Food arithmetic and translation hocus pocus

If you want to know if a food is high in a particular nutrient, don't rely on someone else's received lists or the opinions of your friends. Do a little simple arithmetic instead. Find charts that provide: 1. the calories per serving: and 2. the amount of that nutrient in the serving. Then find charts that provide: A. a reasonable daily calorie intake for you at your sex, weight and age (or else use a good estimation of your actual calorie intake) and B. the amount of that nutrient someone in your condition ought to be having (taking everything into account: like, if you know you're not absorbing the nutrient well, or if you know that you have a higher need for it because of your situation -- one of which is probably true if you're interested enough in this to do this much research).

Now divide A by 1 and divide B by 2. Compare the numbers. A/1 means how many servings of that food it would take to give you your whole day's calories. B/2 means how many servings of that food it would take you to get your whole day's needs for that nutrient. If A/1 is not larger than B/2, the food is not "high" in that nutrient. It may be a nice food, but it is not providing a larger share of the nutrient than you ought to be able to get from an "average" food. If you need to get more of that nutrient from your food, you need to look elsewhere.

This was prompted by my roommate telling me to eat almonds for iron. I was pretty sure this was not correct. I do love almonds. Almonds are lovely for flavor and food and minerals in general but they are not especially high in iron. But it turns out sunfl"ower seeds are high in iron. This is a wonderful insight, as sunflower seeds are very inexpensive if you get them at Trader Joe's -- they're right there with peanuts in the economy nuts and seeds category -- and I adore them. I eat bowlfuls of them sometimes! And they go very well into salads and stirfries and on top of kookoo-fritattas. I buy them roasted and unsalted, myself, but they come raw and also roasted and salted.

Currently, though, my teeth are irritated from long-deferred dental work and I am not eating anything hard except lettuce, and that I am chewing awkwardly with my front teeth. I keep telling myself, this is temporary, no need to get pissy about it.

Also, I can't find a good translation for a line in a Czech children's song. I'm pretty sure what the whole line means, but there's one word I can't get in the dictionary and the online translator completely fails on it, giving me gibberish. It doesn't do well with Czech verbs, which have stacking auxiliaries (you know, like in English "I had been going to drive there forever, but I never did get around to doing it" -- onlhy, of course, different). It insists on translating each element as a stand-alone word, most of the time, except sometimes unpredictably it will gang up two of them -- and, you guessed it, it gangs up the wrong ones frequently.

Just in case anybody around here knows somebody who speaks Czech (oh wait, I do! I'll ask Hana), here's the verse, with the problem word in italics:

"Když jsem já ty koně pásal
přišla na mě dřimota,
koně vešli do žita.

I think it means, "When I was taking the horse to pasture
I fell asleep
and the horse went into the rye."

But I can't get any kind of meaning for pásal. I believe it is the past participle of a verb like "to pasture" but I can't find any direct evidence for it. If I am right, the verb is jsem pásal "I was pasturing." But what is the infinitive form, that I can't find it anywhere?

musical notes

My autoharp arrived, broken.

Taking it to get fixed tomorrow. It looks very fixable.


And a further note: tonight I seem to have fallen in love with an Albanian wedding singer. I think he's exactly what that sounds like, but I like the music. At least the video with it doesn't feature double-headed eagles, men with rifles, and statues honoring ancient gangsters, like some other Albanian videos I've found. Yes, I'm aware the double-headed eagle is the national symbol, but all I can say about that is, if your national syumbol is a double-headed eagle, you should take a long look at that and think about whether you wish to continue on that path.

Anyway, this guy's name is Gramoz Tomorri, and he bends his voice very nicely. There's a thing that Albanian singers do -- singing way back in the throat, maybe? that makes their voices sound a little forced and rough, and it lends itself very nicely to modern touches and techno sort of influences.

Used to be in folk dance circles there were a lot of purists who would object to anything they thought wasn't traditional enough or which they thought wasn't characteristic enough of the region the dance was supposed to come from. Of course that was an untenable stance as most of the dances we know here were at least highly altered on their way over here and some were outright choreographed by the dance teachers. At least among the people I hang with it doesn't seem to be a very popular position anymore. We dance for fun, and while we are generally very excited to hear music and learn dancing that comes more recently from some hotbed of a particular dance style, it's not because we're worshipping at the altar of authenticity: it's because the people who come here with these songs and dances bring delicious stuff.

When Bela Bartok set out to study Hungarian folk music, he started out going deep, trying to get authenticity and trace the roots to their source. What he discovered over the years was that deep was not the only dimension to go: he ended up saying that to truly understand Hungarian music you would have to study music from Morocco all the way East.

The thing about this Albanian singer is, I was looking for a song we dance to, called "Valle Pogonishte." Last time I looked for it I found it, as well as an identical Greek song -- I mean identical, down to every little bent note and saxophone flourish, except the Greek one was in Greek and the Albanian one was in Albanian: and also I found a Greek fan stirring up shit in the comments on the Albanian song, claiming that the Greek song was the real one and the Albanian one was the copy, and I really don't know or care. My point, and I do have one, is that this time I found many Pogonishtes, including Gramoz Tomorri's "Vallja Pogonishte," but none of them is the one we dance to.

I did find a song called "Ali Pasha" which is the Turkish one that we dance to, but only after I listened to three or four mostly Albanian "Ali Pasha"s which were not what we dance to.

I wish my autoharp wasn't broken. I was looking forward to trying to play "Dedo mili zlatni" on it. It does mean my house has two broken autoharps in it at the moment, but the other one is more broken and is not worth fixing, especially since it has like seven chords.

When I took Truffle in for her pre-op stuff, I discovered I weighed maybe seven pounds less than I did a week and a half ago. She was so anxious before she went in that her teeth were chattering, which I've never seen before. But afterwards she was perfectly fine.