Is it Eggs McMuffin or Egg McMuffins?

Forming a satisfactory plural can be harder than you think. Is it Eggs McMuffin or Egg McMuffins?

One the one hand, it looks like a crossover from eggs Benedict--a French construction, I think, like attorneys general. And since it's taking that borrowed form of putting the noun first and the adjective second, then that Frenchy rule should probably apply. And I think it's clear that the egg is a kind of McMuffin, not the McMuffin a kind of egg.

But then on the other hand it seems like the whole item, Egg McMuffin, is tightly glued together, and may actually be a compound noun that is inseparable despite the misleading space--so maybe it's *not* like eggs Benedict and needs to be Egg McMuffins.

So I write them both on a piece of paper and look at them for a long time, and I even go to the McDonald's web site to what Ray Croc (may he rest in peace) thinks it is. The McDonald's people avoid the plural as much as possible, but when they use it they say Egg McMuffins, which doesn't mean it's right, it's just what they say, and in the end I can't decide. But it's an interesting accidental fold in the language, since the two ways of doing it are equally clear and equally valid. That's rare.

(Oddly, the number of eggs in this plural is immaterial--it's always "scrambled eggs" or "eggs Benedict" even if there's only one egg in there. But then when you have eggs for lunch, the rule seems to change--egg salad, for example. That's interesting too.)

I concede that Eggs McMuffin (Egg McMuffins) are weird and oily and not good for your insides, but I had more fun with this chain of thought than I ever have with the web site I manage at work or worrying about whether the hundred-pound gloss I'm using for a print handout is better than the flimsy card stock that costs about the same. This also tells you more about how my brain works than anybody needs to know.

Killer transportation

In January of 2001, a young man named Eugene Hunter shot and killed his mother in their shared home in Wells, Vermont, population about 1200, near the New York border and south of Lake Champlain. The back story was sad--the savagery of the matricide aside, it was obvious that Eugene was nuts at the time of his mother's death. His sister told police that her brother, 23 at the time, thought the Mafia was looking for him. He was afraid to go outside, and when he wasn't holed up in his room he would often roam the house searching for enemies he was sure were there, hiding.

Eugene was arrested and immediately put in the state hospital--there was little question he was both guilty and psychotic.

Then, as often happens with stories like these, a whole lot of time goes by. In late winter your correspondent and honorable husband decide it's time to upgrade the kitchen, which means spending a lot of money, and we decide to sell a handsome Nissan pickup that we bought in 2005. We've never used it as much as we thought we would, and, since we both work most of the time at home, we don't really need a second car. The ad runs in late May, both in the local papers and on line.

Eugene Hunter calls from a place that caller ID pinpoints as Copley House; he's interested in the truck and wonders if it's been sold. We run through the usual stuff--the truck's condition, the age of the tires, the mileage, all that stuff. An unremarkable transaction on every level except for one minor point--he can't just come over and look at the truck because he will need to arrange a ride. "I'm not sure when that will happen," he says, so I give him directions and explain that someone is here almost all the time--I tell him to call ahead just to make sure the truck isn't out trucking around because I'd hate to have him waste a trip from Morrisville.

Eugene calls again that evening and talks again to honorable husband. As far as I can tell, the call is a near-perfect clone of the first call, except it's Vince doing the explaining.

Eugene calls again two days later to say he hopes he can get a ride on Thursday; I give to phone to honorable husband since it's his truck after all. The next day, Eugene calls again and we learn that Thursday won't work after all.

By now I've had enough incoming calls from this Copley House whatever-it-is to be curious, and a quick web search reveals that this is a group care facility in Morristown that looks like it was built at the turn of the century--it has a lumbering turret and a massive porch and three different kinds of exterior shingles. All the pictures and copy indicate it's a place for old people who have dementias, and I figure Eugene is on staff. On the phone he sounds sort of young, and Vince and I decide he may work in the kitchen or in maintenance or something and walk up to work from town.

But I am nosy. I Google people who attract my attention for some reason. Often this leads to uninteresting results, but not always, and this is how I learn about Eugene's past and about his mother. I also learn that, back in November, Eugene was ruled competent to stand trial and released from the state hospital to an undisclosed secure location. There's a black-and-white photo of Eugene's mother with the story and she looks nice, pretty but a little tired at the same time. She took care of her hair.

Our decision point on Eugene Hunter passes almost immediately--Vince and I don't think there's any obvious problem with selling a pickup to a psychotic murderer, and that he seems a nice enough fellow on the phone. "Just don't piss him off," I joke, "and don't imply that someone is following you or anything along those lines." Vince has five or six years of mental hospital staff work under his belt, plus a degree in psychology, and he explains that Eugene will probably be fine since he's got keepers and medications. The meds, he says, really do control the symptoms but also flatten the person out and make them seem off, disconnected, and tired. We spend half an hour talking about how devastating schizophrenia can be, how painful it is for the person who has it, and the people we've known whose lives have been ruined by it.

Fast forward about four days: Eugene arrives with a driver-cum-keeper. He's a stubby fellow who looks older than his mid-thirties, with a large beard and a habit of looking mostly at the ground. But he really looks at the truck, carefully, and he likes what he sees--his keeper retires to the car they arrive in and lets Eugene talk to Vince on his own.

After just a a few preliminaries, it becomes obvious that Eugene wants this truck--he has no plans to look at any other vehicles once he's seen this one. He doesn't have his license, just a learner's permit, and says he wants Vince to test-drive the truck for him while he sits in the passenger seat.

Off they go, but on an unfortunate route--they end up clogged up in a road-repair mess on the Paine Turnpike, sitting for many long minutes while a stretch of paving gets rolled flat, and Vince says it was a little bit uncomfortable but my husband is very poised. They fill the time talking in a general way about mileage and winter handling, and Vince runs an orange light just going to red on the way home. He makes a joke about breaking the law and sort of regrets it later.

When they finally get back, Eugene looks at the ground and looks at the truck, but he doesn't make eye contact with either of us. But he clearly covets the truck, and reluctantly accepts that he must shake hands with us to put the first seal on the deal. Then he asks if we can keep the truck in our driveway until he can get it registered and insured and pass his test and actually drive it. We say sure.

Two days ago, Eugene came (with a keeper) to the house to deliver the check; it's for the full asking price, and oddly there was never any discussion or haggling on this point. It's also a treasurer's check, the reliable kind. Eugene's driver explains that, while they're in Montpelier, they will get insurance and go to the DMV, so they may have new plates by the close of business. Would it be okay if they came back then and switched out the plates? And then, once Eugene has his license, they will come and get it.

I have an idea: "What if we bring it up to you once the plates are on? It's no big deal to do that, and it just seems like once you've paid for it, it's yours, and you should have it. Would that work on your end?"

For the first time since we've been face to face, Eugene looks at me, then Vince. "You'd do that?"

"Sure. I mean we're happy to store it for a while, but if you have it at your place you can practice driving it on your permit and take your test in it. Or just sit in it and listen to the radio or something."

"You'd do that?" he asks again. He has brown eyes, flat and lusterless, and gray streaks in his big beard.

"How about this evening? If you've got plates by then, there's no reason not to."

Eugene and his keeper exchange a look and the keeper gives a short little nod.

Eugene says, "Thank you." It's a short, strange moment--my radar tells me that this change in plan gives Eugene an actual moment of power over something in his life. He looks at both of us again and, once we confirm the timing and the details, he willingly shakes hands. He doesn't offer to, but he's willing.

As I follow Vince in what is now Eugene's truck to Morrisville, I try to think about what it might be like to be Eugene, and my imagination fails me. I just can't do it. I am heartily sorry for Eugene's mother, but my prayers are for Eugene. I am suddenly worried about whether Eugene will be required to go to trial now that he's been judged sane. He should be tried, our society requires it, but for a lot of complicated, confusing reasons that I can't locate, I'm bothered by the thought of all those courtroom people looking at him. Guilty as I'm sure he is, he hasn't earned that.

A few bricks short of a load

The past four days have been gobbled up by the technical support service at the University of Vermont, the medium-sized land grant where the USDA program I work for is housed.

The adventure begins in March, when my work desktop, which I didn't use much because I mainly work at home, died after one of those automatic updates corrupted something important. I swiftly decided that even if the six-year-old desktop could be fixed (not a sure thing), this was the right moment to get a dedicated work laptop--I've been struggling because it's very hard to keep my files in sync when I move around from place to place.

I looked through what the campus computer depot had for sale, and went many times around the barn with them about wanting a CD drive. They told me I didn't want one, not really, and I said that I did, really, since I routinely install at lot of graphics and layout software and tend to save out very large files to CDs for transport and output and safekeeping.

"But," I was told, "you can download all the software you need from our archives!" I looked in the archives, which offered all the usual Microsoft stuff, an Adobe Reader, and a web browser with an e-mail utility laid on.

"You're kidding, right?" I said. "Please--I just want a laptop with a CD drive. That's not a strange thing to want."

"But you don't need one!" they said.

I finally persuaded them to order me what I wanted and paid for it. Seven rather long weeks go by.

When the laptop finally arrives, I pick it up and bring it home to load my stuff--my graphics and layout software--only to learn that I don't have the administrative privileges needed to do that. Or anything else for that matter--I couldn't even delete the cutesy beauty shots of campus the computer gods installed and made into a little slide-show-cum-screen-saver. I sent an e-mail asking how to walk around this and was told I could download all the software I would ever need from the archives.

"So," I said, "who is in charge down there? Could you please put that person on the phone?"

"I don't like your tone," she said. "I'm just trying to be helpful."

"It's not good enough to try," I said. "Succeeding is what matters."

After a half a dozen more plaintive calls and e-mails, I was grudgingly told by a person the next rank higher how to walk around this issue by switching users and using the serial number of the machine to act as an administrator--cumbersome but better than nothing. I spent half a day loading my software, getting rid of some of the junk that was pre-loaded, and deleting the silly slide show.

I then brought up Word to work on a document, only to be told, to my amazement, that the pre-installed and pre-configured Microsoft Office that was part of the purchase wasn't activated. It was useless.

Another call: "You need to be logged into the campus network," I was told. "It will authenticate itself as soon as that happens."

"I am," I said. I was.

"Well, it can't be a wireless connection."

"I'm logged in over a DSL line."

"But you're not on campus. You'll have to come to campus and log in from here."

I hadn't quite realized there were magical properties to the campus lines, so off I went to Burlington, 40 miles away. The activation didn't work from my tiny, windowless office, so I took the machine into the computer depot and hitched myself up to one of their magical DSL lines (superficially identical to the DSL line I use at home), and finally got authenticated. But while I was at it, I perversely decided to delete all the university administrator accounts, leaving only myself in charge, and left. I figure if the computer ever needs any intervention from tech support, it will be their turn to call me.

Four solid days.

Redefining cruelty

For more than 50 years, the Heifer Project has worked to feed humans by distributing animals—-chickens, rabbits, cows, guinea pigs, sheep, and other creatures—-to needy individuals and families. In terms of spreading the misery of animal agriculture around the world, the Heifer Project is a champion. ...

First, as with all animal agriculture, the process of creating a pound of edible flesh involves feeding many more pounds of plant food and grain to the animal before he or she is slaughtered. It’s hardly an efficient method of producing food.

Second, the animals are not raised on factory farms, so they often graze in the neighboring area, which results in the loss of habitat for nondomesticated animals and furthers the extinction of other animal species.

from: http://www.all-creatures.org/articles/heifer-veg.html

Well whaddaya know.

Is it categorically bad for humans to eat meat? In some ways, this is a little bit little bit like wondering whether it's bad to have an abortion, and whether one life should be treasured above another. But the similarity is actually superficial--relations among members of the same species is very different from relations among different ones.

A lot of ink, both real and virtual, has been spilled around this and a few adjacent questions, and often the vegetarian argument hinges on the conditions found on farms. People--invariably people who have not spent much time on commercial farms--announce that these conditions are bad: They fret over mud or crowding or cage construction, and because I work in an agency that serves the farm community, I know some of those concerns are not just legitimate but urgent. Self-interest alone should galvanize us to focus on animal health--when we don't, we risk salmonella, e.coli, giardia, and mad cow disease.

But a lot of these concerns are sentimental and projective. Cattle, for example, are herd and prey animals, and if you watch them carefully you see that they don't react badly when they get squished together, especially when they're uneasy--the lion is less likely to eat a given individual when there's a large and potentially dangerous group as opposed to a vulnerable individual. This reaction probably has adaptive elements in common with schooling behavior in fish.

But because humans don't like being squished, most humans assume that squishing is unpleasant--the underlying assertion is that all creatures have the same standards of comfort and discomfort that we do. (I can't resist adding that one common result of raising "cage free" eggs is that removing the cages makes room for more chickens per square inch. Since I don't know a whole lot about chickens, it's hard to be confident about the chickens' position on this purported improvement in their living conditions.)

We make the same category error when managing non-farm animals, sometimes with very bad results. Is it cruelty to feed a dog human food? Since dogs have digestive systems very different from ours, I think it is--some dog owners poison their much-loved companion animals because they think chocolate is a key food group and the dog is missing out if it's not on the menu. And to make matters worse, most dogs like sweets for the same reasons we do--they offer access to compressed calories.

But choloate also contains theobromine, which is a neurotoxin in canines, and even a small amount can trigger heart arrhythmia and seizures. The even wider human habit of feeding table scraps to dogs not only encourages begging, but inserts in the dog the processed, sweet, salty, and nutritionally ambiguous foods we humans often eat. Yet this is never labeled for what it is--animal cruelty.

The Heifer Project is one of my favorite charities--it opens doors of self-sufficiency and boosts the human enterprise by giving third-world farmers access to improved strains of domestic livestock, selectively bred--in humans we call this eugenics--to produce a more edible product and more technophilic offspring. And is that cruelty? No, it's not.

PETA piper

Here's a picture of PETA people outside the Westminster Dog Show back in February, all dressed up to make a really good impression.

The message, as I half-understand it, is that dogs shows are bad, but the symbolism here seems ambiguous at best. I wasn't there to pick up one of the flyers--I lived in New York long enough to know I won't be going back--so it's not at all clear who the Klan outfit is directed at.

It's apparently not all that clear to PETA, either--according to their own news release, the Halloween outfits are meant to convey the idea that the AKC sounds the "death knell for many beautiful, healthy, and loving dogs whose lives end at animal shelters. Shelters do their best to help the millions of animals dumped on their doorsteps every year, but life in a cage is no life for a dog, and euthanasia becomes a sad necessity."

But wait--if that's their position, doesn't it follow that the white sheet and hood are on the wrong side of the door? Aren't the people on the inside of the building the oppressors, the sworn enemies of shelter dogs everywhere? Something's gone horribly wrong here, unless--let me see--could this actually be about a photo op, and the siren allure of getting above the fold of tomorrow's paper?

Which worked: The story made USA Today, the LA Times, and NBC, to name a few.

But, to be frank, launching ad hominem attacks on the people who are involved with PETA is just too easy--we can chant in unison that Ingrid Newkirk, president of PETA, is personally responsible for killing 23,000 shelter animals in a single 18-month period, while finding homes for eight.

Or we can point out that PETA has gotten into legal trouble in Virginia for illegally dumping dead shelter animals.

Or we can laugh at the PETA initiative to rename fish "sea kittens" on the theory that people won't eat a creature with a cute name.

But if we want intelligence injected into the debate about right relations with other creatures, PETA has not earned a place at the table. And, if my poking around on both sides of the story is accurate, the supposedly more middle-of-the-road Humane Society of the United States hasn't either.

My point here is that throwing stones at tempting targets (this is code for "people I don't agree with"), is pointless--name-calling only freezes people more firmly into their positions, even if they know those positions are illogical and untenable, sea kittens on dry land. I'd much rather focus on the disagreement itself. Like the snappy little dog described in an earlier entry, that is where the rubber meets the road.

once bitten

Earlier this week I was waiting for something else to happen and watched a woman with a small dog get her wrist bitten. She deserved it--people who get bitten generally do--but what was interesting about the transaction was her complete surprise and her apparent inability to see life from another creature's point of view.

Here's what happened: The setting was an urban (well, sort of urban) campus, and it was a warm day between classes--the sidewalks were very full. Even from about 500 feet away, I could see the little dog was signaling a lot of unambiguous anxiety about the crowding, the feet, the bicycles, and the periodic outbreaks of humans running with Frisbees. Whenever some new alarm was raised, the dog would flatten its ears and half-lower its rump, pulling backward on the leash, and the human on the other end would pull the dog forward. They progressed at a snail's pace down the block, slowed by anxiety on one end of the string, exasperation on the other.

When the pair came to the crosswalk, the woman reached down to pick the dog up and presumably carry it safely across the busy street, and this is when the bite occurred--just as she moved to get one hand under the dog's ribcage while the other hand was flapping around, busy with winding the slack of the leash around her palm. Suddenly a balky, worried little dog became a biting dog, a frantic bundle of defensive rage. The dog latched on to the woman's wrist, just for a second, but with the momentum of sheer panic. I'm sure it hurt, even if the dog was diminutive, and this hurt escalated when the dog got thwacked fairly hard for misbehaving--an event that probably reinforced the original message that humans do unpredictable, hurtful things with their strange appendages.

Why does our species find it so easy to disregard clear signals from other creatures? Episodes like this are a form of cruelty that seem to be off the radar of people active in the animal-rights movement, perhaps because so many people in the movement don't seem to know very much about canine or other species behavior. Yes, PETA, puppy mills are bad, and you can take a picture of how very bad they are, but I argue that this is worse.

If a dog has rights, then one of them is to be understood, especially when the dog is yelling at us, as loud as possible, at the top of a pair of tiny lungs.

a slave in the fields of the lord

"This is interesting that you say farmed animals 'enjoy' a relationship with man... As if they are willing subjects to the enslavement and eventual permanent end/use of their bodies. And while the goal might be to 'protect them from predators' we forget that man is the most 'successful' predator of them all."

--comment posted here, April 11

Domesticated animals are not slaves--slavery is a purely human construct. They are animals of various species who have chosen the path of technophilia--otherwise, they would be impossible to domesticate.

Not all technophiles are domesticated--rats, mice, certain wasps, raccoons, bats, white-tailed deer, and that endless parade of carpenter ants in my back shed all feel the pull of the man-made environment, but they aren't domesticated. Instead, we classify them as pests. Are they to be classified as slaves as well? Seems like some very loaded and disapproving language to use for creatures who have a liking for human waste, human food, and human infrastructure.

As predators go, man is barely adequate--we don't stack up well against lions or sharks, that's for sure. But predation is morally neutral, and in many species an absolute requirement: Most predators have digestive systems that requite they eat meat and nothing else. What's difficult, and not neutral, is the real root of our species' success. We are omnivores, with scavenging and predation in the mix, and this has helped nurture our apparently endless flexibility. It is this flexibility that has gotten us into no end trouble--it's our chief adaptation and our default behavior, and lies at the heart of a lot of very hard problems.

"For me, the crux of it is that killing/eating animals is not necessary for human health. Indeed the more we learn the more it's understood we can thrive on a plant based diet. So the question becomes... If we don't 'need' to place 10 billion animals inside of warehouses and slaughterhouses... Why do it at all?"

--same comment, same date

Does it really matter whether people can get adequate nutrition without eating meat? I don't eat meat, and I don't think it matters. It's not a moral position for me, although others sometimes use vegetarianism as a propellent for their self-regard. And it's not a question of doing or not doing something--it's a question of understanding that having right relations with other creatures requires thought, humility, and an understanding of evolutionary constraints and evolutionary behavior.

What does matter is that almost everyone I have engaged with in the animal-rights movement seems to be amazingly short on hands-on, in-depth knowledge of how different species behave, react, and are profoundly different from each other. This includes an ignorance of how the human species really operates, since we, too, are animals.

To speak broadly of "animals" as a class that includes any being that isn't us is morally unacceptable. We're in this together--bears, dogs, bees, elephants, menhaden, rats, grasshoppers, penguins, and humans--and we need to be able to tell each other apart.