Mmmm ... "Free" Ham (Brief Grocer Review)

My first response to the range of grocers in Gainesville was "what ... no Piggly Wiggly?" Moving to the deep south, I thought I'd be able to shop at Piggly Wiggly, dammit. But no dice.

The three main chains in Gainesville are Publix, Winn Dixie (a close second in deep south identification to me), and Sweetbay.

Publix is closest to where we live, which is no surprise because Publix is everywhere. And by "everywhere," I mean that there are two essentially side-by-side shopping centers on Archer Road, each with its own Publix.

I'd like to like Publix, since it's close and especially since it's employee-owned, but the prices ... it's like most of their stuff is made of gold or something. That may have to do with them selling a lot of high-end organic food and so forth, but even the regular groceries seem mostly over-priced. My usual point of comparison is cold cuts. The cheapest hot dogs at Publix cost about half again as much as similar hot dogs did in Missouri, and significantly more than they do at other local stores. I was there not long ago and randomly picked up a 12-ounce box of kosher "pigs in a blanket" from their special Passover section. $13.xx. Yes, you read that right: More than a dollar an ounce for hot dogs in biscuit dough. Needless to say, it didn't go in the cart. Probably wouldn't have anyway -- on the rare occasion when pig in a blanket sounds good to me, I can make more than 13 ounces of them for less than $2 (if I don't buy my hot dogs and biscuit dough from Publix).

Winn Dixie is a mixed bag. Some of their prices are a lot better, some not so much. The real problem with them is that their locations don't happen to be convenient to where we live or where Tamara works (she normally does grocery shopping on her way home from work; I only tag along if we need to pick some stuff up on the weekend).

Fortunately, Sweetbay is fairly conveniently located, and generally has better prices than Publix. And for the last little while, leading up to Easter, they've been running a special. Every time you buy more than X dollars worth of stuff, you get a little coupon. When you get five of those coupons, you can trade them in for another coupon worth $20 off a spiral-cut Easter ham. Which is what Tamara did. Then when she went to get the ham, they were out of all the hams priced at over $20 ... so she got a $16 ham, free. It's in the slow cooker right now, and it smells great.

So we're pretty much with Sweetbay and happy there (the nearest Aldi is in Ocala, too far to drive with any great frequency).

A side note, though: The service is fast, courteous, and friendly in the way that southerners are renowned for, at all of the above-listed grocers. All three chains seem to run clean, well-stocked stores. The only complaint we have with Publix is price, and we'd gladly shop at Winn Dixie more often if it wasn't a cross-town drive.

Of Purple Hearts and Terrorism

Per Fox News:

Legislation that would award the injured from the 2009 Fort Hood shooting the Purple Heart would adversely affect the trial of Maj. Nidal Hasan by labeling the attack terrorism ...

But that's exactly backward.

Survivors and their families who are asking for the Purple Heart to be awarded assert that "Fort Hood was turned into a battlefield when Hasan opened fire during the November 2009 attack."

It's hard to argue that point. Hasan attacked military personnel, on a military base, with a military weapon (the FN Five-SeveN, developed for and used by military and police, although now available on the civilian market as well), apparently pursuant to an ongoing military conflict. If Congress could be bothered to declare war, he'd be culpable for charges of treason, aiding the enemy, etc.

But a battlefield action -- an attack on military personnel, on a military base, with military weaponry, pursuant to an ongoing military conflict -- is not, whatever else it might be, "terrorism." It's almost the exact opposite of terrorism, which is the targeting of civilians and non-combatants for the purpose of creating (presumably politically useful) terror.

If the US government confers the Purple Heart on the Fort Hood victims, it is explicitly asserting that what took place at Fort Hood was a military battle, not a terrorist attack.

More on this at Memeorandum.

Zero Dark Thirty, Torture, Etc.

I've followed the controversy over Zero Dark Thirty's depiction of torture, but only cursorily.

Some people think the film glorifies torture or credits it for the killing of Osama bin Laden (for some people, the film credits it too much, for others crediting it at all would be too much).

Some people think the film's depiction of torture doesn't credit it (or credit it too much), or that its presentation of torture is dispassionate or journalistic.

After finally watching the film the other day, I'm with the latter crowd. Here's why:

• As best we can tell, the US has used torture in the "war on terror." For a film on this subject to leave that out would just be silly and unrealistic. I don't agree that the film is "journalistic," as the filmmakers call it (more on that below), but it does try to be believable. They couldn't accomplish that by having the US interrogators give the detainees ponies. Some very bad things happened, and the film had to portray them happening.
• Since the film has to depict torture, it should do so realistically. I am not an expert on torture, but it seemed realistic to me (and the point of film as entertainment is to seem realistic to the viewer -- experts on torture are a very small percentage of the audience, and that's a good thing). It doesn't treat waterboarding, locking people in small boxes, etc. romantically at all. Neither does it go the other way. The treatment is very flat and naturalistic. "This is happening, no comment on whether it's good or not." The main torturer informs the detainee "I am not a good guy," and proceeds to prove it. So far as I can tell, the film leaves the question of whether or not he should have done so to the viewer.
• If Kathryn Bigelow had wanted to glorify torture or give it undue credit for producing information, she wouldn't have done it this way. The key early break in the case comes not from torture per se, but from convincing a previously tortured detainee that he had already given up important information after sleep deprivation, so why not eat a good meal, smoke some cigarettes, and have a leisurely chat with his captors?

I'm just not seeing the controversy here. It seems to me that if you have a problem with the way Zero Dark Thirty depicts torture, you'd probably have a problem with any film attempting to tell the story in question. Torture is just the low-hanging fruit to complain about.

Now, as to the film itself: I won't say I enjoyed it -- I don't see how anyone could enjoy the topic -- but I couldn't stop watching it and I don't feel like my time was wasted. I'm not sure I believe it in detail, but I think it was a genuine effort to tell a story as truly as the filmmakers could.

Is the film "journalistic?" No. Not because Bigelow didn't want it to be, but because it's impossible for it to be. Many of the details of the operation are still secret, and those which aren't secret have no doubt been released in such order and in such detail as to reflect as flatteringly as possible upon the US government and to accord with that government's narrative.

That narrative, in its bare bones, is that the US intelligence community tracked down Osama bin Laden and that the Navy SEALs killed him. We have no way of knowing if either of those two foundational factual claims are true. For all we know, bin Laden had been dead for years by the time the government announced his assassination. Or maybe he's even still alive (far less likely, I admit -- I doubt the US government would claim to have assassinated him if they believed he was still out there to dispute the claim).

Bigelow accepted that bare-bones narrative and fleshed it out into story, doing the best she could with what information she could get, no doubt constantly weighing the likelihood that this or that piece of information was good. And in my opinion, she did a fine job of it. It does drag a bit in places and weighs in at a thick 2 1/2 hours. I wish it had been tightened to a flat two hours with a little faster pacing, but I don't know that another director could have made that happen while preserving the quality.