Salt Talk
I am reading through a cook book I found recently, Best of the Best, published in 1998 by Food and Wine, and claiming to be the best receipes from cookbooks published every year. Maybe – I don’t know.
This quote caught my eye:
“The right amount of salt can make or break a dish . . . In general, though, I find home cooks rarely cook with enough salt. Most people would be shocked at the amount of salt used in professional kitchens, where we season every component of a dish carefully, and then combine them.”
AdventureMan and I gave up cooking with salt years ago, adding as we eat, as needed. I always laugh because food tastes SO good when we go out. We always knew it had to do with the fact the food was salted, and had lots of fat in it that we didn’t know about, but this is the first time I have seen it documented so blatantly. It is just one of those boxed comments, so I don’t know who said it.
Taking Issues to the Paper
Here is where this story started: Corruption at the Morgue.
You have to wonder what is going on here? Both parties are now taking their cases to the press. It’s interesting. It should be easy enough to determine whether the morgue conditions are modern or not, whether the morgue has the equipment it needs to determine blood alcohol content, drug levels, blood infections (you would want your medics and coronors to know if they are exposed to TB, HIV, Hepatitus, etc.) but all this is aside from the accusation that autopsy results and cause of death are being manipulated to prevent successful prosecution of some who commit crimes, and to implicate some who do not.
The female coroner’s accusation of sexual harassment may not even be an issue – does Kuwait have a law against sexual harassment? I would think the courts would be overwhelmed if there were such laws in place! If there is no law against sexual harassment, can you call it assault, and prosecute?
Morgue chief hits back
Published Date: March 17, 2008
By Ahmad Al-Khaled, Staff Writer
KUWAIT: The director of Kuwait’s morgue refuted accusations by a female coroner of departmental wrongdoing and false reports during a press conference yesterday. Department director Eid Bousalib labeled the female coroner Dr Nawal Bousheri a “problem employee.” The director argued that his department is transparent, noting “We have a department of quality control which monitors all our procedures.
He, instead concentrated his statements on attacking Bousheri. Reciting a litany of offenses including failing to show up for work and complaining about the lack of promotion, Bousalib painted Bousheri as a disgruntled employee simply lashing out via the media.
She stopped signing in and out of her log book and declined overtime hours and with that we sent a memo to the administrative department regarding those issues. At that time she was not assigned any cases. On two occasions, one for 46 days and another for 21 days where she never signed-in.” Bousalib pointed out, “This happened in 2007, long before she complained in the media.
He also noted that she applied for a promotion and was rejected and in response, “She placed another complaint with the Civil Service Commission that was investigated and declined…She was still unsatisfied and complained in the administrative courts in 2007 on the same issue (her promotion) and it was rejected,” he said.
Addressing Bousheri’s accusations, Bousalib said that male doctors examined male corpses and that women examined female corpses. “That is totally wrong, women examine women and men examine men – even the doctors have separate offices (male and female sections)-If you examine our overnight shift lists, we always have a male and female doctor on shift.” Bousheri alleged that male doctors would be present in the same examining rooms where female coroners examined female corpses. She said the result was in app
ropriate behavior regarding the corpses.
Bousheri also claimed that coroners falsified reports at the request of police. Bousalib rejected the claim. “It is impossible to doctor the records. An administrative person, no matter his rank, has no authority over technicians and what the technicians write on their reports is what they are responsible for in the courts,” he said.
Regarding accusations of poor sanitation, sterilization of equipment, and bad smells in the state morgue, Criminal Investigation Deputy Director Brigadier Dr. Fahad Al-Dousari said, “The ventilation system is modern. The morgue was authorized and approved by the British Royal College and Kuwait University and is up to international standards.” Notably the facility was denied the approval of the British Royal College prior to 2001 but after upgrades, subsequently received the approval.
The department, which includes a wide variety of sections such as a criminal laboratory, forensic medicine section, and a crime scene officers section, has been in operation for 50 years. In 2001 Kuwait launched the identification DNA laboratory which was the first such lab in the Middle East and Arabian Gulf region.
Earlier slanderous rumors regarding Bousheri’s mental state had been leaked to the press. Bousalib declined to comment on the rumors, noting “She is still an employee and a colleague and we do not interfere in her personal life.” Kuwait Times could not confirm the rumors. Dr. Bousheri is still employed at the department, but Bousalib would not confirm if she was still receiving cases.
Female coroner retaliates…
Published Date: March 18, 2008
KUWAIT: Female coroner Dr Nawal Boushiri has retaliated against accusations hurled at her by morgue director Brig Eid Bousalib in Sunday’s press conference. She pointed out that she was waiting for the minister of interior’s nod, especially since he was aware of all the misdeeds that took place at the criminal administration. She met him twice and he has given the director the go- ahead to defend himself, thus making him both the opponent and the judge. She asserted that she has documents to prove the viol
ations that took place in the autopsy room and other departments at the administration.
However, she said that she has reservations about making them public now, since the case is sub judice. She expressed astonishment at the fact that the director avoided the sexual harassment topic, emphasizing that the issue has deeply troubled her and undermined her position at the administration
She said that the head of the department is a dentist; universally, the post is reserved to a doctor specialized in general medicine and surgery. A dentist’s knowledge is limited to the teeth.
My complaint is still being considered by the court and I have a letter authorized by the Civil Service Commission stating that the minute the post becomes vacant, I have the right to take charge.
The director said that the autopsy room is a modern one and meets international standards. I want to say that the room is a hall, that has two tables for inspecting bodies, without any kind of partition. The ventilation system is poor. The equipments used are substandard. This administration department smells foul whenever a body is present in the autopsy room. Authorities should verify this matter.
She said that there have been cases where lab reports indicate that the blood and urine samples taken by the administration were not that at all. Further some reports state that the urine sample was substituted with some ‘liquid.’
Boushiri went on to say, “The director feels that it is not important to decide the dose of drug in the bloodstream. I say it is of extreme importance especially in cases decisions have to be made whether the dosage was part of treatment or not. It is usually the drug overdose that causes death.
Whatever has been said about my commitment to work is baseless. For all the years that I worked at the administration, I stopped signing the attendance register only after the director started sexually harassing me. I did not sign the register for several months before he ordered that my salary be stopped on 16th September 2007. I don’t know why he chose this date in particular.
5KD = LLLOOOLLLL
I have seen opinions, and heard people talking about how Kuwait has more important things to do than to penalize people who are using their mobile phones. They are outraged! Clean up the highways first, they say, give us better schools, enforce the laws already on the books (but leave our cell phones alone!)
I am sorry. I know I am going to get killed for this opinion, but have you ever followed someone driving while talking on a cell phone? Do you watch them wobble out of their lane, try to steer the car with their knee because they have the phone in one hand and they need to adjust the volume of the radio? In countries where mobile phone use has been monitored and statistics kept, they attribute a huge rise in inattentive driving to cell phone use. They have statistics. They can prove that cell phone use is linked to a rise in accidents.
Brave Qatar brought in a team of experts who interviewed seriously injured accident victims. Every single one of them was on a cell phone when involved in the accident.
My rant is this: a 5KD fine? In Kuwait, that is just laughable. A 5 KD fine (about $20 with the dollar diving into the cellar) is not a deterrent. I want to see a sliding scale: start at 50KD for the first incidence, double it for the second, double it again for the third, etc. Make it hurt.
There are too many drivers for the roads, even with the ongoing improvements. The drivers are ill experienced, and careless. Driving in Kuwait is lethal enough without the additional factor of cell phones. If you need to ask directions, pull over. It’s not that hard, you’re smart, you can figure it out.
Meat and Fish at the Sultan Center
It doesn’t take long before you live in a country long enough that you don’t see with the same eyes as when you came. Last week, as I was shopping, I was looking for something to fix for dinner. Normally, I just see something and grab and go, but my attention was caught by how expensive everything was, and then again, by the fact that American ground beef was twice as expensive as New Zealand ground beef, and both were really really expensive – it’s ground beef!
I’ve been careful about meat ever since I read Deadly Feasts about ten years ago. The book is a medical mystery, it traces the identification of Mad Cow Disease, and how vulnerable we all are. The human variant takes ten years to develop – all because tainted meat enters our food supply, because meat producers are too greedy to pass up a cow who is stumbling and falling down.
Even those who keep it out of the human food chain often process fallen cows for animal food.
And none of that has anything to do, really, with this post. The point is, for once, instead of rushing by, I was paying attention. When you pay attention, you start to see things (again) (or for the first time.) Here, you see things routinely that you don’t see in the United States:
Lamb’s brains:
Lamb’s heart:
Sheep’s feet:
Fresh Quail:
Kuwaiti Shoom:
Saudi Shrimp (these look big, but Kuwaiti shrimp, in season, are even bigger, and the sweetest shrimp you have ever tasted):
Iranian Squid:
Nuabi (a fish caught locally)
I love Kuwaiti seafood, and this is the one I love the best of all, Kuwaiti Zubaidi:
For those of you in the US, you can multiply the prices by four for an approximate idea of how much the food costs in dollars. The dollar is slipping here, as everywhere else, prices are going up, and we are taking the double whammy.
The seafood is out of this world. Even though expensive, local caught seafood is about what we would pay for seafood in the US. Vegetables IN SEASON can be reasonable. When I want iceburg lettuce, I pay about $3/ head. I have wonderful friends who are sharing their bumper crops of vegetables this year, and oh! they are SO good, so tasty! One of my friends has tried some heirloom tomatoes, and they are doing well!
Trivial
Any time I start to get all puffed up about readers complimenting me on my blog, I just take a look at the search terms that bring them in.
You know, I would love to think it is our discussions about political and social issues, the books I review, the travel destinations I recommend, the human experiences we share . . . I would love to think that.
It just isn’t the truth. Here is what brings the most people to look at Here There and Everywhere. It is truly, truly humbling.
Something Stupid
I had a birthday a while back, and decided that I was no longer going to mourn my Cuisinart, stuck in storage lo, these last ten years while my husband and I vagabond around the earth. I had bought a cheap food processor in Germany, and left it behind (whew! bought it when the dollar was $1.20 to the Euro, those were the days!) and then I bought a cheap food processor in Doha and brought it with me, but it doesn’t grate Parmesan, and . . . well, it isn’t a Cuisinart, and I really loved working with my Cuisinart. Isn’t it wonderful when they invent a piece of machinery that truly decreases labor, and is a pleasure to use?
I just bought a little one, knowing I will get rid of it when I leave. It is 110 volts, so I could even take it back with me if I wanted. The very first thing I grated was Parmesan cheese, and it was good. And then I grated cheddar, and it was good. And then I chopped onions and parsley, and it was very very good. I used it three times.
Yesterday, I went to grind some sausages and it only worked for one second, then quit. I checked all the plugs, checked the fuse box, checked everything I could. I couldn’t figure out why it wasn’t working.
Then I figured it out. I had fried my beautiful new Cuisinart. Can you figure out what I did?
I will show you a close-up of the transformer, maybe that will help:
Yes, I plugged my sweet little 110 brand new Cuisinart into the 220/240 output plug instead of the 110 output plug.
Do you think it can be fixed? Is there somewhere in Kuwait I can take it and get it re-wired? (Sigh.)
Kuwait Plumbing/Bathrooms
This is one of those “sometimes you don’t even know what you don’t know” kind of posts.
We were sitting around after book club, and the topic turned to oddities in our housing. I mentioned that sometimes, my bathrooms just STINK and I don’t know why. People were quick to explain that when they put plumbing in, they don’t exhaust the sewer gases the same way as in Europe and America, and sometimes the gases back up and make a bad smell.
I know that my bathroom sometimes smells like someone has just dumped a diaper pail, sometimes I can smell hair dye, and sometimes I can smell men’s perfume! Sometimes it smells like the sea at low tide – none of these smells has anything to do with me, and I have wondered why my bathroom smells that way. We keep candles and perfumes in our bathrooms, so that when the stench is overwhelming, we can burn or spray it away.
The management’s suggestion, when we complained, was to run a lot of water, that made the smell go away. Run a lot of water? In a country like Kuwait where there is no rain this year, and water is precious?
“If only they would air condition the bathrooms!” one friend added and suddenly the light went on in my head! I had always thought it was me! I do my hair and make up in the bathroom, and often I end up sweating and wondering what I did to make me so HOT (not as the like “she’s so HOT!” sense, in the sweat-rolling-down-my-forehead sense.)
When I got home, I checked out all my bathrooms. My friend was absolutely right, there is no air conditioning in the bathrooms. We love our bathrooms, they are about the size of a small bedroom in the US, or a spacious walk-in closet, they have windows, they have beautiful tiling, they are nice!
And no, there is no air conditioning in the bathrooms. I have lived here for two years and never figured that out.
(No, that is not my bathroom in the photo. I love bathrooms, and found that photo HERE at Tessera Tile where they have glass tiles and I am dreaming of doing a bathroom with glass tiles and glass brick.)
Early Easter
Easter is REALLY early this year. A friend sent me an e-mail explaining why:
Do you realize how early Easter is this year? As you may know
Easter is always the 1st Sunday after the 1st full moon after the Spring
Equinox (which is March 20). This dating of Easter is based on the lunar calendar
that Hebrew people used to identify Passover, which is why it moves around
on our Roman calendar.
Based on the above, Easter can actually be one day earlier (March 22) but
that is pretty rare. Here’s the interesting info.
This year is the earliest Easter any of us will ever see the rest of our lives! And only the
most elderly of our population have ever seen it this early (95 years old or
above!).
And none of us have ever, or will ever, see it a day earlier! Here are the
facts:
1) The next time Easter will be this early (March 23) will be the year 2228
(220 years from now). The last time it was this early was 1913 (so if you’re 95
or older, you are the only ones that were around for that!)
2) The next time it will be a day earlier, March 22, will be in the year
2285 (277 years from now). The last time it was on March 22 was 1818. So, no
one alive today has or will ever see it any earlier than this
year!
Muslim Bioethics
I love Wired because it gives me science news in a language I can understand:
A Beginner’s Guide to Muslim Bioethics
By Brandon Keim March 04, 2008 | 1:26:15 PMCategories: Bioethics, Biotechnology, Religion
When Sunni and Shiite scholars disagreed over the ethics of cloning animals, I wondered whether there were other bioethical conflicts in the Muslim world.
Are Muslims split over stem cell research and genetically engineered crops? Generally speaking, do they approach biotechnologies in the same way — or variety of ways — as Western cultures?
I posed the question to a handful of Muslim bioethicists. The first to respond was Brown University anthropologist Sherine Hamdy. Wrote Hamdy,
I think it would be easy and reductionist to make this into yet another ‘Shiite vs. Sunni’ issue, but there has always been a wide space of interpretation and widely debate even within the Sunni Muslim world about various biotechnologies including cloning. Most religious sources say that if a given technology, e.g. cloning is for beneficial purposes and the good outweighs the negative (if there is potential for human cures, etc.) then it is permissible, others have cautioned about the potential danger of creating a ‘super race’ of people, animals….so most of the disagreement is actually about the understanding of the technology itself and what impact it might have.
Would it be a bit too easy and reductionist, I asked, to then say that Muslims are less inclined to take an absolutist position and instead base their judgments by weighing the risks and benefits of each case?
You can read the entire article, and related articles, HERE
Just Bad English
I am adding a new catagory today called Just Bad English.
No, I am not going to troll your blogs looking for grammar mistakes or misspellings or unusual use of English. I have noticed that I am blogging in English, and that many of the Kuwaiti bloggers are blogging in their second language – that is tough enough without the Language Police lurking in the background, and that’s not my point, nor my interest.
If, however, you are writing for a newspaper, you are held to a higher standard, even if English is not your native tongue.
So tell me, in this article from the Arab Times Kuwait Crime News, how many people were arrested? What were they arrested for?
Meanwhile, a team of securitymen has launched a surprise inspection campaign in Ahmadi resulting in the arrest of two Kuwaitis wanted by law for various criminal charges and 105 jobless expatriates. The arrested individuals were referred to the concerned authorities.
I have another complaint. In the Kuwait Times, we often read of the police “suspecting” a car and pulling it over, or
“suspecting” some individuals and chasing them.
We don’t use “suspecting” that way.
There is suspicious behavior. People are suspected OF something – you can’t just look at a car and “suspect” it, you have to suspect it OF something – erratic driving? What made the police suspicious?
examples of good usage:
Police suspected him of being under the influence of drugs, and pulled him over.
He looked nervous, and police suspected him of being an illegal resident, so they asked to see his papers.
Police received a tip that a brothel was operating in Farwaniya, and based on that suspicion, raided the apartment, breaking down two iron doors in the process which gave the occupants enough time to escape through a hidden hatch in the back of the apartment.
A sharp eyes policeman spotted the car, which appeared to be one stolen a few nights previously. Suspicious that the driver was not the legal owner, they stopped him and interrogated him, and demanded to see his registration and residency papers.
(I made up all the above. Any resemblance to a case you may know is purely coincidental.)
I have also noticed that almost every suspect gives up his drug accomplices, pimp, fellow thieves, smugglers and drug stash after interrogation. I suspect Kuwait police have some extensive experience in encouraging these confessions. Most of these confessions seem to result in other valid arrests. Sometimes, I can believe, these confessions are made by people who are very very afraid. On the other hand, sometimes a confession elicited by fear of a lot of pain might be totally false.
How do you know the difference? What if someone experiences a lot of pain and confesses to a crime they did NOT commit? This means that an innocent man suffers and the one who committed the crime skates. This happens in every country in the world. (That is just a rant, not a language criticism, just a general question in my mind; how do we protect the innocent?)
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Early Voting in Florida
