As a pescetarian for over 14 years, I did once enjoy meat, and I enjoy a veggie burger that approaches the smell, look, and texture of beef. When I make a Beyond Burger at home, I toast and butter the roll, sauté onions with Worcestershire and soy sauce, and slather on some Dijon mustard. I’ve enjoyed the Impossible Burger at restaurants like BRGR and Dave & Buster’s. More than half the experience of a decent burger, at least it seems to me now, is the accompaniments.

One of my guilty pleasures back when I ate fellow mammals was White Castle. I crave the entire slider experience, including the rehydrated browned onions and soft steamed bun. I’ve gone to great lengths to eat at White Castle: taken detours in New Jersey, made special subway trips in Manhattan, driven long distances in Chicago, taken the Metro and walked alone at night in St. Louis, talked it up to family while visiting Las Vegas. It’s probably a good thing I’ve never actually lived close to one. I recognize it’s not the healthiest fare. It’s a memory of childhood, the first fast food I remember eating when we were in the Bronx.

Now Impossible Burger claims to have an improved version, and it’s debuting at White Castle. One reviewer talked up the Impossible Burger 2.0 in an Engadget article. But look at this photo:

It doesn’t look any better than the original Impossible Burger. And how is this a White Castle product? The proportion between burger and bun is completely wrong, because that’s not the bun White Castle should be using. And why is there a piece of lettuce stuck between?? They need to go back to the drawing board. Make a slider that looks and tastes like a slider.

Of course, my complaints are not going to prevent me from homing in on a White Castle the next time I’m near one, to try this new product.

Back when I used to blog in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the tagline of Best Let or Get was:

       good works 
       nifty gadgets
     wild thoughts
     + {my} life

     {William Alba}

Seeking to blog frequently again, I will indulge myself occasionally and write once more about nifty gadgets. I’ll start with wrist watches. My children say I have too many, but really I have only three: the automatic I inherited from my grandfather, a quartz watch with a 24-hour dial, and my newest lovely acquisition from Christmas. (They say I have a fourth — my Fitbit Charge 2. which does flash the time on my right wrist, but I count that instead as a fitness tracker.)

My grandfather’s watch is a Seiko Sea Lion M44 manufactured, according to its serial number, in April 1964. My mother believes he bought it on a trip to Japan sometime that year. She’s not certain because she had already immigrated to the US by then.

I remember admiring this watch as a child. When Grandpa visited the US for the first time, sometime around 1970, he placed it against my ear so I could hear the ticking. That’s the same trip when he blew smoke rings up towards the ceiling of our South Bronx apartment, and when he knocked insistently on the bathroom door to tell Grandma that it was snowing. It was a few flakes dancing slowly from the sky and I said, “It’s just snow, Grandpa,” but he had never seen it falling down.

This Seiko looked so enormous to me. I couldn’t imagine my own wrist ever wearing such a large object. He gave it to me sometime in the mid-1970s. I remember him handing it to me, telling me to take it. “But it’s your watch, Grandpa,” I said, completely puzzled. “I want you to have it,” he said. Seeing the tears in his eyes, I didn’t understand, so I refused. He instead gave it to my mother for safekeeping. He was well, as far as anyone knew. Yet that was the last time I saw him.

I didn’t see or wear the watch for decades. As a younger child, I wore a Mickey Mouse Timex where the hands were Mickey’s arms. For a while as a teenager, I wore a pseudo-diver’s watch from an outfit like Sears or Montgomery Ward. Then for many years I didn’t want anything to restrict or confine my hands. I could see the time on wall clocks or computer screens. In the 1990s and 2000s I sometimes carried the time with me on a clever little TimeTag that was simply a metal clip attached to an LCD, or on a portable device like a PalmPilot, iPod Touch, or iPad.

Then in 2015, somehow I thought I wanted a watch again, to know the time during classes and meetings. I ordered a Casio quartz from Amazon. Small, thin, light, accurate, inexpensive, with 24-hour markings, I thought it would be perfect. But it disappointed me greatly. There was no heft to it, the watch band was uncomfortable, it had no spirit. I sent it back and looked for Grandpa’s watch, stored away in a wooden box in my bedroom. 

It started right up. As an automatic watch, the simple act of picking it up wound the mainspring and the second hand began sweeping, the gears began ticking. It was smaller than I remembered, with a case width of 38 mm, small by today’s standards. But it fit my narrow wrist perfectly after I removed a couple of fine links.

I love the clean dial. Okay, so the time drifts into inaccuracy from day to day, and its power reserve doesn’t last through half a weekend, but what is a watch for?, I asked myself. To remind me of the passage of time.

…

But after a while, I found I did want something more accurate. A watch that I didn’t have to check against the oven clock before I left for the bus every morning. I had been admiring the Eone watches that I missed getting on Kickstarter, and especially the new Bradley Element, with its ceramic ridges and valleys. I thought this would be a great way to know the time by touch, to tell the time more discreetly.

But I kept this watch for less than a week. It felt too self-indulgent. I loaned it indefinitely to my mother, suffering from macular degeneration, so she could tell the time better.

…

Later in 2017 I bought the Fitbit Charge 2 for myself. It’s a good activity tracker, and the app is convenient for tracking water intake and sleep. I switched in a magnetic “Milanese” strap. But it’s not a watch.

…

With a fascination for 24-hour time, last fall I purchased the Svalbard Glacier.

It is certainly more accurate than Grandpa’s Seiko, and it has a sense of itself. My main complaint is that it wears large for me at a case width of 41.5 mm. And while I thought the 24-hour markings on the face would intrigue me, I found myself doing mental calculations too often to interpolate between the hour markings.

…

So last November I was still looking for a watch that I could call my own. Something understated yet distinctive, accurate, low-maintenance, rugged, easy to view. Preferably a watch that helped me perceive and change time across time zones. And something that I could proudly leave to a grandchild.

I found the Casio Oceanus OCW-S100-1AJF:

There is so much that I love about this watch, my Christmas present from my wife this year: its atomic radio accuracy (which can also sync to the Clock Wave app if I’m beyond range of six transmitters in the US, Japan, China, Germany, and Great Britain), coupled with quartz precision. A solar-powered battery, world time settings accessible through the crown, perpetual calendar and automatic DST adjustment, shock and water resistance, and clean dial with lume. I can wear it for work or play, although I do take care not to scratch the titanium case and band, or smash the sapphire crystal. The case width is spec’d at 41.5 mm, yet it sits perfectly on my wrist.

I don’t know why I would buy another watch anytime soon. There’s so little I would change about it. I wish the 30 time zones on the face were just a bit more legible while remaining unobtrusive, and that the words “TOUGH MVT.” were on the caseback rather than the dial. These are incredibly minor issues. At the moment I consider this my BIFL (Buy It For Life) watch, one that suits just about every 

 …

So what other watch could I possibly ever need? I can think off a few categories:

1. A beater watch, inexpensive and easy to replace. Currently I take off my watch instead, if I’m doing something like trying to uninstall the dishwasher. One possibility: for my son’s upcoming birthday I purchased an Alba watch, cased in China with a Japanese movement from Seiko. It doesn’t have all the features of the Oceanus, but it does have a clean dial, date and day window, and solar power, and it lists at about one-fifth the price of the Oceanus.
2. A GPS watch. While these are more immediately responsive to time-zone changes, all current models are too large. Casio, Citizen, and Seiko make good watches in this category.
3. A black-tie automatic watch, something very dressy. I would consider a Grand Seiko watch like the “Snowflake” for the smooth and accurate Spring Drive, or a Credor Spring Drive (another Seiko sub-brand). A Rolex (maybe the Sky-Dweller but there are other attractive models), or a Patek Philippe with marvelous complications also falls in this category. Okay, so the last two are not terribly original choices – I don’t dwell much on four- and five-figure watches.
4. A completely silly and playful watch, like those by Tokyoflash Japan.
5. A watch loaded with astronomical data, like the YES Equilibrium. But the Equilibrium LCD looks pixelated, the ring is too cluttered, and the case is just too large.
6. A watch that has a desirable timekeeping feature I currently lack, such as vibrating alarm, illumination, or day-of-the-week. But not a Casio G-Shock – those things are monsters.
7. A second Oceanus watch, because I like this one so much.
8. A Dick Tracy watch. I still have a flip phone instead of a smartphone, and I’m ready to use one but don’t want to carry it around. Currently an Apple Watch needs to be tethered to an iPhone to use its communication features. Why this limitation? I don’t understand why we don’t yet have Dick Tracy watches.

Yesterday, as on many Saturdays, I read and return items to the Homewood Branch of the public library. Because another patron requested The Essential Drucker, I was compelled to quickly review this book. The main chapter that captured my attention is titled “The Educated Person,” originally from Peter Drucker‘s 1993 book Post-Capitalist Society. It begins:

Knowledge is not impersonal, like money. Knowledge does not reside in a book, a databank, a software program; they contain only information. Knowledge is always embodied in a person; carried by a person; created, augmented, or improved by a person; applied by a person; taught and passed on by a person; used or misused by a person. The shift to the knowledge society therefore puts the person in the center. In doing so, it raises new challenges, new issues, new and quite unprecedented questions about the knowledge society’s representative, the educated person.

In all earlier societies, the educated person was an ornament. He or she embodied Kultur – the German term that with its mixture of awe and derision is untranslatable into English (even “highbrow” does not come close). But in the knowledge society, the educated person is society’s emblem; society’s symbol; society’s standard-bearer. The educated person is the social “archetype” – to use the sociologist’s term. He or she defines society’s performance capacity. But he or she also embodies society’s values, beliefs, commitments. If the feudal knight was the clearest embodiment of society in the early Middle Ages, and the “bourgeois” in the Age of Capitalism, the educated person will represent society in the postcapitalist world in which knowledge has become the central resource.

At this early stage, I was metaphorically nodding in agreement. Drucker’s attempt to distinguish knowledge from information, by centering knowledge in personhood, appeals greatly to me, as does his elevation of the educated person as the standard-bearer of society.

But then I began to wonder what Drucker meant by this, that personhood is necessary for knowledge. What counts as a “person,” and what does he mean by “knowledge,” in contrast to information?

What is Drucker’s stance towards Cartesian mind-body duality: can the mind (and knowledge) of a person be separated from body, or does “personhood” require a material substrate? That is, would he hold that materialism alone cannot account fully for consciousness, as in Nagel’s thought experiment “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?” Or would he instead agree with the postmodernist Lyotard, who suggests in his essay “Can Thought go on without a Body?” that we cannot dissociate human thought and perception from our particular bodies, including differences such as gender?

This piece by Drucker antedates widespread commercial access to the Internet, which has engendered a rise of a kind of artificial intelligence: algorithms harvesting vast amounts of data. Before Copernicus, humans inhabited the center of the universe. Before Darwin, humans distinguished and elevated themselves from the rest of the biological organisms on Earth. In the quarter-century since Drucker wrote, I wonder whether the line between knowledge and information has become blurred by artificial intelligence. Humans are no longer the only entities on this Earth who can identify patterns in information and take action. Our algorithms can also diagnose disease, play chess and Go, drive cars, win trivia contests, and predict and influence human preferences in everything from media consumption to political action.

Continuing to excerpt Drucker:

A motley crew of post-Marxists, radical feminists, and other “antis” argues that there can be no such thing as an educated person – the position of those new nihilists, the “deconstructionists.” Others in this group assert that there can be only educated persons with each sex, each ethnic group, each race, each “minority” requiring its own separate culture and a separate – indeed an isolationist – educated person … [T]heir target is the same: the universalism that is at the very core of the concept of an educated person, whatever it may be called (“educated person” in the West, or “bunjin” in China and Japan).

The opposing camp – we might call them the “humanists” – also scorns the present system. But it does so because it fails to produce a universally educated person. The humanist critics demand a return to the nineteenth century, to the “liberal arts,” the “classics,” the German Bebildete Mensch. They do not, so far, repeat the assertion made by Robert Hutchins and Mortimer Adler fifty years ago at the University of Chicago that knowledge in its entirety consists of a hundred “great books.” But they are in direct line of descent from the Hutchins-Adler “return to premodernity.”

Both sides, alas, are wrong.

Again, I want to agree with Drucker. It is also my gut reaction that postmodernism verges upon nihilism and moral relativism. This drops the ground beneath our feet. To illustrate this, After all, Lyotard the postmodernist, translated from the French three decades ago, wrote, “I don’t know whether sexual difference is ontological difference… Your thinking machines will have to be nourished not just on radiation but on the irremediable different of gender.” But the idea of gender itself has become interrogated since then, and gender has become a more fluid concept. 

On the other hand, we cannot simply go back one hundred years, ignoring the technological, social, and philosophical changes that have occurred since modernism. According to Drucker, looking backward would have a stultifying effect on educated persons — and I agree:

The knowledge society must have at its core the concept of the educated person. It will have to be a universal concept, precisely because the knowledge society is a society of knowledges and because it is global – in its money, its economics, its careers, its technology, its central issues, and above all, in its information. Postcapitalist society requires a unifying force. It requires a leadership group, which can focus local, particular, separate traditions onto a common and shared commitment to values, a common concept of excellent, and on mutual respect.

The postcapitalist society – the knowledge society – thus needs exactly the opposite of what deconstructionists, radical feminists, or anti-Westerners propose. It needs the very thing they totally reject: a universally educated person.

Yet the knowledge society needs a kind of educated person different from the ideal for which the humanists are fighting. They rightly stress the folly of their opponents’ demand to repudiate the Great Tradition and the wisdom, beauty, and knowledge that are the heritage of mankind. But a bridge to the past is not enough – and that is all the humanists offer. The educated person needs to be able to bring his or her knowledge to bear on the present, not to mention to have a role in molding the future. There is no provision for such ability in the proposals of the humanist, indeed no concern for it. But without it, the Great Tradition remains dusty antiquarianism.

(Reading only this excerpt from Post-Capitalist Society, I confess I don’t know what Drucker, who so often was published by the Harvard Business Review, means by postcapitalism.)

… Postcapitalist society needs the educated person even more than any earlier society did, and access to the great heritage of the past will have to be an essential element.  But this heritage will embrace a good deal more than the civilization that is still mainly Western, the Judeo-Christian tradition, for which the humanists are fighting.  The educated person we need will have to be able to appreciate other cultures and traditions: for example, the great heritage of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean paintings and ceramics; the philosophers and religions of the Orient; and Islam, both as a religion and as a culture. The educated person also will have to be far less exclusively “bookish” than the product of the liberal education of humanists. He or she will need trained perception fully as much as analysis.

The Western tradition will, however, still have to be at the core, if only to enable the educated person to come to grips with the present,  let alone the future.  The future maybe “post-Western”; it may be “anti-Western.” It cannot be “non-Western.” Its material civilization and its knowledges all rest on Western foundations: Western science; tools and technology; production; economics; Western-style finance and banking. None of these can work unless grounded in an understanding and acceptance of Western ideas and of the entire Western tradition.

I question whether material civilization and knowledges must rest on Western foundations – or even what this means. I happen to agree with him, but I may be making assumptions about what counts as “Western” as well as discounting the influence that “non-Western” civilizations and knowledge have had historically. And while Western foundations may explain the state of the world today, it’s not entirely clear whether this was simply an accident of history and whether Western foundations are an inevitable necessity of the future. In summary, his and my understanding of Western tradition may be a shared blind spot.

Tomorrow’s educated person will have to be prepared for life in a global world. It will be a Westernized world,  but also increasingly a tribalized world. He or she must become a “citizen of the world” – in vision, horizon, information. But he or she will also have to draw nourishment from their local roots and, in turn, enrich and nourish their own local culture.

Postcapitalist society is both a knowledge society and a society of organizations, each dependent on the other and yet each very different in its concepts, views, and values. Most, if not all, educated persons will practice their knowledge as members of an organization. The educated person will therefore have to be prepared to live and work simultaneously in two cultures – that of the “intellectual,” who focuses on words and ideas, and that of the “manager,” who focuses on people and work.

If I may summarize, in this essay Drucker distinguishes knowledge from information, declaring that only persons have knowledge. He then sets up dichotomies between humanism and postmodernism, between Western and Eastern heritages, between global and local citizenship, between technical and humanistic practices (in a section that I did not excerpt here), and between intellectual and managerial cultures. In his view, the best educated persons of the future must navigate the spaces of these dualities.

He closes:

[O]ne thing we can predict: the greatest change will be the change in knowledge – in its form and content; in its meaning; in its responsibility; and in what it means to be an educated person.

Drucker’s essay leaves the thoughtful reader with two challenges. The first is how to shore up and elucidate the points he makes. I am personally inclined to agree with him, he sounds good, but the terms of his arguments are vague. I would want to see them clarified, amended, and/or winnowed.

Suppose we do accept the broad sense of his arguments, that he has outlined what constitutes an educated person. The second, more interesting, and larger challenge is how to actually implement this vision, in order to educate students across the arts and sciences.

On June 9, I watched the film Won’t You Be My Neighbor? during its early release in Pittsburgh. At the start of this documentary about Fred Rogers, he turns from the piano:

Come on over a minute, I just had some ideas that I’d been thinking about for quite a while, about modulation.

It seems to me that there are different themes in life. And one of my main jobs, it seems to me, is to help, through the mass media for children, to help children through some of the difficult modulations of life.

Because it’s easy, for instance, to go from C to F. But there are some modulations that aren’t so easy. For instance to go from F to F-sharp, you’ve got to weave through all sorts of things.

And it seems to me if you’ve got somebody to help you, as you weave… Maybe this is just too philosophical. Maybe I’m trying to combine things that can’t be combined, but it makes sense to me. 

The film indicates he spoke these gentle, insightful words in 1967. Two years earlier, John Lennon had written In My Life. Last July I transposed the song from the key of A to C to better suit my vocal range and to play on the guilele:

There are [C] places [G7] I’ll re- [Am] member [C7], all my [F] life [Fm], though [C] some have changed.

The modulation from F to F-minor occurs twice during each verse, accompanying life, gone, no one, and think of love. Until this past week, when I transcribed the words from the Mister Rogers movie, I had recollected he was referring to this type of transition, from major chord directly to minor chord — that is, from the subdominant major (IV) to the subdominant minor (iv). I’ve also encountered this chord change in the titular line of the Green Day song Wake Me Me Up When September Ends.

But no, he was referring to chords where the root is separated only by a half-step. This is a different case. With my limited repertoire and simple understanding of music theory, I have encountered this only once (and in reverse), when Jeff Lynne moves from A-flat to G in the song When I Was A Boy:

[Ab] In [G] those [C] beau- [Em] tiful [Am] days …

When I was a boy, I found comfort in the neighborly, avuncular reassurances of Fred Rogers. In my life now, he helps me to remember what it was like to be young, the vicissitudes, and therefore how to be old.

Every weekday morning and evening my little commute takes me by the Tree of Life. But not today. The white wooden barricades with blue letters that arrive every spring for the marathon were blocking Wilkins Avenue. When I turned and turned again to detour, a police car silently strobed blue, red, blue, red, blue, red.

Wear blue, my daughter explained, in solidarity. Are you giving blood? she asked. The children talked about the active shooter drills at their schools going awry. My wife and I described tornado drills in Illinois, fallout shelters in Ohio. As though matter of fact.

Today the sky is gray and it is cold and people are quiet.

Before this week I had not seen Parts Unknown. I had a faint awareness the program involved travel and food, two of my favorite pastimes. However, I imagined the show would portray other cultures through a lens of superiority, like issues of National Geographic where the natives are objects to be gazed upon, or like the Fear Factor episode when the contestants gagged down half-formed half-cooked duck embryos.

(Not that I myself have ever eaten balut.)

I figured Anthony Bourdain’s message would be something on the lines of: Come one, come all! Step right up and see the wonders of the freaks who dress, act, and speak in a manner that is nearly-but-not-quite civilized. Marvel at the disgusting dishes they dine upon. As your intrepid explorer, watch from the comfort of your armchair as each week I venture into bizarre places, and hold your gullet as I consume what passes for cuisine.

It turns out that I had prejudged him unfairly. Yes, the first episode I watched, about  Pittsburgh, paints the city in broad strokes, with an overemphasis on sausages and pierogies, and on pro wrestling and demolition derby. Despite this, I appreciated his attempts to describe the mixed blessings of historical and contemporary gentrification in neighborhoods like East Liberty, the Hill District, and Braddock.

The second episode I watched, about Manila, is spot on target. The episode focused on overseas Filipino workers, who labor across the globe for decades in order to send money and balikbayan boxes to families back home. This emphasis on OFWs created a bridge for Western viewers to empathize with Filipinos, to more fully understand the people who serve them as maintenance and musicians on cruise ships, as nurses and doctors in hospitals, as maids and nannies in their own homes. He illustrated how the generosity and joy of Filipinos intermingles with a broad faith in Catholicism, extended family, extreme poverty, and a history of colonialism and violence — although he glossed over the atrocities the United States committed in the Philippines barely a century ago.

 (CNN)

He showed the importance of food in everyday life and during celebrations, instead of attempting to gross out viewers with balut and dinuguan. While I would have liked to see some personal favorites like pancit, lumpia, and leche flan as well as a greater emphasis on seafood, I understand that he must have wanted to downplay foods that resemble the noodles, egg rolls, and desserts in Chinese and Hispanic restaurants and that his travel to coastal areas was restricted by monsoon season. He did push on the boundaries of typical American viewers, showing the traditional method for making lechon by roasting whole pigs, the colorful mixing of halo-halo from syrupy jars of fruits and beans, the pungency of adobo, the elevation of sisig beyond the necessity of entire-animal cooking, the use of peanut butter with meat in kare-kare.

Rice is so important to Filipinos that the word for rice (kanin) is cognate with the word for eating (kain). I wanted to see him talk about rice, which I myself enjoyed for every meal at home for the first seventeen years of my life but only rarely now. Parts Unknown reminded me I am both American and Filipino, yet I sometimes feel an outsider in America, and always an outsider in the Philippines.

I would like to travel there a third time; it has been 32 years since my last visit. I do not know how comfortable I will feel in my own skin, as someone who understands but can barely speak the language, whose diet keeps me from the most common foods, who is unsure what to do when I travel to the islands where my parents were born, to a land where I look like I should know what I am doing.