, for example, a 257-building swath of the North Bronx, has been hailed as a rare example of a romantic suburban community — and one that was in danger as owners tore down stately Tudors and Colonials to build enormous new homes ill-matched to their surroundings.

Similarly vulnerable neighborhoods like Dumbo in Brooklyn, along with Flushing, Richmond Hill and Kew Gardens in Queens, are now desperately lobbying the commission for their own historic districts. Even parts of Staten Island have lately converted to the preservation gospel, spurred on by the news that during the 1990's the borough was the state's fastest-growing county.

To that end, Mr. Tierney notes that the commission recently completed a street-by-street "windshield survey" of Staten Island, driving by every building and documenting what is expected to be a trove of landmark-worthy structures. And over the past three years, 406 buildings in the boroughs beyond Manhattan have been designated, including the Douglaston Hill Historic District in Queens. The commission is working on a stretch of more than 500 buildings in the Crown Heights North area of Brooklyn, which could be the largest district designated in more than a decade.

With a total of 84 historic districts under the agency's belt, Mr. Tierney remains proud of the commission's work.

"I think we've been aggressive, and I think the results show it," he said. "At a time like this, when preservation needs to be at the table, we're at the table in a major, major way."

A Misplaced Gem

If you follow Berenice Abbott's footsteps today, you might have a hard time finding anything to cherish about the Purchase Building. The whole property, which has recently housed a temporary city command center, strikes a barricaded note. Drab aluminum siding clads part of the facade. Hemmed in by the garden for the adjacent River Café, the structure looks awkwardly sited.

Was it really worth fighting for? Absolutely, said Nicholas Evans-Cato, vice president of the Vinegar Hill Neighborhood Association.

"Even within such a small historic district as Fulton Ferry," he said, "the boundaries that were drawn at that time recognize that the Purchase Building is just as much a part of the history of the working waterfront as the Empire Stores or the Brooklyn Bridge itself." And for a warehouse once crammed full of office furniture, it has a remarkable expanse of gasp-worthy windows.

"Why would all those file cabinets need great views of the river?" Mr. Evans-Cato wondered. "And if you put a restaurant in there, future park visitors would have had that great view, too."

Yet even Moderne-minded architects admit that the planners have a point.

"I love the Purchase Building, and I think it's an underappreciated gem," said Fredric M. Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. Yet, he added: "The Purchase Building as a warehouse in a park just did not make sense. The context was everything. And the context of this building is that it blocks the view of a world monument, the Brooklyn Bridge."

The verdict: Nice building. Wrong place.

Jeff Byles is the author of "Rubble: Unearthing the History of Demolition."
###

Carolina on my mind

Why i love the cuisine South
Pretty feeling in my mouth

enjoy

The New York Times
March 15, 2006
A Southern Star Rises in the Lowcountry
By R. W. APPLE Jr.

CHARLESTON, S.C.

EATING well, very well, is nothing new in the marshy, island-rimmed Lowcountry of South Carolina. The complex and amply documented culinary traditions of this elegant peninsular city and its hinterland stretch back into Colonial times.

In 1742 Eliza Lucas Pinckney, born in Antigua, educated in London, wrote from her family's plantation on Wappoo Creek: "The country abounds with wild fowl, venison and fish. The pork exceeds any I ever tasted anywhere. The turkeys are extremely fine, especially the wild, and indeed all the poultry is exceeding good. Peaches, nectarines and melons of all sorts extremely fine and in profusion." Decades before the Revolution, she cultivated rice and figs, baked macaroons with West Indies coconut and macerated peach kernels in wine, brandy, orange flower water and sugar to produce the cordial ratafia.

Notable early cookbooks were compiled by her daughter, Harriott Pinckney Horry (1770), and another relative, Sarah Rutledge ("The Carolina Housewife," 1847). Miss Rutledge included recipes for shrimp, crabs, oysters and shad — all Charleston mainstays a century and a half later — as well as daubes and ragouts introduced to South Carolina by the French Protestants known as Huguenots. Nor did she omit savory dishes based on ingredients brought by slaves from West Africa, such as okra, sesame seeds (known here as benne, exactly as in Senegal), peanuts and black-eyed field peas — the key ingredient, along with rice, in that quintessential Lowcountry treat Hoppin' John.

But the Civil War and its aftermath took a heavy toll, devastating the aristocratic families like the Pinckneys and the Rutledges (from both of which my wife, Betsey, descends) and fastening a straitjacket of poverty on the Lowcountry that stayed in place for almost a hundred years.

These days Charleston is again a boom town, with soaring real estate prices and growing suburbs like Mount Pleasant, which is linked to the city by a spectacular $650 million suspension bridge, opened in 2005. Packed with restaurants old and new, the area has become one of the South's important culinary capitals — a worthy rival, if on a smaller scale, for New Orleans, at a time when many of that city's eating places are struggling to regain their footing after the hurricanes of 2005.

To mark its arrival in the gastronomic big time, Charleston staged its first Food and Wine Festival early in March, drawing more than 5,000 people over three days. Chefs and other food experts came from across the South to size up the situation, and many of them were impressed.

"The seeds have been here for a long time," said John T. Edge, director of the Southern Foodways Alliance at the University of Mississippi, "and now they're sprouting, at the most opportune moment." Frank Stitt, the chef and owner of the heralded Highlands Bar and Grill in Birmingham, Ala., agreed that "Charleston is poised to take its place alongside New Orleans, and the process won't take long."

Unlike New Orleans, Charleston was slow to develop a restaurant culture, and the best cooking was long confined to private kitchens. As late as 1958, when I first visited the city, in search of architectural rather than epicurean thrills, it had only one significant restaurant, Perdita's, which specialized in she-crab soup, made with the orange roe of the female of the species. Not incidentally, the definitive sherry-laced version of that soup is said to have been perfected early in the 20th century by William Deas, butler to a local grande dame named Blanche Rhett, who produced a cookbook in the 30's.

Betsey can remember street vendors calling out "Swimpee! Swimpee!" when she was a young girl. They have disappeared, along with most of the sweet, tiny creek shrimp that they sold and the habit in many households of eating shrimp and grits for breakfast, lunch and dinner, sometimes in the same day. Still, that dish, usually made with larger if still succulent bay and ocean shrimp, has become the emblem of Charleston restaurant cooking in recent times, as ubiquitous as pizza in Naples.

Today, though, a new sophistication is sweeping across the city and its suburbs as chefs with fresh ideas arrive from places like Boston, New York, Chicago and Houston, eager to use local ingredients in new ways shaped by their own experience.

As the newcomers have poured in, some of the old masters have decamped — first Louis Osteen took his rich duck and quail specialties, his oyster stews and cobblers, to Pawleys Island, almost two hours up the coast, while more recently Michael Kramer, the Californian who put McCrady's on the culinary map, headed north to Chicago, and Rose Durden abdicated her seemingly permanent post in the kitchen of Carolina's.

Many of the town's classicists continue to turn out their classics, of course. The food-mad pilgrim can still revel in Robert Carter's moist, towering seven-layer coconut cake at the Peninsula Grill and Bob Waggoner's authentic, brightly spiced Frogmore Stew (a Lowcountry witch's brew that includes shrimp, crab, corn and sausage) at the Charleston Grill. And night after night at the cozy little Hominy Grill, Robert Stehling sends out carefully handmade versions of myriad regional delicacies, like okra and shrimp beignets, shad roe (perfectly sautéed and prettily poised on a heap of stone-ground grits) and buttermilk pie, which beats a buttermilk sky any old day.

THERE is much to like about Fig, Mike Lata's pared-down dining room on Meeting Street, Charleston's main stem. Things like the mustardy deviled eggs served while you read the menu, for example, and a warm salad of shrimp, pancetta, radicchio and cherry tomatoes, and a wine list filled with fairly priced, seldom-encountered gems such as Brick House Oregon pinot noir, made by my friend Doug Tunnell, and the matchless Armagnacs of Francis Darroze.

Mr. Lata, a 33-year-old New Englander who came to Charleston by way of New Orleans and Atlanta, turns out a superb hanger steak with caramelized shallots and an old-fashioned bordelaise sauce, and a paprika-infused Portuguese seafood stew. His luscious pudding made with Carolina Gold Rice puts other local versions to shame.

But Fig's strongest suit is vegetables — appropriate enough in a city and a region where the three- or four-vegetable plate lunch remains a treasured tradition.

An adherent of the Slow Food movement, Mr. Lata knows when to gild and when not to. He dresses a billowing bowlful of tender pale green Bibb lettuce, grown on nearby Wadmalaw Island by Dan Kennerty, with freckles of dark green herbs and a sherry vinaigrette, nothing more. His roasted beets are sweet simplicity, too. But he transforms the seasonal produce of Celeste Albers, turning hardy winter chard into a voluptuous gratin and pairing pan-roasted cauliflower with mustard butter. Only the turmeric-flavored cauliflower dishes in India excited me quite as much.

"The food Celeste brings me is so perfect that you're frustrated the rest of the year when you have to make do with the ordinary stuff," Mr. Lata said, and he frets that the proliferation of golf courses, gated residential communities and shopping centers here is squeezing farmers out, narrowing the range of products available to chefs.

In Mount Pleasant, Ben Berryhill, who spent a dozen years tending the stoves for Robert Del Grande at the top-rated Cafe Annie in Houston, faces similar problems. He told us that he searched constantly for prime local products but had not yet managed to find a supplier for fresh quail, long a staple of the Lowcountry table.

Mr. Berryhill's cooking at his new restaurant here, Red Drum, succeeds best, in my view, when he applies his Southwestern sensibility to seafood. Local crab, shrimp and scallops go into a spicy Mexican-style Campeche cocktail patterned after the one at Goode Company in Houston; fish like grouper and tuna go into lime and tequila ceviche or tacos, shrimp onto tostadas and wood-grilled salmon onto sweet corn pudding. Wood-grilled shrimp with green chili garlic butter make a persuasive advertisement for the quality of Carolina shellfish.

Is this Charleston cooking? Well, yes and no. Mr. Berryhill and colleagues are broadening the definition, and as Mr. Edge said when we dined at Red Drum, "Southern food wasn't frozen forever in 1865, and there's no reason that cooking here should be frozen in 1995."

A bit farther out of town, on Daniel Island, which once belonged to the Guggenheim family, Ken Vedrinski has given the area perhaps its most cosmopolitan restaurant, Sienna, a stylish, polished wood and stainless steel room with an open kitchen. Born in Ohio into a Polish-American family, he was largely raised by an Italian-American grandmother who proved to be his primary culinary influence.

Mr. Vedrinski likes bold flavors that "pop off the plate," he told me, and that showed in the array of Italian-style raw fish — crudo — that he served to a group of us, including Mickey Bakst, a veteran of the Michigan restaurant wars, who as maître d'hôtel has breathed animation into the Charleston Grill at Charleston Place, a rather sterile space that once epitomized the forbidding feel of hotel dining rooms.

The crudo at Sienna was every bit the equal of its celebrated counterpart, David Pasternak's at Esca in Manhattan, utilizing fish from near and far: local flounder, grouper and oysters, tuna from the Northeast, ivory king salmon from the Northwest. Each got its own topping: olive oil for some, citrus juices for others, balsamic vinegar, even highly perfumed moscato vinaigrette.

Adapting a technique from Siggi Hall, Iceland's leading chef, Mr. Vedrinski bonds a ciabatta crust to a salmon scallop, a substitute for the crisp skin that he said "most Americans just won't eat," and serves it with a bracing cold salad of tomatoes, capers, garlic and onions. He serves the classic Lowcountry combination of pork and shellfish in the form of intensely piggy guanciale, made from hog jowls, and lightly cooked shrimp over noodles hand-cut with a chitarra, a guitar-shaped tool.

We sampled all that, and two more irresistible plates — tiny veal meatballs, made to Grandma Volpe's recipe with impossibly ethereal gnocchi, and an unctuous rice pudding gelato made by Shun Li, the youthful Chinese-American pastry chef — before waddling out to our car, happily sated. Sienna's remarkably fastidious, decidedly modern Italian cooking could stand muster in New York, or in Milan for that matter.

SOME people argue that Charleston lacks the lovable holes-in-the-wall that underpin the more ambitious restaurants in great food towns, places like the bouchons of Lyon, say, or the street-food stalls of Singapore. To a degree that's true, especially downtown. As much of the local food gossip these days centers on who serves the best beef — the Oak Steakhouse, Grill 225 or Mo Sussman's, the three main combatants in the city's red-hot steak skirmishes — as on who turns out the best shrimp and grits.

But move away from the center, to outlying areas where commercial pressures are not so intense, and you find plenty of joints where the old verities are served.

Take oysters. Charleston loves 'em, especially the uncultivated beauties, "meaty, juicy, salty," that John Martin Taylor, the Lowcountry food maven, gushes about, "continually washed by the incredible flow of our eight-foot tide," then plucked from the mud of the salt marshes and "garnished only by the glint of the January sun."

All through the colder months, oysters in vast quantities are cooked over raging fires and consumed at outdoors open-them-yourself oyster roasts, accompanied by heroic quantities of beer. Much the same experience can be had all year, in less raucous surroundings, at Bowens Island Restaurant, a humble cinder-block place on James Island, south of Charleston, where clusters of oysters from the Ashley River are steamed under wet burlap on a sizzling metal plate, then shoveled unceremoniously onto your table. Add saltines, hot sauce, maybe a squirt of lemon to replace that "glint of the January sun," and the requisite beer.

A ramshackle roadside place called See Wee, on Highway 17 leading north toward Myrtle Beach, is blessed with virtuoso practitioners of another old Lowcountry art, frying. Frying oysters, frying pickles, and delicately frying green tomatoes — the best of my 71 years, cut thin, dusted with corn flour and plunged into the hot fat for just a few moments, served up crisp and golden with a mild horseradish sauce. But most of all, frying shrimp, as well as any Tokyo tempura master, without a scintilla of heaviness or a smidgen of grease to mar the love affair 'twixt crustacean and palate.

As is always the case, freshness is the key here. Shrimp start deteriorating the minute they leave the water, so you eat them best close to the sea. The See Wee sign promises that — "Local Shrimp," it says, "God Bless the USA" — and at the same time suggests an unhappy reality. Carolina shrimpers, like Maryland crabbers, are menaced by low-cost foreign competition.

The restaurant's unusual name? It commemorates a small, ill-starred Indian tribe who took to their canoes in the 17th century, hoping to cross the Atlantic to trade deerskins with the king of England. Most quickly drowned; the rest were captured and sold into slavery and death in the Caribbean.

Closer to town, on the same stretch of Highway 17, stands an unpretentious little monument to the Gullah people, as the African-Americans who inhabited the coastal islands are known, and their culinary culture. Gullah Cuisine, it is called, and it is the place to get over your allergy to that mucilaginous vegetable the okra pod. Charlotte Jenkins, 63, the kindly, soft-spoken proprietor, cured me in 10 minutes flat with her smoky, robust shrimp-and-andouille gumbo, thickened with okra (and not, like most Louisiana gumbos, with roux or filé); her deep-fried okra; and her distinctive yellow rice with crisp, vividly green okra.

Mrs. Jenkins's sweet braised cabbage, her extra-cheesy macaroni and her state-of-the-art fried chicken were all richly worth the trip out from town as well.

The happy, appreciative crowd at Saturday lunch was as heterogeneous as you could imagine: black, white and Hispanic, working class and middle class, local and Yankee, young and old. Parked outside were a Lexus, a Mercedes, a Harley, several pickups and a lot of battered third-hand jalopies. This, I said to my wife, was the South we fantasized about but almost never found in the days when I traipsed around the region in the 1960's, covering Martin Luther King.
###

Niche Programming

More Glory of the Web stuff. No one need do without the kind of programming s/he loves best ! Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 12, 2006
As Internet TV Aims at Niche Audiences, the Slivercast Is Born
By SAUL HANSELL

ANDY STEWARD, a successful London computer consultant and sailboat racer, became exasperated when trying to watch his favorite sport on television. There were a few half-hour recaps of some major sailing races, but they were always shown late at night.

Mr. Steward looked into creating a sailing channel on the Sky satellite service in Britain, but his idea was soon dead in the water. He would have had to pay £85,000 (nearly $150,000) to start the channel and £40,000 a month (nearly $70,000), as well as the production costs. That was a lot of money for an untested concept.

But in January, he did introduce a sailing channel, one that is rapidly filling with sailing talk shows, product reviews, programs on sailing techniques and, most important, intense coverage of the sort of smaller races that don't make it onto traditional television.

His new channel, however, will not be available over the air. And it won't be found on cable or even on satellite, at least not yet. The channel, called Sail.tv, is broadcast only on the Internet, which enables video to reach a much larger worldwide audience at a much lower initial cost than a satellite channel. Because "we didn't have any idea how big the audience would be," Mr. Steward said, he wanted to keep his expenses as low as possible. "Internet television is an investment we can grow into," he said.

In the last six months, major media companies have received much attention for starting to move their own programming online, whether downloads for video iPods or streaming programs that can be watched over high-speed Internet connections.

Perhaps more interesting — and, arguably, more important — are the thousands of producers whose programming would never make it into prime time but who have very dedicated small audiences. It's a phenomenon that could be called slivercasting.

In 2004, Wired magazine popularized the phrase "the long tail" to refer to the large number of specialized offerings that in themselves appeal to a small number of people, but cumulatively represent a large market that can be easily aggregated on the Internet. Plotted on a graph along with best sellers, these specialized products trail off like a long tail that never reaches zero.

Indeed, the Internet's ability to offer an almost infinite selection is part of what makes it so appealing: people can find things that don't sell well enough to warrant shelf space in a neighborhood music store or video rental shop — think of the obscure books on Amazon.com. The ease of digital video production and the ubiquity of high-speed Internet connections are sending the long tail of video into the living rooms of the world, live and in color.

"The next wave of media is to unleash the power of serving people's special interests," said John Hendricks, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, which is developing a series of specialized video services. "Every time I walk into a Borders bookstore, I spend a lot of time looking at the magazine rack — because staring at you are all the passions of America. The bride who is about to get married, there is a magazine for her. And for the person who is a little older, there are wonderful travel and leisure magazines."

Already, there are specialized video services serving hundreds of specialties, including poker, bicycling, lacrosse, photography, vegetarian cooking, fine wine, horror films, obscure sitcoms and Japanese anime. There is also a growing market for Webcasts of local news and entertainment from every country and in every language, aimed at expatriates.

"We're adding two or three new channels a week," said Iolo Jones, the chief executive of NarrowStep, a company in London that provides technology and support for specialized Webcasts. Among his clients is Sail.tv, which says it attracted 70,000 viewers in its first month.

NEARLY 15 years ago, when the advent of digital cable offered the possibility of 500 channels, many people were skeptical that there would be enough programs to fill them. But then came specialized broadcasters — including the Speed Channel (for auto racing fans), the Military Channel and Home and Garden Television — and now cable and satellite systems are largely full.

"It has become almost impossible for a channel to increase its distribution the old way," said Lauren Zalaznick, the president of Bravo and Trio, two cable channels owned by NBC Universal. "To get distribution it takes a lot of effort and negotiation. You have to give up a lot to get very little."

Indeed, after DirecTV dropped Trio, a channel devoted to pop culture, among other things, Ms. Zalaznick decided to move it from pay-TV systems to the Internet. "To survive we had to find a new way," she said. The new way, she quickly realized, could also help Trio resolve its identity crisis. The cable channel mixed documentaries about pop culture, original music programming, reruns of obscure television shows and a fair bit of programming aimed at gay and lesbian viewers.

Moving to the Internet allowed her to break Trio into three distinct sites; they will be introduced over the rest of this year. One, called TrioTV.com, will have the music and pop culture programming. Another, BrilliantButCancelled.com, will have the old TV shows. And the third, OutZone.com, will have gay and lesbian programming created in conjunction with PlanetOut, a media and entertainment company focused on that audience.

Other big media companies are also creating narrower Internet extensions of their channels. Scripps Networks, which runs the HGTV network, for example, created HGTVPro, with programming aimed at contractors and builders.

Discovery Communications, which has been a master of the current system, creating 15 different cable channels including Animal Planet and Discovery Health, is now exploring even more specialized services over the Internet. One will be introduced tomorrow for $9.95 a month. It will offer 30,000 video clips excerpted from its library of documentaries and other educational programs to help grade school and high school students with their homework. In the future, other services will offer content focused on narrow topics in travel, science and health.

Discovery, Mr. Hendricks says, is in a good position to create such services because of its large archive. "We have a wealth of programming just related to cancer, just related to Alaska and so on," he said.

In addition to offering Internet distribution, Discovery will start to broadcast some of these programs late at night on its regular channels and encourage people to record them, he said.

To be sure, there are doubters. "I've never been a believer that we should create channels for all these niches like beach volleyball," said John Skipper, a senior vice president of ESPN, a unit of the Walt Disney Company. "They just don't pencil out. Because if you have 12,000 people, you can't afford to do it. And if you can't afford to do it, you can't make any money on it."

One reason that ESPN has shied away from this sort of niche programming, he said, is that its brand stands for a level of high-quality visual production that would be difficult for small channels to afford. Indeed, ESPN has been investing millions of dollars to produce programs in high-definition formats.

But reticence by some big media companies is making room for independent programmers to explore all sorts of niches.

Marie Oser, a vegetarian cooking writer and food promoter, has been creating television programs for cable networks for several years. She is now working on developing a site, VegTV.com, which features 160 clips, mainly cooking demonstrations, as well as coverage of events like the Tofu Festival in Los Angeles and interviews about vegetarianism with celebrities including Jane Goodall and Daryl Hannah. The most popular viewing times, perhaps not surprisingly, are at lunch time and just before dinner.

Viewers call up about 1,000 videos each day, Ms. Oser said. "That's not huge," she said, "but it's growing." She makes money promoting her books, the food products she creates and the products of paying sponsors.

She offers her video by way of the Roo Group, a New York company that handles the technology for storing and sending the video to users; it also sells advertising on behalf of VegTV and a stable of other specialized sites. In the past, Roo has brought American Express, Honda and other national advertisers to Ms. Oser's site, although no major campaigns are running now. Roo also provides links to her programming from some other sites it works with, including Local10.com, the site of WPLG, a Miami television station, which supplements clips from its local news with additional video from Roo.

Another Roo-based slivercaster is Yuks TV (www.yuks.com), started by Dailey Pike, a Los Angeles comedian who earns most of his money these days warming up studio audiences for sitcoms. Mr. Pike said he was outraged when he saw a Comedy Central poll asking viewers to rate the 100 best comedians of all time. "Bob Hope was well below Bill Maher," he said.

He decided to create programming around clips from classic comedy television shows that have fallen into the public domain, including routines by Jack Benny, Red Skelton and George Burns with Gracie Allen. Mr. Pike also has some exuberant classic commercials, like ones featuring the dancing Lucky Strike cigarettes and the skydiver who delivered a can of Colt 45.

At first, he, too, made a program for late-night cable television, but in 2004 he switched to the Internet. The site has had as many as 200,000 visitors in a month, he said, but only if he buys advertising to attract them. "I can't make enough money to cover my costs at this point," he said. But he hopes that this will change, he said, as Roo builds up its advertising sales prowess.

Robert Petty, Roo's chief executive, has been trying to build an Internet broadcast system for years, but the idea has attracted attention only recently. "In the last few weeks, we've had a lot of people in saying they want to build out five TV stations for broadband," said Mr. Petty, a former executive at Telstra, the Australian telephone company. "We went for a lot of years without any attention at all. We're really enjoying it now."

He added that viewers were quickly warming up to Internet video. "Now we are talking about three- to five-minute videos," he said, "but there's no question that in a year's time we are talking about 22-minute to one-hour videos." Roo works with 100 sites, which show 40 million videos a month, Mr. Petty said.

While advertising on small video sites has been sporadic so far, many companies, including Roo and NarrowStep, say they see an opportunity to match video commercials to specialized audiences, as Google does with Internet searches and Web pages.

"The real analogy here is not with television but with magazine publishing," said Mr. Jones of NarrowStep. "Narrow publications can get very high rates."

In any case, companies that have thrived largely by selling specialized DVD's, often through obscure mail-order dealers, are now turning to the Internet as well. One company, Brain Damage Films, which produces and distributes horror films too obscure to show in theaters, has started renting its movies through Akimbo, a service that uses the Internet to distribute video programming. (Brain Damage's biggest hit so far has been "Death Factory," which involves an accident in a chemical plant and a worker who starts to mutate.) Akimbo can send programs either to a specialized set-top box that it sells for $69 or to a PC with Microsoft Media Center software.

Darrin G. Ramage, the chief executive of Maxim Media Marketing, which runs Brain Damage, says the company has no choice but to move to online distribution. "The bottom line is that for independent horror movie fans — people from 18 to 25 — the Internet is where they are," he said. "Anything they want to know about, they go on the Internet. If they want a movie, they go on the Internet."

Online distribution now accounts for 10 percent of Brain Damage's revenue, he said, and the company plans to start selling downloadable versions of its films directly from its Web site.

Kostas Metaxas is also shifting his video production online, although he serves an older audience more interested in diamonds than blood. Mr. Metaxas runs Exero, an Australian company that produces interviews with jewelers, fashion designers, chefs and others who cater to the preoccupations of the rich. "It's eyeball candy, basically," he explained.

He has accumulated 500 such interviews and packaged them for cable networks, DVD sales and in-flight viewing on Malaysia Airlines. Exero, too, is now finding a new audience through Akimbo, offering some programs free and selling others.

Instructional videos are also becoming available on the Web. TotalVid, which is owned by Landmark Communications, the parent of the Weather Channel, offers 2,300 programs for download, many of them videos teaching everything from how to play a guitar to the best techniques in tae kwon do. "There is a huge group of men who aspire to do martial arts," said Karl B. Quist, TotalVid's president. "They are not going to take lessons at a dojo, but they will watch a 60-minute video."

Viewers can pay for limited-time access to individual TotalVid programs, which include videos on extreme sports, music, parenting and travel, or they can pay $9.95 a month for a subscription that allows unlimited viewing of its films.

"I offered to help my son's basketball team, and I wound up as head coach," said Michael Katz, a marketing consultant in Hopkinton, Mass. A friend recommended TotalVid, and Mr. Katz used it to find a 45-minute video about how to coach youth basketball.

"The production quality wasn't great, but I could actually see the demonstrations of how to do the drills," he said, boasting that his team finished third in its league.

Looming over all of the smaller companies that distribute specialized video is the question of Google's ultimate role. Google's early video service was criticized as hard to use, but it is nonetheless attracting a lot of programming from major networks as well as independents — and of course, it has a huge traffic flow that no independent site can match. Google allows programmers to offer video free, to rent it or to sell copies that viewers download to their computers; Google gets a commission for videos that are sold and rented. Eventually, it plans to sell advertising on some videos as well, sharing the revenue with the producers.

Mr. Quist, for one, says he plans to deal with Google as a partner rather than as a competitor by making much of the TotalVid's accumulated content available for rent through Google Video. Some producers who license programs to TotalVid can cut out the middleman, of course, and deal with Google directly. Mr. Quist said he hoped to help these producers market their programming on Google as well as on Apple's iTunes and other online video stores.

Among the niche audiences that are considered both large and attractive to Internet broadcasters are immigrants and expatriates seeking news and entertainment from their home countries. But arranging cross-border deals, especially those in less-developed countries, can be difficult, complex and sometimes harrowing.

Kaleil Isaza Tuzman was reminded of this last month when someone stole his watch while he was taking a shower in a shared bathroom at his hotel in Khartoum, Sudan. Still, Mr. Tuzman said he considered the trip a success because he was able to secure the rights to broadcast Sudan TV, the national television station, on JumpTV, the company he runs.

JumpTV, which is based in Toronto, has evolved into a service that offers live Internet transmission of television station broadcasts from more than 60 countries to expatriates around the world. Among its channels are VTV4 from Vietnam, Channel 10 from Greece, Amazon Sat from Brazil and, perhaps most notably, the original Arabic-language version of Al Jazeera, the news channel based in Qatar.

This service has made a great difference to Joe Wityk, 83, of Calgary, an immigrant from Ukraine.

His son, Steve Wityk, said, "My dad has been bugging me for 20 years to get TV from the Ukraine." The younger Mr. Wityk did not want to buy a receiver to get the specialized satellite channels, which could have cost as much as $1,000, he said. So he was delighted to find that he could subscribe to TV5 from Ukraine through JumpTV. He installed an inexpensive computer in his home that he connected through a hole he drilled in his ceiling to the television set of his father, who lives above him.

"He had subscribed to Ukrainian newsletters but by the time the news got to him it was old," the son said. "The TV is much better."

MR. TUZMAN travels the world to manage relationships with television stations and oversee construction of the global network of satellite receivers and Internet servers needed to operate the system. He declined to say how many subscribers he had, but each typically pays $9.95 a month for a single channel, or up to $26 a month for a package of related channels.

Mr. Tuzman — a founder of GovWorks.com during the dot-com boom, allowing people to pay parking tickets and otherwise deal online with local governments — faces competition from cable and satellite services. That is especially the case in the United States, where there is already much programming for the largest ethnic groups. So he focuses on smaller groups.

"The Bengali community in the U.S. is not the size of Dominicans'," he said. "But guess what? They can't watch Bengali TV anywhere else." Moreover, the audience for the Internet is worldwide.

"If you are a Mexican in North America, you are much better served by cable and satellite than if you are a Moroccan in Europe," he said. "Our company is a very exciting company because we aggregate a lot of different audiences, but any one of those audiences is a very small niche."
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Jessica's Country

Lafayette's Jessica Credeur spent a year living here. She must be relieved to see the election of this woman to this post. One day, Jessica might even be our Ambassador to Chile.

Enjoy.

The New York Times
March 8, 2006
Letter From Chile
With a New Leader, Chile Seems to Shuck Its Strait Laces

By LARRY ROHTER

SANTIAGO, Chile, March 7 — This is the most socially conservative and tradition-minded country in Latin America, or so Chileans are accustomed to being told and to thinking about themselves. So how is it that the new president, who is to take office here on Saturday, is not just a woman, but also a single mother and an agnostic?

The triumph of Michelle Bachelet, 54, a Socialist, pediatrician and former exile, in January's election was clearly a political watershed both for Chile and Latin America. But it has also set Chileans to wondering if perhaps their supposedly inhibited and stodgy society hasn't also become more modern and broad-minded than they had ever imagined possible.

In a book that has been widely commented on and that anticipated the rise of Ms. Bachelet, "The Chilean Dream: Community, Family and Nation at the Bicentennial," the sociologist Eugenio Tironi maintained that modernization here arrived in three waves. First came an economic opening in the 1980's under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, then a political modernization in the 1990's after the return of democracy and civilian rule.

"Recent years," Mr. Tironi argued in the book, published a year ago, have initiated "the phase of cultural liberalization" and a "new moral climate." Taken as a whole, he concludes, "Chile seems to be evolving toward a liberal model of society of the North American type," marked by greater individualism, an erosion of the traditional family structure and greater social tolerance.

One index of that shift is that last year nearly 60 percent of all babies were born out of wedlock, compared with less than half in 2000. Yet for every sign of change, there seems to be a counter-example of the persistence of traditional values and resistance to more relaxed sexual and social mores.

Prior censorship of films, which had kept movies like "The Last Temptation of Christ" out of Chilean theaters for 15 years, ended only in 2003. But in sharp contrast to a place like Brazil, where a pop song called "Sin Does Not Exist Below the Equator" was once a big hit, explicitly erotic magazines are not displayed at newsstands, and nudity and coarse language are absent from prime-time television.

In the social realm, divorce was approved less than 18 months ago, after more than a century of debate during which Chileans could only "nullify" their marriages through legal subterfuge. But abortion remains proscribed, as do the gay unions now offered in parts of Brazil and Argentina, and any discussion of the morning-after pill or sex education in the schools immediately provokes controversy.

Part of the resistance is simply a result of the unusual power wielded by the Roman Catholic Church here, more conservative than its counterparts in places like Brazil and Peru. During the Pinochet dictatorship, the church, under Cardinal Raúl Silva Enríquez, was the most visible and effective defender of human rights through its Vicarate of Solidarity, saving dozens of opposition figures — including some who are in power today — from jail or even death.

"But when democracy was re-established, the church handed the democratic coalition the bill," explained Arturo Valenzuela, who is director of the Center for Latin American Studies at Georgetown University and comes from a Chilean family. "It was, 'We took care of you guys, so don't mess around with divorce.' Yet the ones who handed over that bill weren't the same ones who had protected the Christian Democrats and the Socialists; they represented a church that had moved right."

The news media here have historically been unusually conservative, too, and thus have served to inhibit rather than promote new values, many social analysts say. But Chile's embrace of free market capitalism, originally imposed by advisers of General Pinochet who were followers of Milton Friedman, is forcing changes even in that realm.

One leading television channel here, for instance, is the property of the Roman Catholic university. But in order to maintain the ratings necessary to attract advertisers, it has had to turn to the same mix of reality shows and racy prime-time soap operas, including some featuring premarital sex and gay characters, as its secular competitors.

Another factor in bringing about change is clearly generational. More than half the country's 15 million people were not even in school when democratic rule was restored, meaning the authoritarian practices and values of General Pinochet's 17-year dictatorship, including its emphasis on God, nation and family, are as much a fading memory as the Socialist Salvador Allende's earlier stress on social solidarity and mass political engagement.

Some, however, argue that Chile has never been as socially conservative as it often appeared in the past. A historian and social critic, Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, for example, talks of a "subterranean" Chile in which abortion, homosexuality and other socially condemned actions have flourished.

It is not that "Chile is more pious or saintly than other countries," but that "society is much more liberal in its behavior than its discourse," he said. "What exists here is a situation that limits the expression, but not the practice."

One landmark event that brought such disapproved behavior to the surface occurred June 30, 2002, when the American photographer Spencer Tunick came here to shoot a series of pictures of multitudes of people naked in public places. To the shock of those accustomed to thinking of Chileans as inhibited, and who predicted Mr. Tunick's failure, an estimated 4,000 people were willing to take part in the project on a cold winter morning when the soccer World Cup final was being played.

The event had so much impact here that academics and journalists began to speculate about a "destape," or "uncorking," like the rapid transformation into a modern society that occurred in Spain after the fall of the Franco dictatorship. But others, like the pollster Marta Lagos, argue that a more relevant comparison is with Ireland, another Catholic country where pockets of traditional values continue to coexist with more liberal, modern attitudes.

"What our numbers tell us is that the speed of changes in values in Chile is much slower than in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil or Mexico," Ms. Lagos said. "We are changing, but we are still lagging behind in leaving the traditional society for one that is more modern and open. So in the end, it is a question of seeing the glass as half empty or half full."
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To The Manor Born

Jonathan Player for The New York Times

PHOTO (left) - Sir Benjamin Slade outside Maunsel House in Somerset last week, with Jasper, right, and Britwold the Saxon, who is named after the original resident. No one is in line to take over the $13 million estate.

March 7, 2006
North Newton Journal
Seeking a Willing Heir, an Aristocrat Turns to America
By SARAH LYALL

NORTH NEWTON, England, March 2 — WANTED: Heir for $13 million estate, including 13th-century manor house, in bucolic Somerset. Must be able to pay $140,000 annual upkeep and meet incidental costs of, for example, repairing the driveway ($70,000) and fixing the stables ($1 million).

Also, "He can't be a drug addict," said Sir Benjamin Slade, the current owner of the estate and its manor, Maunsel House, which has been in the family since 1772. "He can't be a Communist. It's politically incorrect to say so, but he can't be gay, because he may not produce any children."

The problem, said Sir Benjamin, who is 59 and childless himself, is that none of his army of relatives is willing to take on the property when he dies. So he is searching for an heir in America, where some Slades settled in the 18th century.

"Americans have more energy and a better work ethic," he said, sipping tea in his sumptuous library. ("There are no bookcases, because my family was illiterate," he said.) Paintings of ancestors plastered the walls; a fire roared in the hearth; a leak dripped steadily from the ceiling.

Running even a comparatively small estate requires not only money and energy, but also the putting aside of one's natural distaste at allowing strangers to traipse through one's house. Sir Benjamin rents out Maunsel House for weddings, conferences and house parties. Most of the bedrooms are reserved for paying guests; he and his companion, Kirsten Hughes, live in the back.

Other aristocrats operate cafes, shops, garden paraphernalia centers, theme parks and wildlife sanctuaries on their estates, or simply charge the public to look around. "The old money has always got some business on the side," Sir Benjamin said.

But even the best-run estates are finding it harder to compete with the siren calls on Britons' leisure time. Some of Sir Benjamin's friends, he said, are down to only 50,000 visitors a year, from more than 100,000 in better times. Also, things fall apart. The beautiful Victorian wallpaper in one bedroom at Maunsel House is torn and stained. The stair carpet is frayed. "This window unfortunately fell out onto the lawn," Sir Benjamin said, gesturing into a bathroom.

Many huge old houses in Britain are run by the National Trust, which takes over properties and opens them to the public, letting the former owners remain rent-free. But Sir Benjamin practically burst a button on his natty green tweed jacket when the subject came up.

"They are absolutely the most awful people," he said. He told a cautionary tale about a friend who donated his castle to the National Trust, only to be banished to a drafty upstairs apartment. When the friend left his baby's stroller in the hall, the National Trust said it was unsightly and ordered him to remove it.

Sir Benjamin has a ready store of scandalous stories about his ancestors, to whom he refers in the first-person plural. Many of his tales have to do with the Slade habit of losing money in inheritance-related disputes. The hardest fought of these, perhaps, was between a set of male Slade twins in the 19th century, only one of whom could be the heir.

"The problem was that no one knew who popped out first," Sir Benjamin said. The ensuing suit — Slade v. Slade — cost a fortune in legal fees, adding to the family's financial woes. "We were absolutely stuffed," Sir Benjamin said.

Sir Benjamin, who has a head of snowy hair and a prosperous-looking, ruddy complexion, was not supposed to inherit the baronetcy or Maunsel House, which belonged to his uncle. But the uncle died, childless, when Sir Benjamin was a teenager — along with, in the space of four years, Sir Benjamin's father, mother and older brother — leaving him as the sole heir. When he took possession of Maunsel House, it was a ruin, his surviving aunt confined to just two rooms.

"She lived on Mars bars and Milky Ways," he said. "She drank for Somerset. She had about 18 different driving offenses — hit and run, driving over a policeman's foot. When she died, she left £22.50, and she didn't leave it to me." Once, Sir Benjamin said, the aunt set the house on fire, hoping to collect insurance, only to have the fire fizzle out because of the pervasive dampness.

Annoyingly, not one of Sir Benjamin's vast array of British relatives seems eager to inherit. His nephew, Lord Rotherwick, is Sir Benjamin's legal heir, but he already has a grand house, Sir Benjamin said; he would probably sell off Maunsel House.

Other relatives have been ruled out as too uninterested in their roots. "If you ask any of them, 'Who was your grandmother?' 'What did Sir John Slade do in the Peninsular War?' they have no idea," Sir Benjamin said.

He feels it is too late to produce a suitable heir of his own, even though he has some frozen sperm on deposit in a sperm bank ("they said I had nine months' supply, whatever that means"). If he were to have a child right this minute, it would be a good 25 years before the child would be ready to take on the estate — "and then it would be too late," he explained.

He got the idea for the heir hunt when an American television company, researching a program about Britons' American relatives, got in touch.

"So I said, 'While you're in America, could you find me an heir?' " Sir Benjamin recalled. So far, he added, the company has come up with thousands of American Slades ("I don't know where they got them — Google, I suppose") prompting sacks full of letters from people who think they are his relatives.

The idea is to winnow down the field to a handful of viable prospective heirs, with methods including DNA tests. "I think we should dig up one of those Slades down in Devon," Sir Benjamin said, referring to his dead ancestors. "You just dig up a bone and away you go."

The television company — which Sir Benjamin said has asked him not to discuss too many details — is now hoping to turn the search into an "Apprentice"-style reality program, in which potential heirs would live at Maunsel House and undergo a series of challenges, with Sir Benjamin eliminating them one by one.

Sir Benjamin is looking forward to ejecting the losers with his own aristocratic catchphrase: "You're disinherited."
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