Passover "Pains" and Shavuot Grains

Passover Prep

Earlier this spring, I decided to look at all the secondary (economic, social, social-justice, and so on) issues caused by our politicians' and media's responses to CoV-SARS-2 (aka, COVID-19, the Novel Corona Virus, the 'Rona, etc.) as the modern equivalent of the Ten Plagues of the Biblical book of Exodus. My first design tried to put a bit of visual mnemonics: the "O" in the word "lockdown" looked like a keyhole, I had silhouettes of wild animals behind the line "wildlife incursions", and so on. I ended up with something looking a bit too much like the old "Ransom Note" aesthetic (or lack thereof!) of the early 1990s, so I started again from scratch. After playing around with a couple of different typefaces and moving the plagues around to avoid adjacent plagues of the same colors, I came up with something worth putting into vinyl:

While some of us might have chosen other plagues, or ways of expressing them, I had to keep in mind that my choices had to appeal to a broader, often progressive audience.

The seders themselves gave me more questions, some of which have brought me down an interesting rabbit-hole of published Biblical research. If I come to anything worth raising Ishmael, I'll probably write about it over on The Contrary Point of View.

Moving Towards Shavuot

Starting with the second night of Passover, Jews start a ritual called counting the Omer, referring to the seven-week period of the grain harvest. Conveniently, this period ends with the Biblical holiday of Shavuot (Pentecost) when, by tradition, the Law (the Ten Commandments and the start of the Oral Law that accompanies it) was received by the Tribes of Israel at Mount Sinai. The two-day harvest festival is relatively low-key for most Jews (stay home from work, add extra prayers, study Jewish Law, eat dairy foods), so it's not the sort of holiday that lends itself to a lot of holiday-specific decoration.

However, working at a craft store, and seeing religious designs that seem to focus on the Christian and the arguably-appropriated (dreamcatchers from Native American traditions, mandalas from Hinduism and Buddhism), along with designs that seem to align with Wicca and other European Earth traditions, I feel the need to create some balance with designs that celebrate Judaism.

Inspiration and Symbology

My original idea was to create a Mount Sinai with fire and smoke ascending or descending upon it, the traditional two tablets representing the Ten Commandments in the foreground, and 49 stalks of wheat, one for each day of the Omer. While this might have worked as a drawing or painting, it would have been way too busy for a t-shirt. I ended up with a rough outline of the peak of Mount Sinai, the two tablets (with the Commandments mnemonically reduced down to their numbers), and twelve stalks of wheat (one for each of the Twelve Tribes of Israel) divided into two groups of six, framing the Hebrew word "Shavuot". Those looking for a little more symbolism might recognize that the groups of six are further divided into two groups of three, with the two on the right side set up similarly to the Hebrew letter shin, the first letter in the Hebrew word for "Almighty". 

original Shavuot Design, including background

I didn't want another white T-shirt — I wanted a bit of "natural" color — but I also wanted to use a blank I already had in stock. After examining my stash, I hovered between Bella+Canvas crew necks in Mauve and Dusty Blue, and started putting them together with vinyl colors. I settled on the mauve, using metallic, foil, and glitter accents to create texture in my final composition.

I'm planning to wear it at least once to work before the holiday, and again for a Zoom-based holiday celebration.

Decades of Font Build-Up: License Issues

I've been "collecting" typefaces since the days when you could buy 5.25" diskettes with dozens of Bitstream*-compatible, PostScript, and other shareware faces for a couple of dollars. (It's more of a hoard than a collection...)  While a number of these have been jettisoned along the way for various reasons, a recent dive into the rabbit hole of "free" online font repositories (1001 Fonts, DA Font, etc.) suggests that I may still have a bunch of these either installed or in archived directories, without any attached license information. Since most cheap and free fonts in the 1990s were either bitmapped, poorly-designed, or cheap knockoffs of better-known faces, and most of us used those faces for personal, or small-distribution hard-copy newsletters, it was unusual for any of us to come to the negative attention of the rights owners (and even more unusual for the rights owners to do anything about it).

Times have changed. If I'm going to make a design "public" — either by putting an image of it (or a photograph of my finished product) on this blog, posting it to a design community (such as Behance, Dribble, or Design Bundles Community) or social medium (such as Pinterest), or allowing it to be searchable on Cricut Design Space — I have to mind my Ps, Qs, and alternate character sets, making sure that any resources I use are under the terms of the rights owner's license, and that I tag the designer, the rights owner, the place I found the resource, and (if a separate entity), the place from which I acquired the license.

This is not always as easy as it looks, and I don't always succeed at this part of my task. The proliferation of "old fonts" — both online and in my personal hoard — doesn't make it any easier.

Looking at the information on relatively recent faces on places like DA Fonts and 1001 Fonts state that those faces are "demo" versions of typefaces that the authors are currently selling on sites like Creative Fabrica and Creative Market. Great! I can play with the face, and if I need it for something beyond the free site's license, I can look up the face and license it appropriately.

Other faces have information on the brand-name foundry from which they came. While a handful of these faces are from current companies such as Adobe and Monotype, many more are from once-big names that have since been acquired by other big names (Bitstream was acquired by Monotype in 2012) or have ceased operation (such as Casady & Greene). So far, I've not been able to find the current owners of Casady & Greene's catalog.

The download page notices for many of the oldest fonts don't include any license information other than "contact the author" about licensing terms or license upgrades. Sometimes there is a link, sometimes a Readme file, and sometimes nothing at all. Unfortunately, a lot of contact information in these Readme files is out-of-date (questionable Compuserve addresses, defunct websites, etc.). Trying to contact those designers could require significant research on the user's part, as well as hoping that the license enquiry email would not be thrown out as spam.

DA Fonts, 1001 Fonts, and their ilk have been around for decades. Like me, I suspect they scraped up typefaces wherever they could find them, and have a back catalog of fonts and faces that they haven't had the time, manpower, or inclination to curate. Unfortunately that leaves them in the category of caveat emptor where type selection options for public-facing designs are concerned.

Obviously, we all have the option to not-use typefaces of questionable licensing when creating something we might want to post or sell. Personally, I need to take the time to curate my catalog and archive anything for which I don't have clear license information (or at least clear licensor information). And if you ever created shareware, donationware, or other freely-available type, you might want to check these "all the free fonts you can download" sites to make sure that anything of yours posted there has your current contact information and licensing terms.

By the Pricking of My Thumbs - National Diabetes Month

 "By the pricking of my thumbs
Something wicked this way comes."

    --Second Witch, Macbeth IV:1

American Hallowe'en is associated with literary wickedness, cartoon witches and ghosts, jack-o'lanterns, and schlock horror films of decades past. It's no surprise that many Hallowe'en designs draw from Shakespeare's "Scottish play", whether "Double, double, toil, and trouble" or "Something wicked this way comes".

And so I wasn't surprised to see "something wicked" on a crafting YouTuber's t-shirt.

That said, pricking our thumbs (and other fingers) to deliberately draw blood, Sleeping Beauty-style, is a necessary behavior for most people living with diabetes: the small blood drop feeds a chemically active sensor in a device that tells us our current blood glucose ("blood sugar") levels. This information tells us if we need insulin, or sugar or carbohydrates, and whether we are "safe" to drive, to work out, to sleep...

November is Diabetes Awareness Month: American Diabetes Month in the US, Canadian Diabetes Month in Canada, and so on. It is the month of Dr. Frederick Banting's - the discoverer of insulin's - birth; his birthday (November 14) is celebrated around the world as World Diabetes Day.

So it shouldn't be a surprise that the second half of the Wise Sister's quote reminded me of the first, and of my many friends, colleagues, and family members living with diabetes. It took a bit of time to replace "something wicked" with a phrase that "scanned" properly (had the same number of syllables and similar stresses), and a bit longer to do the artwork. The typeface is "feather" by NJ Studio, available at Font Bundles.

Now, to choose a number.

In the "English" units used in the United States, the ideal blood glucose range to which we're asked to manage is from 80 to 180 mg/dl (milligrams per deciliter), with an average non-diabetic number being roughly 100 mg/dl, which is what we tend to see in glucometer advertisements. While a spot reading in this range may not be unreasonable for those of us with what I refer to as "mild" Type 2 diabetes, it's an extremely unlikely number for a person with Type 1 diabetes or more advanced Type 2, and this "random" glucose number is a serious point of contention in our communities. 

My choice of "169" is based on a recollection of one of my Type 1 friends mentioning the 160s in her typical range for something. 

The detail of the blood drops, the lines of the thumbs, and the blood uptake on the test strip mean this design will be difficult to reproduce in vinyl, and may need to be produced as a sublimation print or an iron-on transfer. That said, I think I would replace the readout window with a piece of chalkboard iron-on vinyl so that the person wearing the shirt could add whatever number was current or more appropriate for the time the shirt was being worn.

Not-Corned Beef Burgers

 So, in the middle of all the COVID-19 confusion, my state political party decided to hold its annual picnic and general meeting on a Saturday. These are generally pot-luck/covered-dish sorts of events where the venue has grills to use and everyone brings something to eat with enough to share. 

With things a bit of a last-minute for me, and me never trusting anyone else's grill to be have never cooked dairy or pork (or animals that could not ever be kosher), I decided to save myself next-day cleanup mess by bringing along a chili that could top burgers or hot dogs, or be eaten by itself. Unusually for me, I decided on a beef-and-bean chili (I usually make my chilis pareve/vegan so that I can either top them with cheese or use them to top a burger or hot dog). So I picked up several pounds of ground beef and several pounds of dried beans, and set the beans to soak overnight Thursday. 

Technique note: I soak my beans for chili in water that includes onion powder, garlic powder, one or two whole dried chilis, and a few bay leaves. I cook my beans in water that contains similar seasonings. I believe this counteracts the beans' usual blandness.

When I got home from work Friday morning and checked my email, I found a message saying the picnic had been cancelled due to a power outage at the venue. While we had had heavy rains mid-week, it had never occurred to me that power would be an issue: I'm used to doing Field Day (an annual Ham Radio event) with portable generators that ran the radios and the lights, and gas- or charcoal-powered grills to cook our meals.

So, I made as little of the chili as I could to use up the beans, but I still had four pounds of hermetically-sealed extra-lean ground beef in the refrigerator, with no space to freeze it, and with a use-by date a week or two out.

Somewhere along the line I got the idea to see what would happen if I used corned-beef or pastrami seasoning on ground beef, and serve those burgers on rye buns. Researching recipes for corned beef and pastrami were a bit tricky, since most of them started out with already-brined brisket (the sort that is only inexpensive around Saint Patrick's Day) and pre-packaged, whole pickling spices.

After a bit of work, I found  few reasonable recipes for corned beef, and a few different options for pickling spice blends. Since putting whole spices into burgers is (obviously) Not A Good Idea, I had to convert the whole-spice measurements into weight substitutes so I could measure out ground spices to make my blend.

Please note there are a few issues with using ground spices instead of whole spices, and mixing spices into ground beef meant for the grill as opposed to brining a whole brisket for over a week and then simmering it with a fresh packet of pickling spice. These include:

• Whole spices release their flavor much more slowly than ground spices
• Salt and acid break down tough flesh and also help infuse spice flavor into the meat (this is why tougher cuts of meat are usually brined or marinated in a wine or vinegar mixture).
• Depending on whether your spices are freshly ground or have been hanging around a while, your ground spices can have a stronger or a weaker flavor than their whole progenitors.
• It's difficult to tell a priori how much flavor has infused into a brisket and how that relates to how much of a ground-spice blend to add to ground beef.

Needless to say, our crazy work schedules left me putting off and putting off using the ground beef until it was two days past its "use or freeze" date. So it was "now or never" for putting my blend together and trying it out.

I would have done a lot more fresh-grinding if one of my store-and-grind containers hadn't broken and my hands and arms weren't sore from various recent injuries; as a result, a lot of my mixture came from my very long-in-the-tooth ground-spice rack. That said, it required a bit of tasting along the way to decide how much salt I needed to add in, whether I really had enough mustard, and that ground bay leaf needs a slightly lighter hand, weight-wise, than its whole-leaf component (to avoid bitterness).

Please note that while I purchase a number of my harder-to-find and specific-origin spices from Savory Spice Shop, it is because their nearest retail store is convenient to me (about five miles from home) and has a great selection. Many similar seasonings can be found from brands such as Simply Organic at places like Whole Foods.

The proportions I ended up with were:

• 11.5 g ground coriander
• 8 g ground black pepper
• 14.5 g mustard powder
• 0.4 g Powdered Turkish Bay Leaves
• 3 g ground allspice
• 1.5 g garlic powder
• 6 g onion powder
• 10 g sea salt, freshly ground (I use La Baleine as my usual table salt; for a smokier taste I might have substituted something like Hickory Smoked Sea Salt or Alderwood Smoked Sea Salt
• 0.5 g White Wine Vinegar Powder (for acidity)
• 3 g Cook's Charcoal Seasoning (to enhance the "grilled" taste)

This resulted in approximately 1/2 c (8 tablespoons) of spice mix, about 2 oz (57.4 g).

Once I got the spice mixture together, the next thing I needed to figure out was how much to use for my no-time-to-sit-and-marinate ground beef. (I still believe the best method for this sort of seasoning would be to season the beef and let it sit in the refrigerator for a day or two before grilling. That sort of "soak" time would require a lot less spice than cooking the burgers immediately.) While most of my as-purchased seasoning mixes suggest using 1/4 teaspoon per pound of meat, I started with an amount of spice which, in whole form, was intended to season approximately four pounds of meat (the same amount I had). A teaspoon for the whole lot would have been gross underkill, but the entire half-cup of spice blend would have been way too much.

I settled on an initial trial of about 4.5 teaspoons for my ground beef. My sister found it overseasoned, while my Other Half thought it needed a bit more. I found it pleasant as it was, but definitely not tasting anywhere close to corned beef. Adding more spice helped, as did using some of the mixture as the basis for a spread which could be used on its own or as an adjunct to mustard.

Final proportions:

The next time I use this for immediate grilling, I'll use the proportions of about 6 t per 4 lb, or 1.5 t (1/2 T) per pound of beef.

I also made a nice bit of a spread by mixing 1/2 t spice mix with 1/2 t honey and about 1.5 T balsamic vinegar. I probably should have added a bit more honey, but it was a nice way to boost the flavor of the seasoning. I might try making up a cup of that mix as a wet marinade for a London Broil or a roast.

If I were going to season a day or two in advance of grilling, I'd probably start with about half of that and see from there.

Now I have another seasoning mix to work with. 

More "Fun With Food"!

MLK, X Heritage and Schiller's Ode to Joy

Because it's such a great set of sound bites, I suspect that many of us most remember Dr. Martin Luther King from his "I have a dream" speech — a speech in which he dreams that one day, "little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers".

While it's an ideal that still bears repeating, Dr. King is not the first to have considered the idea. In 1808, Friedrich Schiller wrote the words that were transformed by Ludwig van Beethoven into the first-ever symphony that employed a chorus, his Ninth ("Ode to Joy"). Referring to some future Elysium, Schiller writes "Alle Menschen werden Brüder" — all men shall be brothers. Yitzhak Peretz further expands this in his Yiddish lyric, my first exposure to Beethoven's tune, starting out with the line "Alle mentschen zaynen brider — broyne, gele, schvartze, vaysse". Rather than hoping for brotherhood in some Utopic future, he affirmatively states that we are brothers, right now, regardless of the color of our skin ("brown, yellow, black, white"). Thinking of the rainbow of my multicultural neighborhood, our store's customers, and the general area in which I live, restricting Dr. King's dream to just two extremes of skin tone seems... constrictive.

I started creating a field of generic (featureless) faces of different skin tones and hair colors, and even a couple of "covered" faces to honor the Muslims in our local community...

Further, in today's times, when our sense of gender has expanded beyond the binary, I tried adding a few faces with hairstyles that could be either male or female.

Then, finally, I added in Schiller's and Peretz's words (Yiddish is traditionally written in a variant of the Hebrew alphabet).

In checking the correct German and Yiddish spellings, I learned that some time later in his life, Peretz and others looked at his words more sarcastically than literally — though my Yiddish teacher emphasized to our post-détente class their Jewish Socialist origins. Meanwhile, I spent much of late January with an "Ode to Joy" earworm.

A design with this variety of colors lends itself well to using up vinyl scraps for the faces' hairstyles and hijabs, using paper templates to help with placement. Conversely, it does require a somewhat neutral background so as not to clash with those colors. I set my template to light gray to better visualize my layout, and after playing around with a number of colors decided that would be the correct background for my design.

Having missed Black Heritage Month and Hispanic Heritage Month, I was going to put this design away for next year. But in light of today's Black Lives Matter protests, I'm not waiting. It's not just people whose names might be "Brown" or "Hightower" (stereotypically African-American surnames) that matter: it's people whose (stereotypical) names might be Sanchez, Diaz, Rodriguez, Marcos; Chang, Wang, Li; Singh, Patel, Choudry; Farouk, Mohammed, Abdullah; Redcloud, Silverbird... and even people whose last names might be MacDiarmaid, van Gerwen, Santelli, or Rosenberg...