Saturday, March 31, 2007

A1: Failing the Grade

I had written it weeks ago, but I didn’t sense a proper tie-in till now.  It was when I said, “The crock-pot steel-cut oatmeal experiment is a failure,” did I realize the larger issue I had invoked.  Yes, the cereal I’d accidentally bought instead of instant oatmeal, and which I had then glibly promised could be cooked overnight into creamy perfection, but which had in fact turned into a puddle of serviceable gruel cowering in the middle of a crusted shell of hard-baked cereal solids; the boy liked it but it was hardly an effective use of either technology or materials.  But that was okay, because I’d learned something about my kitchen and its limitations.  And that reminded me that it was time to share this story:

I consider it an early triumph of the scientific method, though I guess I didn’t actually have a control group or statistical integrity or any of that good stuff.  However, I did have a hypothesis, and I damn well disproved it.  If that ain’t science I’ll eat A1 ice cream.

Oh yes, because I did and I do so enjoy my A1 steak sauce, and likewise my ice cream.  Well, not so much anymore; I haven’t had A1 in years and I go slow these days on the churned glacees.  But really, those flavors always taste so good that they must taste good together. Or so I thought.

I was young, like maybe third grade, and the family was concluding our evening meal.  There had been a beefy main course of some sort, so the A1 was already out.  Then supper was cleared away and dessert was served – vanilla ice cream with chocolate sauce.  At this phase of my story-arc I was basically lactose-affinitive, and ice cream was a product I consumed with unmitigated gusto; vanilla with chocolate sauce was a combo I particularly enjoyed so I set to my jumbo ramekin that night with out a second thought.

Anyway I didn’t have a second thought for a minute or two, and then the thought I had was not very profound – sort of a product of intellectual brainfreeze, though my being 10 may have played into it as well.  I’m just saying, I’d hope I wouldn’t come up with such a notion today, knowing what I know now – what I learned that terrible night:

I was ruminating on my love of ice cream and said something to the effect that I loved it and A1 sauce too.  Dad considered me quizzically: “Not together, though – right?”

“Why not?,” I queried the universe.  Two great tastes – why should they not, as the sages predicted, taste great together?  Sweet and savory, slick and creamy, piquant and redolent – I saw no reason why these shouldn’t be big-time culinary pals.  My position was a hypothesis based on empirical evidence and well-established precedent.  It seemed entirely obvious, but that may have been the ice cream talking. 

We debated the point back and forth, me and Dad, he taking the position that some things are better apart than together, and I espousing the hypothesis that two rights invariably make an even bigger right.  After a few minutes dad realized that his robust rhetorical skills would never persuade me – I’d inherited his stubbornness and absorbed his talmudic intellectualism, and even at my tender age I wasn’t going to roll over for a principal – in this case, that ice cream is better without steak sauce – in which I did not believe.  Argument would be ineffectual.  Only a live trial would convince me to change my view vis-à-vis a bowl of A1 ripple. 

I remember thinking how great it was that my folks were letting me try th8is.  They usually had strong feelings about wasting food and I already had a dessert in front of me.  Now I would have two.  Li’l sis’ eyes were wide with my audacity as mom settled a second frosty serving of ice cream onto my lucky placemat.

Mom then passed me the slim squared A1 bottle with silent amusement.  Why was she grinning like that?, I wondered.  Is she really so happy to be feeding me all this ice cream?  My questions didn’t slow me down as I uncapped and upended my delicious condiment over the glistening confection. 

My first tip-off was visual – I expected the brown sauce on the ivory mounds to look better than it did.  The A1 sort of slid and glopped – most unlike the chocolate, caramel, and occasional butterscotch of my erstwhile experience.  Then I caught a whiff: spicy yet fatty, vinegar and cream…. The individual components of the scent were all old favorites, but somehow they weren’t mingling properly in my snout.  It didn’t smell so much like an inspired blending of classics as an odor that seemed to curdle with the very sniffing of it.  Curious.

I glanced fast around the table, my spoon in my hand; all eyes were watching me in various forms of anticipation.  The spoon plunged into the bowl and emerged laden with what was starting to look like a treat divided against itself, the A1 puddling and staining the margins of a big creamy dollop.  There was no point in hesitating now so I took it deep into my oral cavity and let the sensations unfold of their own accord. 

There were many sensations: coldness, softness, various textures… a phenomenon was taking place on my tongue, too, which I struggled to understand.  It was like a fight between two cherished heroes from which neither might emerge.  Sharp flavors were blunted; sweet ones, tweaked; each component of my creation seemed to provide a cruel foil to every other shade of gustatory satisfaction either constituent product had ever independently offered me.  It was complex and sophisticated, this thing in my mouth – and I didn’t like it.  In fact, once I realized what had happened to my ice cream dream, I could barely swallow it. 

Dad’s delight at the results of my experiment (so called) was so evident that I felt compelled to scoop myself up a second spoonful, but even after I got it into my mouth I just couldn’t go through with it.  “Sorry, Dad,” I admitted after half a swallow, “this just isn’t very good.”

“Well, there you go.”

“Yes, here I go,” I replied, and switched my A1 bowl for my chocolate sauce bowl.  Since then I’ve tried to keep that experience in mind when faced with opportunities to blend fabulousnesses.  Turns out that sometimes two rights actually make a wrong – or at the least, an about-face.

Wednesday, March 28, 2007

As Good as It’s Gonna Get

Sports: I note this news item and ask myself, “unprintable song about celery?” Dude, this is the 21st internurt century - nothing is unprintable.  However, much that has been printed cannot be read without deleterious impact on native intellectual capacity, to wit: they’ve gone from Gilbert and Sullivan, to this.  It’s really kind of sad. 

Further sports: Here’s a little quiz, or quizlet, or quizzilini if there are more than one of them.  (singular: quizzilinus.) This may be an easy quiz, but it combines two areas of knowledge that very few people possess simultaneously: entomology and sports.  The question is this: We know that “soccer” is a name derived from the rules of “asSOCiation football,” which was codified in the 19th century.  “Tennis” is derived from the French word “tenez,” for “hold” - like, “hold on - I’m going to hit a wad of felt at you with some tightly strung animal intestines.” ("Hold" seems like the least warning to which one might be entitled in such circumstances.) “Rugby” is the name of the school in England where, in 1823, some joker picked up a soccer ball and ran with it for the first time ever, apparently.  And “golf” is a word that is so ancient that its actual meaning is lost to the mists of time, but probably means either “to strike/cuff” or “club/cudgel.” However, there is one very popular sport which is named after a piece of equipment which is no longer even used in the game itself.  Name the sport!  I dare you! And no peekies!

Nonexistent singulars, continued: My “sudoku mania” book contains puzzles, each of which is a sudokum manium.  Oh yes.

Adorable juvenile nicknames: Zach likes his Curious George books, but I myself really like what he calls that brazen little treeweasel: “Monkey George.” Like Chicken George, but prehensile!  After all, his curiousity is an important personal characteristic, but is obviously trumped by his inherent monkeyness.  Well done, Zebo!

Irrelevant Bonus List: Nonpartisan Shipwrecked European Families that failed to cash in on the fad while they had the chance:
* Swiss Family Romulan
* Swiss Family Robotron
* Swiss Family Right-On
* Swiss Family Robitussin
* Swiss Family Rododendron
* Swiss Family Razzenfrazzen
* Swiss Family Riboflavin
* Swiss Family Rocky IV
* Andorran Family Robinson

and a good Wednesday to you, sir.  I SAID GOOD WEDNESDAY! 

Monday, March 26, 2007

Roadnotes: Mile-High Edition

I’ve really had almost no time for keeping up with email, much less blogging, since my return from the conference.  I didn’t bring my camera with me on the trip - it’s too bulky, and I didn’t have enough reliable shooting time.  Instead, I wrote this, the first bit while waiting for my supper at Rock Bottom Brewery, and then more on the 737 home, with appropriate pauses for turbulence.  Consider it what you get instead of a lousy t-shirt, and consider yourself lucky.

Welcome to Denver, dude – population: me.  I’m in a raucous sports brewpub with cool deco-style lights, old school but new manufacture, and that seems to be a lot of what I’m seeing around here - a town where everything seems like it should be older than it is.  The hotel is brand new and very beautiful - 35 stories of big rooms and down comforters, wide-screen tvs and lots of art, paintings and photos and sculpture and a mysterious adage of some sort scrolled around the port-cochere.... in each elevator, another extra-big tv, this one turned permanently to video loop of scenes of place: long clips of an immobile shot of the highway, a mountain lakelet, a diner’s parking lot in the rain - chosen and filmed by artists to make the closed moving chamber of the elevator more of a still outdoor space.... I look out the window of my 10th floor room to see many big new glass towers surrounded by old brick warehouses, and then flatlands to mountains that are much taller than they look.  I walk out and the town smells weird, a smell I keep thinking I’ll outwalk but I don’t.  The sky is big - not quite Montana big but big nonetheless, and close, and cornflower blue; the air is warm and dry, so dry my nose bleeds…

It was strange meeting people in Denver.  Of course there was Jill, my first on-line friend and finally a friend in person too, with whom I had a delightful supper and conversation, but then after supper I went for a Chimay in the lobby bar of the hotel and struck up a convo with a grizzled fellow next to me who: was there for the same conference as was I; was from California; was a partner at a major firm with important ties to public interest law and my own office; himself had helped to found three of the programs I now fund; WAS A STUDENT OF MY FATHER’S AT THE SEMINARY.  We had a good talk about ethics, administration, theology, spirituality, my dad… there were all the other California advocates, too, with whom I speak all the time but whom I never see in person unless I travel to another state.... and then, out of nowhere, Lilli, who took the open stool at the brewpub and wound up stuck in a conversation with me - a schnecken-baking spin-teaching hash runner from Eugene, who’s moving back to - of course - Santa Cruz in a month or so....

Denver itself: There were the many blocks of beautiful masonry and stone buildings, with rough western alleys full of bricked-up windows and old overpainted ads - set into the sidewalk at one moribund intersection was a bronze plaque identifying that location as once the commercial center of Denver, describing each building’s purpose and materials - and three of the four of these elegant edifices seemed empty and closed, a tragic waste of beautiful architecture…

There were - oh yes there were - the two brewpubs, one in an old building but dating back business-wise only to the 1980s, and one in a new flashy spot that looked and felt very much like the other from the inside - both decorated in a self-consciously western-heritage style, pouring beer that was generally servicable and sometimes quite good, like the Big Easy Belgian at Wynkoop or the Golden Eagle IPA at Rock Bottom.... yet with all the beer I drank, and my very comfortable bed in my softly silent room, I consistently fell asleep late and woke up not just early but before my alarm even went off, watching out my never-closed blinds for the first hint of blue in the sky so I could justify rolling out of my very comfortable bed to work out in the gym - a big, nicely appointed facility where I lifted, pedaled, saunaed and yogaed at various times, working up a really good schvitz and - at first - getting myself a little queasy-dizzy from the altitude…

There was the strangely abundant seafood, not just trout but salmon, shrimp, swordfish - real seafood, and what it was dong way up in Denver I have no idea but it was pretty damn tasty…

There were the abundant Ethiopians, many among the hotel’s staff and all over downtown and at the airport, beautiful people with beautiful names, so many of them and all so far from what was once their home, and I should have been wondering what kind of cosmic disruption brought them all to this arid high plains city but all I can really think is dang I could really go for some doro wat and tibs about now…

There was the set of silos we passed on the way back to the airport in our big Chevy suburban shuttle - a late afternoon with a heavy sky and light rain, easy jazz on the radio and those huge silos erupting next to the freeway out of a neighborhood of shabby small old wood-frame houses, a thousand shades of grey and brown, and the silos a dirty off-white with a huge dog-food aid painted on the side; the air all around reeked of kibble and I could only imagine how sick of smelling it the locals must have been…

And of course there was the conference itself, where the civil Gideon session overflowed the room and the official schedule booklet had a photo of the rocky mountains on the cover - superimposed clumsily for some reason over a blurry photo of downtown L.A.... and the session on rural delivery featured a Norwegian exchange student to whom I made a suggestion that left him genuinely intrigued, saying he’d never considered it but he’d take the idea back to Norway…

And now I’m on the 737 back home, delayed an hour or so, packed in tight, my “Philly” cheesesteak supper nestled uncomfortably in my gut, and we’re almost out of the turbulence, I think.  I’ll be home, probably, before midnight.  It was a decent stay in a decent town, and I would like to go back and explore it a bit more thoroughly sometime… but for now I’m ready for a little shuteye. 

UPDATE: Sodium-free club soda on the airplane: a refreshing cup of just plain club?

Epilogue: It’s been tough getting time to post, but I’ve got some fun essays saved up.  I should have something more worth your time to read it soon.  Till then, don’t forget to floss!