Month: December 2016

I set a goal of 5 posts a week for 2017 so I thought I’d give a try to this one before the new year clicks in. The Angina Monologues are sort of an outsider’s view of the plant based whole food movement, particularly as it is expressed by Dr. McDougall, Dr. Esselstyn, Jeff Novick, and others who are enthusiastic about preventative medicine. I don’t speak for any of those people, but I have enormous interest in their message and will try to promote my understanding of that message. One of my favorite ways to do that is to try various recipes of people who cook PBWF. This new year I am trying one such site which I am happy to pass along to you.

Our New Year tradition is to make salads. My mom used to make them. In my very young and foolish days I would have them with cold cuts on Nee Years Eve. I still had a lot of young health to waste. As I enter the last third of my life I no longer have any such illusions. So now I modify the recipes so they are as far from the toxins as I can get them. They are still not as clean as some less processed meals, but they are not too bad. The real issue for me with these salads is the substitute for mayonnaise. Most use some sort of blended tofu concoction. This year though, I ended up at Clean Food Dirty Girl. She has an interesting take on the potato salad dressing here. It is pretty high in fat as it uses a lot of cashews, but we sometimes eat at Gracious Madre which has several offerings with a cashew cream that is probably 95% cashews or more. By that standard Molly Patrick ( the Clean Food Dirty Girl from the website) provides a reasonably non toxic alternative to the canned vegan mayos. We had been using Nayonaise, which seems to be puréed tofu, but it is very expensive and has the high calorie load of tofu. The spices in the salad dressing give it an interesting (as in, “Very good,”) flavor and I’m thinking of swapping out some of the cashews with potato to get lower calorie density at a similar consistency. I do the same thing with TerriNC‘s phenomenal nooch sauce which is a staple in our house. You’ll find that near the top of my healthy vegan food lists which I’ll post here if I ever get off my lazy ass and figure out how to post here on the Monologues. WordPress and I are still in the first date phase of our relationship. I’ll get better as you go along.

In the meantime have a healthy plant based NYE. Let’s achieve the lives to which we aspire  in 2017.

Big Blue laid me off in May.  It was after five years of my second stint there.  I wasn’t surprised by it, and the lay off didn’t bother me that much, at least for about the first month.

It was the third time Big Blue had laid me off.  The first time was about 22 years prior.  They offered me a job afterwards.  I know; it’s weird, the plan is to lay everybody off and them offer jobs to the people they wanted to keep in the first place.  Now this sounds like it violates labor laws and leaves Big Blue open to a lot of liability.  So they nominally come up with the excuse that they were reengineering their operations and some of their workforce had skills that matched the needs of the new operations, so they were able to offer them positions in that organization.

This was not new to me.  I returned to finish my degree at San Jose State while working full time in the Semiconductor industry.  At that time I was a first line supervisor. I remember receiving an ad fro a parody of a management textbook.  One of the chapters was entitled, “How to Get Rid of Employees Without Actually Firing Them.”  I laughed when I read it.  It was an insightful comment about how bad managers and bad organizations operate.  It’s funnier when you are not actually living it.

The truth is I liked Big Blue.  I had fond memories of the people I worked with in the early nineties, many of whom remain friends to this day.  I was thrilled when I had the opportunity to return in a contract role in 2010.  And even in the second tenure, the place had many wonderful people.  I sat next to a lady who was about young enough to be my granddaughter.  She seemed to aspire to becoming the Emily Post of flatulence.  Once, when she remarked on the proper age to genteelly pass gas in public, I noted that I could be considered a prodigy in that field.  She was exceptionally honest with an excellent work ethic.  And she was not remarkable in terms of many of the Big Blue workforce.  Any employer with the most rudimentary skills for handling people could have created an exceptional environment for its employees from this workforce.  I had recently made up my mind that I could remain at Big Blue until my retirement, which I estimated to occur about ten years in the future.  Of course, not long after I took an FTE position there, it became apparent that those rudimentary skills were not supposed to be fostered.  The Human Resources department, which was staffed with the same high caliber people who I found in the rest of the company, was replaced with HRNet, a sort of facebook clickbait webpage that was supposed to substitute for the human being that I was tacitly led to believe would represent me in dealing with the company’s regulations.  I used to use the tagline, “HRNet; taking the human out of Human Resources since 2011.”

Mark Covello

December 20, 2016

Pacifica, California

I know. It almost sounds like an oxymoron (or, perhaps, “oligmoron,” might be more appropriate). I started off a post that I titled, “Obamacare,” yesterday, but I couldn’t get the wording right. So this morning I am blogging from my iPhone trying to get something out. I’ve   slowly been learning the ins & outs of WordPress, but I don’t have any formalized content. As I’ve explained elsewhere, I sort of think of this as a self-funded Herb Caen-ish encore career. I guess this sort of activity feels a bit like that. I’m thrilled to know I can blog from bed.

Yesterday, in the unpublished post, I was remarking that the news I heard left me  the impression that Trump was going to make good on  his campaign promise to raze Obamacare.

I wanted to comment about Obamacare as it is a main focus of the Angina Monologues. In the most postmodern of actions this, “Progressive,” president was reviled by conservatives for passing what might be one of the most retrogressive laws in the nation’s history. The ACA exists for exactly one purpose; to keep healthcare in the private sector. And, in doing so,  he freed the health insurance industry from any sort of oversight. The insurance companies could determine exactly how health care would be doled out without the interference of any pesky regulations.  When conservatives criticize it they tend to characterize it as a government handout, but anyone who has sought coverage on the exchanges knows it is anything but that. The costs are not being borne by the taxpayers. They are borne by the people purchasing the insurance. That fact is reinforced by the number of large insurers who have left the exchanges as they started to realize  the consequences  of treating symptoms rather than diseases. That’s the lesson of the big 2 diseases of our day, Type II diabetes and heart disease; You can treat the symptoms until you’re blue in the face, but if you don’t address the disease, itself, the disease will always win.

That is the lesson I would like this blog to teach; that to succeed over heart disease you must address the disease, itself, and the only way to address the disease is to revise the lifestyle that created it.  As I figure out how to develop the site I hope the Anigina Monologues will grow into a sanctuary for people who are undertaking the difficult task of addressing that disease. ( In the meantime do what I do and use The McDougall Plan for your sanctuary.)  Everyone seems to be against us; the food industry, the medical industry, the pharmaceutical industry.  But, the truth is that they all have the best of intentions.  As Doctor McDougall has said, “It’s nothing personal.”  They’re all just trying to make a living.  And in the process they are enabling us to kill ourselves.

I didn’t think we were the type of people who would give in to an oligarchy, but, if the oligarchs are going to try to use us by getting rid of the laws that empower them, I say, “Bring it on !”

Mark Covello

December 17, 2016

Pacifica, California