Just Hangin’

Posted on March 30, 2011 by Liza Blue

A previous Fanagram discussed the refined art of puttering, an activity that I have mastered.   Hanging out is a related but distinct discipline, and one that I completely suck at.  Puttering is a solo act that involves some physical activity, while hanging out is a social activity, but one that implies no physical activity.  Hanging out is the fine art of doing nothing together.  To me, it also implies some level of multi-tasking, where conversation can be interspersed with periods of silence.  Further, one of the key ingredients of the successful hang out is that the moments of silence are expected and are not awkward – there is no imperative to keep a conversation going.  This is only possible if there is some other easily interruptible activity that you can defer to, such as reading the Sunday paper or watching sports on TV.      

My failure in hanging may be partially due to my general impatience and lack of conversational skills, but I also think that hanging out is more of a male activity centered around sports.  We went down to visit our son Ned at college and took a tour through the appalling dump he was renting with 12 other guys.  The TV room was set up almost as a shrine; all the room mates had chipped in to buy a huge flat screen hi-def TV.  There were two couches in the room, one at floor level, the other elevated so that the seating was tiered, simulating a stadium.  Although I think that there had been some effort to tidy up the joint in anticipation of a parental walk-through, I noticed a couple of beer bottles and a smattering of bottle caps in the corner.  

I asked Ned, “Do women ever watch the games with you?”

He looked at me in total astonishment.  “Are you kidding, why would they want to do that?”

“Well what do the women do during the weekends?”

“I have absolutely no idea,” he answered with a sad tone in his voice as he contemplated a weekend afternoon without hanging out.

Now I actually know a fair amount about sports, particularly football, and I can happily hang out with Nick watching football. But if there are several couples, for example at a super bowl party, I feel that my proper place is with the other women who have no interest in men’s sports.  I remember one party where the men and women had self segregated, with the women in the kitchen arranging hors d’oeuvres and the men hanging around the grill poking at the coals and talking sports.  I decided that I would try and break the mold and walked over to join the grill group.  They were talking football and I attempted to break into the conversation by appropriately commenting that Charles Woodson was one of the few defensive players who had ever won the Heisman trophy.  The conversation stopped dead and all eyes turned to me in astonished horror.  The men then turned away without any further comment and continued their conversation.  I had been summarily dismissed. 

What is the female equivalent of the man cave?  Women just don’t sit around watching sports together and don’t really talk about sports, except maybe women who talk about their children’s playing time on the travel soccer team.  In contrast, men can put on a random basketball game with some chips and a beer and they are set for the next several hours.  Shopping might qualify as female hang out pursuit, but I still maintain that hanging out should involve a couch – besides I never shop.  Perhaps going to the park with the kids, where breaks in conversation can be filled by helping kids on the slide or in the sand box – but I always found that hanging out at the park was a total bore, and I don’t think that I am alone here.  I remember pushing kids on a swing and looking over at other women who had the same weary look on their faces.  Furthermore, by the time a child finally learns how to pump by themselves, they have generally lost interest in swinging.

Taking a walk, with dogs, a stroller, or even a power walk with purposeful strides carrying weights is a frequent social activity, but does not qualify in my scheme, since all involve physical activity.  In my paradigm, hanging out at the fitness center is an oxymoron.   Hanging out with a the Sunday paper either at home or at Starbucks does qualify, but these are gender neutral opportunities, so I still maintain that women cannot hang out as successfully as men.  Furthermore, the image of women hanging out carries with it the unattractive whiff of idle gossiping. 

Part of my discomfort in hanging out traces back to my mother who simply had no tolerance of any idleness.  I grew up when the Cubs only played day games, and I have a distinct memory of her walking through the TV room and saying in a very pissy tone, “Can’t you think of something better to do on a brilliant sunny day?” and then she would harumph and indignantly march off, frequently with a tennis racquet in hand.  She loved it when her children brought friends over as long as they were not draped over couches idly drinking sodas and watching TV.  So in response she always organized group activities –  one summer she organized a volleyball league in our backyard, in the fall there was always a soccer game, and in the winter we would go skating or sledding.  Sometimes we would find a gym and play dodgeball.  There was one summer where croquet was the featured activity.  It turns out that her mother, my grandmother, was a fairly accomplished croquetter and had taught her some basic strategy.  Using a “split shot” she could almost make it all the way around the court on a single turn.  She and my father played constantly in their bathing suits.  There are couple pictures of him during that one summer, tanned a golden brown in a madras bathing suit, and then I never saw him without a shirt on again.

My brother-in-law Hank and his family live about 3 hours away in Madison, and we have visited many times with the stated goal of “just come on up and we’ll hang out together.”  This is great for our son Ned and his cousins Nate and Will, but Hank knows that these visits make me somewhat anxious.  But now that I have dissected the art of hanging out, I have much improved.  Our last visit was in the spring and I brought along a crossword puzzle book, some knitting and some books – all the perfect hanging tools.  What’s more, the French Open was on, one of the few women’s sports that men enjoy watching.  That Maria Sharapova is pretty easy on the eyes and her tennis dress can double as a cocktail dress.  And Venus Williams’ surprising choices in tennis attire will get men commenting on “fashion.”  Serena Williams’ enormous biceps and other body parts always provoke conversation.  For example, Nick and I have debated whether or not you could balance a teacup on her glutes.  Even better, due to the time change the French Open was on in the morning, so after a leisurely breakfast and paper reading, we segued to the TV and spent a very pleasurably morning chatting, and not panicking about keeping a conversation going for 4 hours – we would just default to the French Open.  In the afternoon we went for a walk, and then I helped Hank take the garbage to the dump.   A great weekend.  As we left, Hank even complimented me on my new found hanging skills. 

The missing words in the following poems are anagrams (i.e. like spot, post, stop) and the number of dashed indicates the number of letters in the words.   One of the words will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words using the context of the poem.  Scroll down for the answers.

Equality was not Job One when the sexes were ——-

And sometimes sucking the hind tit is where women are relegated.

For example, I have always thought that hanging out ——- to the guys

They sit on the couch, watch sports and endlessly fraternize.

Once I tried to join the men at the barbecue as they shot the breeze

But they ——- like I was a leper with a lethal disease.  

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Answers:  created, catered reacted

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Home Style Chunks

Posted on March 26, 2011 by Liza Blue

I set the five cans on the kitchen counter, awaiting Ellen to conduct the taste test.  I will only try one, since to open all of them would be too wasteful; my choices include Harvest Moon, Wild Buffalo Grill, Mediterranean Banquet, French Country Café and New Zealand Summer (which is of course our winter).  Each label is decorated with a rustic water color painting of the ingredients.  Harvest Moon has a picture of a cornucopia with some pheasant feathers sticking out surrounded by fall leaves and a few miscellaneous vegetables, the Mediterranean Banquet depicts a bag of brown rice and a bottle of olive oil in addition to a rack of lamb, and French Country Café says “Bon Appétit!” next to a roasted chicken, some apples and peas. When I shake the can, there is a sloshing noise which makes me nervous, particularly since the can also claims that it contains “home style chunks.”  Chunks of exactly what, I think.  Despite the homey labels, canned chunks bring back grim memories of cafeteria mystery meat and shit on a shingle.

The cans have been sitting on my counter for two weeks now as I have put off the taste test, but I have promised myself I will do it and Ellen is due to arrive any minute.  This scenario began to unfold when I went to the Grayslake Feed Store to pick up 300 pounds of corn gluten for organic weed control.  Grayslake is a bit northwest of our suburban home, just far enough away from Chicago to be in a semi-rural farming area, so in addition to lawn products they stock all sorts of animal feed.  As I walked in I saw a curious sign that said, “We proudly sell the Honest Kitchen Food, made from 100% human grade ingredients.”   I asked the salesperson, “What does human grade mean – do people eat this stuff?” 

The check out girl, incongruously adorned with black lipstick and nail polish and glittery mascara, turned up her nose and said, “Well I certainly haven’t tried it, but I suppose you could if you wanted to.  You do realize that this is dog food, don’t you?”  It turns out that the Honest Kitchen makes dehydrated food that mostly resembles an expensive bag of peat moss.  Apparently all you have to do is add water for a perfectly balanced human grade meal.    The term implies that the manufacturing plant undergoes more frequent and thorough inspections by the USDA, and human grade is distinguished from feed grade, which can include such extraneous body parts such as feathers, beaks and claws, or parts of “4D” animals, i.e. those that are dying, diseased, disabled or deceased. 

The in-store advertisement for human-grade food said, “We believe that your pet deserves the same nourishing foods that you feed your family,” and that “all the ingredients can be found in your kitchen.”  I am in complete agreement that pets should have the same diet as humans; in fact, “Leftovers” or “Table Scraps” would be ideal names for a dog.  It is the dog’s role to be the handy clean up crew for spilt milk and all those Cheerios that kids fling from high chairs.  My mother would routinely put gummy roasting pans with adherent pieces of  meat outside by the back door for the dogs to enjoy – they would do a more thorough job than any grease-cutting detergents or scrubbers.  This was also my mother’s delaying tactic for the final clean up – when entering through the back door you often had to tip toe around an array of pans that all appeared spotlessly cleaned.  Occasionally my mother would do a sweep of the bushes to retrieve missing pans that had been pushed in there by determined dogs.  In those hectic days when the household was full of children there was absolutely no need to purchase dog food.  As the kids slowly departed, the critical mass of scraps to support two dogs dwindled and my mother reluctantly started purchasing dog food.     

I was tempted to buy Honest Kitchen for our two dogs who have been subjected to exactly the same meal for their entire lives, but the food just did not look that appetizing.  My attention was drawn to the next items on the shelf – the Merrick 5 Star Entreés for dogs, which now stand on my kitchen counter.  Apparently, labeling regulations state that you can use the terms “human grade” in promotional literature or in store advertising, but not on the label itself, since people might get confused and eat it.  There was clearly no chance that I was going to mistake Merrick dog food for human in the store.  First off, I was in an animal feed store, and secondly I was surrounded by bits and pieces from the slaughterhouse floor.   Next to me was a big bin of pig hooves, which in human terms look the jumbo yellowed toenails that podiatrists make their living at.  There were other body parts, like femurs, and bins of rawhide tied into many different shapes – one selection was dyed to look exactly like a hot dog in a bun.   Behind me was a bin of pig’s ears and knee joints, which looked entirely human and still had little bits of ligaments attached to them. 

 But if I took the Merrick can out of this setting and put it on our pantry shelf, it could mix in perfectly with our row of canned soups.  Everything about the label is designed to make it look appealing to human palettes.  There are the names themselves, of course, and then the list of ingredients make you think of one of those fancy menus that try to dazzle you with quality sounding ingredients.  The Wild Buffalo Grill includes “cracked pearled barley,” which I suppose is much yummier sounding than plain barley.   The French Country Café includes “garden peas,” again a mystery since I assume that all peas come from a garden at some point.  Harvest Moon includes not just wild rice, but specifically “Minnesota” wild rice, and each can has a specific type of apple, Golden Delicious, Granny Smith or Fuji.   And then if the picture on the can is not enough, the store bins have actual pictures of the food to hammer home the human-grade promise.  But instead of putting Wild Buffalo Grill realistically in a dog dish, it is artfully poured into a soup bowl and decorated with a rosemary sprig for garnish. 

I have always thought that labeling is an interesting marketing exercise.  Most of the Merrick labels are consumed with the required information on the percentage of ingredients and nutritional value, but the Merrick family found themselves with a little strip of empty label where they could additionally extol the virtues of their 5 star entrees.  I envision some family member who was a frustrated writer, itching to let loose on the label.  Each can presents a way over the top vignette:

French Country Café:

“Whether it’s a corner café on the streets of Paris, a Cottage tucked along the French countryside or a trip up the Eiffel Tower with your significant other, they all spell the romance of France.  This savory delight inspired by the many culinary artists from across the pond will have your dog begging for more in a heavy French accent in no time.  The Merricks say Merci Beaucoup.”

When I first read this, I was confused by the term “significant other.”  Were they referring to a dog, or is this a very PC reference to a human companion?  I do know that dogs are routinely welcomed in French restaurants, where diners can slip them scraps under the table.  How about those culinary artists in France?  I am sure that they would be dismayed to hear that they were the inspiration for dog food.  I would also love to hear the audio of a dog barking in a French accent.

 Wild Buffalo Grill

“It’s winter in the Rockies at a quiet cabin with the one you love, a good book and a warm fire.  The taste of the west is on the menu tonight.  Buffalo and a host of tasty vittles are warming on the stove.  The Merrick family is happy to share this original taste with your canine friend.  The Merricks say Howdy and thanks.”

Hmm… same issue here, is “the one I love” a dog?  Perhaps so, since a dog in a cabin is a familiar American scene.  But if I am snuggled in with my dog, why am I cooking the dog food on the stove? The words “original taste” strike a slight disturb point for me, since originality in a dog food sounds a little risky.  Personally, I would have described the taste as “comforting.”

New Zealand Summer

“There is something so peaceful, so still about imagining a herd of sheep grazing on the grassy fields of New Zealand.  A simple life of a shepherd is not so simple but oh so comforting for the sheep to know that they are under His watch.  The hope is for a place someday that offers a peace that transcends all human understanding.  The Merricks hope your dog Baas over this dish.”

Wow, this vignette veers off into religious symbolism.   The capitalization of “His watch” must mean that the shepherd is God or Jesus Christ watching over the flock with a resulting transcendent peace.  That’s quite an aggressive agenda for a dog food label.  It is also a little confusing if you read this label from the point of view of the actual sheep.  While the label states that a simple shepherd must be comforting for the sheep, I can’t help but notice that the main ingredient of New Zealand Summer is lamb, and that the shepherd is ultimately leading the sheep to slaughter.

I have now spent quite a bit of quality time with the Merricks.  In recognition of their creative efforts to market in human terms, I come to the logical conclusion that a taste test is in order, but even though it is human grade, it does make me nervous.  All the scraps that my mother fed the dogs would be considered human grade, but I remember horrible pieces of greasy gristle and home-style chunks of fat.  I quickly eliminate Mediterranean Banquet and New Zealand Summer since their principal ingredient is lamb, which is a meat that I am pretty neutral on, but since I would never order it in a restaurant, why would I select it now?  Furthermore, the label specifies lamb liver.  As a kid, I enjoyed the liver and squash my mother served us; somehow the bright orange squash and rich brown liver made a visually appealing plate.  But then during my pathology residency I had to work in the autopsy suite and the morgue.  I routinely handled slippery, jaundiced and cirrhotic livers, which killed any thought of ever eating liver again.  That leaves me with either duck or buffalo as entrees, and I decide to go with Wild Buffalo Grill since the second ingredient is water.

The door bell rings and Ellen is here.  She is wavering in her resolve, but I am impressed by her loyalty to see this through http://sverigeapotek.se/.  My personal marketing strategy is to impress upon her that “tasting” dog food is critically different than “eating” dog food.  I certainly would not want my friends to think that I eat dog food, and my husband Nick is thoroughly appalled at this whole exercise.  But I point out that tasting consists of something as trivial as putting the tiny tip of your pinky into the “sauce” and briefly touching it to your tongue.  Eating on the other hand implies a deliberate and measureable caloric intake.  Satisfied with this framework, Ellen relaxes her defensive position of arms tightly folded across her chest, and she agrees that Wild Buffalo Grill sounds the most promising.  We shake the can as directed, and then also note that the label states, “Keep fresh water available at all times,” clearly disturbing advice.  Nick is watching us at the kitchen counter while he makes a traditional lunch of cold cuts, pickle and cottage cheese, and offers the helpful observation that all dog food recommends a ready supply of fresh water.  For our dogs’ sake, I wonder if I have been irresponsible by letting the toilet bowl serve as their emergency fresh water supply.

Back on task, we nervously peel back the top of Wild Buffalo and stare at symmetrical chunks swimming in shimmering sauce interspersed with recognizable peas and carrots.  One-two-three we each pinch off the smallest corner of a chunk and taste it, and conclude that it is not bad.  French Country Café is next and we both agree that Wild Buffalo tastes better.   While I acknowledge that dogs who have the privilege of eating 5 Star Entrée dog food probably eat better than a sizeable chunk of the human population, I also know that I have been deeply acculturated to think that dog food is repulsive.  So there is no way that our tasting will ever segue to eating, and we stop our testing at two cans.  I pour a sample of French Country Café into the dog dish and call the dogs.  Ironically the dogs do not taste anything, they simply wolf the food down in a couple of slurpy bites, beyond any possibility of savoring the efforts of culinary artists.  While I am sure that they were appreciative, I do not hear any barking in French.    

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (like post, stop, spot) and the number of dashed indicates the number of letter.  One of the anagrams will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers. 

The Merricks want their dog food to stand out on the pantry shelf

And they hope the homey picture on the label will just sell ——.

If not, there’s a list of yummy ingredients and stories of how it’s made,

They’re no —— in there, but at least we know everything is human grade.

Wild Buffalo Grill is probably more nutritious than meals many children get

But I can’t —— my gag at eating home style chunks intended for my pet.

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answers: itself, stifle, filets

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Artisans and Decadence

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Liza Blue

As someone who enjoys fiddling around with words, I have always found in interesting to consider how food is described, either on menus or on packaged goods.  Here the copywriter has a very limited space to convey as many messages as possible: smell, taste/mouth feel (silky, creamy, hot, spicy), audio (crispy, crackling), sight (beauty shot of food), and various emotional hooks (i.e. home-cooked, indulgent, decadent).  Decadent is a particularly interesting word, since, to me, this should have a basically negative connotation, such as corrupt, immoral or orgiastic behavior, i.e. within the realm of Romans feeding Christians to the lions and then seeing the collapse of their empire.  Now I routinely see this word describing chocolate.  I imagine some junior marketing person sitting in a cubicle, and the art director throws him a package of cookies and says, “Ok kid, here’s your chance.  Come up with some way to make these chocolate chip cookies sound different, and you can’t use the word “home style” because that is what the competitor is doing.  And the client wants to charge a premium price, so we need to make it sound like the cookies are worth it, but you can’t use the word “gourmet” since everyone uses that word – it has been done to death.”

 So the kid starts thumbing though the thesaurus to find some verbiage and the word “rich” leads to the word “indulgent” and that leads to tame fringes of the word “decadent” – and ba-da-bing! an advertising campaign is born.  The cookies are portrayed as a naughty treat to great acclaim and the copywriter includes this success as a line item on her resume.  But the success is short lived since the client fails to copyright the term, and pretty soon everyone is using the word decadent, and once again the copywriter, now an art director, is asked to come up with some way to distinguish a line of desserts and ice cream.  But at this point her creativity is spent and once high flying career has stalled out.  She can only come up with this feeble attempt to ramp up the decadence.  Instead of “purely” decadent, I might suggest “No Doubt About It Decadent” or “Roman Empire Decadent.”

A stroll through the grocery store illustrates how marketers use basically meaningless terms to try and capture your attention.  Safeway’s cookies and deserts use multiple different strategies to hope that one resonates with the customer.  In addition to decadent, cookies and desserts are variously describes as home-style, indulgent or gourmet.  Adding an international flair seems to be another strategy.  We have Belgian style éclairs, and cookies with Canadian maple syrup and crème brûlée that is imported from France.  The trio of accent marks on crème brûlée is a nice touch, but personally importing a dessert consisting of eggs, butter and crème would leave an inappropriate carbon footprint.  To me it is discouraging that these strategies work – last week on an impulse Nick picked up a pie at the grocery store with the label “French silk pie with whipped topping and decadent chocolate.”  Upon further review, French silk was just a come-on since the pie was made from some sort of faux chocolate, the whipped topping was not cream, and the decadent chocolate referred only to the little chocolate shavings decorating the top. 

A restaurant menu is another fertile ground for word dissection; I have found that almost every ingredient comes with an often meaningless adjective.  If you go to the local diner, the menu might just list BLT, and the gum snapping waitress with the nicotine breath asks if you want in on wheat or white, toasted or not.  As you move upward in the restaurant world, the description of the BLT gets increasingly pretentious until you get something along the lines of:

“Hand-carved apple-wood smoked bacon, a medley of crisp seasonal field greens, vine-ripened heirloom tomatoes, topped with home-made aioli-infused mayonnaise, served on artisan multi-grained seminola bread.” 

 You have just moved from a $5.00 to $15.00 sandwich with a marginal improvement in taste.     

The word artisan now seems to be getting a workout on restaurant menus to create the image of something locally unique, food that is crafted on a small scale.  Similar to decadent, the word has a specific meaning to me that is best illustrated by the following scene:

Antoinette rarely looked into the mirror as she got dressed, but instead focused on her wedding picture from 50 years ago, when she was young and almost pretty and that mole on her left cheek had not grown so big and sprouted two hairs, one stiff and bent, the other limply hanging down.  Now she was shortened and stooped by the hard work of mothering 11 of her 13 surviving children, and saddened by the death of her husband Étienne in a threshing accident 10 years ago.  Since that time, she had only worn a dark blue or black knitted shirt and skirt.  While she always wore thick black stockings outside, at home she shuffled around in slippers, revealing twisted varicose veins, thickly calloused heels and yellowed toenails. 

Wednesday was always market day, when she brought ingredients for her bread.  Antoinette was always greeted warmly in the shops and occasionally villagers would peek over at her as she shopped, since many were convinced that she had a secret ingredient in her bread.  Her bread was locally famous and she had been asked for the recipe many times, but had always refused.  Even her daughters, cooking beside here, could not produce the signature bread.  When her children and grandchildren gathered together on holidays, she baked for several days and the smell of her bread wafted through the entire town.  Bread brought the family together.  All 27 would crowd into the kitchen, dining room and living room reminiscing as they dipped their bread into olive oil, slathered it with butter, made turkey stuffing or French toast. 

Once day Antoinette was sitting in the kitchen as her youngest granddaughter Colette played under the table.  “Regarde, Grandmère, regarde!  Your foot looks just like your bread!  And indeed it did.  The thick white and cracked calloused heel looked like the lightly floured tops of the bread.From that day forward, the bread was called “Pain du Pied.”  As the family spread farther and farther, there were many weeks where Antoinette had nobody to bake for, and her daughter Suzette suggested that Antoinette could supply the bread to the local restaurants. 

“Go ahead and call it Pain du Pied, Maman.  Let’s give it a special name in case you get famous.” 

Suzette was very savvy and trademarked the name, and then took the bread to the nearby restaurant.  Pierre, the manager at the restaurant, had always thought that Suzette was très jolie, so he agreed to serve the bread on a trial basis.  In a historic coincidence, that very night a secret food critic was eating at the restaurant since his car had broken down on the way to the Michelin 2 star restaurant in the neighboring town.  The next day, the critic trumpeted his discovery in his column,  swooning over the perfect crustiness that gave way to the perfect interior chewiness, with a sweet yet sour “je ne sais quoi.”  Pain du Pied went viral and soon the small town was overflowing with eager gourmands, who eventually awarded the restaurant 3 Michelin stars, but also warned that if the bread was not available, the meal was ordinary at best.  Suzette, whose husband owned the restaurant, and whose boyfriend was the chef, begged her mother to expand her operations, get a commercial kitchen, hire bakers, and create a “du Pied” franchise.  But Antoinette refused, stating that each loaf was an individual work of art that could not be compromised.     

So there it is; that is, or at least was the definition of an artisan.  Now I have seen references to “artisan salt,” good old NaCL, has gotten the VIP treatment.  And Starbucks is featuring an “Artisan Breakfast Sandwich.”  When I asked one of the baristas what this meant, she just shrugged her shoulders and suggested that it was an empty marketing term.  Worldwide,  Starbucks now has some 16,000 stores around the globe, and each is potentially offering artisan sandwiches, a scale that must outstrip even the most generous definition of artisan.  Much like gourmet and decadent, marketing has sucked the life out of another lovely English word.

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. like post, spot, stop) and the number of dashes indicates the number of letters.  One of the anagrams will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the context of the poem. Scroll down for answers.

 

The chefs descended on the village where the old woman was ——–
 
In the hopes that they could coax her into confiding
 
The magic recipe for her bread, or at the very least
 
A ——- seat to watch her work magic with yeast.
 
Despite their best offers and all the dealing and conspiring
 
She refused to divulge the one thing that they were ——–.
 
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Residing, ringside, desiring

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TMI: TP

Posted on March 25, 2011 by Liza Blue

 

As I complete my 59th lap around the sun, I have accumulated quite a few pet peeves, one of which was on display that other day as I accompanied Nick on his dog walk.  Three times he had to stoop over and dutifully collect the stink pickle, and then pocket it for the rest of the walk.  I was very grateful that I was not in charge of the stoop and scoop (as I will be next week when Nick is out of town), but then realized that I was grateful that dogs don’t routinely need a wipe – after all we cheerfully let them wander around the house and sit on the furniture.  Another one of my pet peeves is dogs with upright tails and exposed assholes, but these two pet peeves may cancel each other out.  Without the dog’s anatomy, as objectionable as it might be, toilet paper might also be a part of the dog walk.

These pleasant thoughts led me to ruminate on why humans are the one animal that routinely requires some sort of post evacuation hygiene.  Dogs of course can lick, but let’s not dwell on that.  Even apart from our obsession about cleanliness and germs, it is just a basic human fact of life.  The explanation seems to be anatomical.  We are the only mammal that is truly bipedal.  Even our simian cousins, the great apes, can only stand up briefly and a visit to the zoo reveals that while they may have the ass for squatting, they just don’t have the ass for standing proud and tall. Our upright posture was followed by the development of our enormous glutes (i.e. heinies, biscuits, bedonkadonks) that gave us the ability (well not me in particular) for endurance running and hunting.  The successful hunt then provided improved protein-rich carnivorous meals.   

Once we went bipedal, the blow hole rotated from a visible low maintenance location to the deep dark recesses of our intergluteal cleft where the sun just can’t shine.  Our hands were free for multi-tasking and using tools, and our well-fed brains followed suit to create the beautiful synergy that became the reasoning, imaginative and emotional human mind.  Man stood up, went hunting, opposed his thumbs, then looked around and said, “Please pass the TP.”  All in all not a bad trade off.   

Some cultures may use water, but we Americans are fully wedded to toilet paper, contributing to a thriving paper products industry.  Americans use about 50 pounds per year, which, oddly enough, is up 13 more pounds compared to 20 years ago.  Most of the bun wad is made from 100% virgin fiber, which has irritated and frustrated environmentalists, who point out the folly of cutting down virgin forests for a disposable product.  Recycled toilet paper, i.e. deinked paper products, is a more logical choice, and is routinely used in institutional settings (i.e. at the ballpark, gas station, etc).  However, home-use toilet paper is still primarily 100% virgin fiber.  When presented with a choice, most Americans have focused on the more obvious interpretation of recycled toilet paper and have not warmed up to the idea.  Furthermore, virgin TP is one of the most heavily marketed tissue products and not surprisingly has the highest profit margins. 

The marketing challenge is to simultaneously convey the contradictory messages of strength and softness.  To me, strength brings to mind something like Kevlar or burlap, resulting in splinters or rope burn, respectively, but softness brings to mind a delicate rippable material.  Lite beer faced a similar dilemma of the contradiction between taste and calories, and their successful campaign featured beer swillers yelling, “Tastes Great – Less Filling!”   “Softly Plush – Shreds Less!”  

 I recently saw an ad for “Quilted Northern Soft and Strong” which plays both angles, and tries to get away from the cute soft imagery of soft babies, puppies and teddy bears.   The woman says:

“It’s time to speak frankly about a something nobody wants to talk about.  It’s not just about – you know – it also has to keep your hands clean.  It has to have strength that I can count on and it’s still soft.  Quilted Northern: Protection for a confident clean.”  

This ad goes right for the jugular about American’s cleanliness fetish, but I have got to say that shredding and clean hands are probably more of an operator error than any fault of the TP.   

Nick keeps our household stocked in toilet paper on Costco runs to get bulk purchases of paper products and he comes back with whatever is on sale, or whatever has a coupon.  The strength/softness dichotomy is of no interest to him, maybe because he only uses half as much paper as I do.  Our current stock happens to be Charmin Ultra Soft; the packaging acknowledges the budget minded by saying “Using less never felt so good!”  The Charmin campaign appears to rely on PR from a nationwide contest called “Enjoy the Go – Everyone deserves an enjoyable bathroom experience!”  For a $50,000 prize, contestants must answer trivia questions about bathrooms, followed by a contest of stacking toilet paper and then tossing the rolls into a toilet.  The final event is a TP mummy contest.  The winner is anointed “Queen of the Throne” and decked out in a crown, faux sable cape and jeweled scepter.  I wish I had known about the contest.  I would have nailed it and put it on my resumé. 

I also noticed that the Quilted Northern ad offered a money back guarantee, and I thought I would take them up on the offer.  All I needed was to buy the product, and send them the cash register receipt and the UPC code from the package.   I also had to send them a little essay on why I did not like the product.  Hmm … this might be a little tricky.  Although I will admit to occasional, but judicious, dissembling and exaggeration, I consider myself an honest person.  However, to claim my refund, I would have to out and out lie.   I really don’t care about toilet paper, and have never had any concerns about shredding, absorbency, scent, softness, plushness and any other selling point they can up with.  In a good faith gesture, I went out to buy Whole Foods 100% recycled toilet paper for a comparison.  Both are unscented and weigh about 4 ounces, but the Quilted brand appears bigger.  However, it actually has fewer sheets – 242 sheets compared to 336 sheets for the recycled brand.  The larger size is probably related to air fluff to make the roll look bigger and feel softer – i.e. the basis of the old add for “squeezably soft” Charmin.  Both have a quilted pattern of hearts on the roll, but I must say that the Quilted Northern brand does feel a bit softer.

So what can I come up with to claim my refund?  I decide to lie, since I feel that Quilted Northern is not being totally straight up with me.  Although the TV ad says there is a money back guarantee, it is not on the product itself and you have to go to the website to find the details on the refund.  Furthermore, you have to wait 6 to 8 weeks to get the refund, which seems like a ridiculously long time to pop $5.99 in the mail.  I am sure that Quilted Northern figured that only a few refund requests would trickle in, and their money back guarantee is really only an empty offer.  So here is my letter:

The missing words in the following poem contain two sets of anagrams (like spot, stop, post), one indicated with *** the other with —.  The number of dashes/asterisks indicates the number of letters in the words.  One member of each set of anagrams will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

To:  Quilted Northern

 From:  Liza Blue 

Re:  Refund Request for Quilted Northern: Soft and Strong

 Date:  February 22, 2011

 I went to the store to get some tissue for my ****

 There were lots of choices but I liked the Quilted ones.

 Your TV —- says that your product —- all other brands

 Keeps you clean and also protects your hands.

 It’s 50% stronger to —- any rips,

 And plush and soft to absorb the drips.

 So I decided to **** the others and chose Soft and Strong

 But when I got home everything went terribly wrong.

 My fingers were exposed to the **** as the TP wilted

 What gives – isn’t strength was the whole point of being quilted.

 So I think that your ad is full of meaningless marketing fluff

 And I will be one of the few who —- to call your bluff

 My reason is that you fell flat on your 50% stronger boast

 And in 6 weeks I will expect my refund by return —-.

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  Answers: buns, spot, tops, stop, snub, nubs, opts, post

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Oh So Clever

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Liza Blue

When I think of the word “clever” I think of a particular kind of intelligence, one that implies a problem solver, i.e. the ability to find an efficient work-around for an obstacle.  Additionally, the work-around typically involves a fresh approach, something surprising or unusual in its simplicity.  Cleverness is more ingenuity than genius.  Engineering is a clever profession, and nature is the most clever of all.  Through the relentless force of evolution, nature has devised the most elegant lures, traps and elaborate mating rituals, solutions to the most harsh or competitive environments, and in the process has woven a virtuoso web equipped with checks and balances that we can only begin to understand.

When I read a story about desert ants in the National Geographic, I only thought about cleverness.   Desert ants can wander around the featureless desert for hours, but somehow manage to find their way home.  Researchers proposed that the ant brain is equipped with some sort of mechanism that “counts” the number of steps on the way from the nest and then the ant takes the same number of steps returning.  Animal navigation routinely surpasses human navigation, but you can’t help but be impressed by a clever ant that can accomplish this on a speck-sized brain that can be scrambled with a casual finger flick.

And you also have to admire the ingenuity of the researchers that figured this out.  The first hypothesis was that the ants used visual cues, so the researchers set up a tiny treadmill in their lab accompanied by moving images of desert scenery.  The ants were not fooled by this and still found their way home in the simulated desert.  The next salvo was to alter the stride length of the ants by trimming down their legs, although the researchers were quick to point out that that was not animal cruelty since ants often lose their legs and feel no pain.  The ants did in fact come up short on their way home, but the German researchers realized that the ant navigation system might not be on the fritz, the ants could have merely gotten tired, or were handicapped by walking on stumps.  So they tried a third strategy, this time making the ants’ legs longer by gluing a pig bristle to each of their legs – bingo, hypothesis confirmed, the ants routinely overshot their mark.

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Chapter 4. SAT – The Reveal

Posted on March 20, 2011 by Liza Blue
(This is the concluding essay of a series of four describing my late in life SAT retest.  The other are filed under the category of SAT experience.)

It has been one month since I took the SATs and while awaiting my scores I have been interested to learn more about its history.  It turns out that the SAT test was an outgrowth of the IQ tests that were first developed by Binet in 1905.  France had recently made a commitment to offer education to all of its children and the test was designed to identify children with significant learning disabilities so that they could receive special education.  In other words, the IQ test was designed as a way to extend educational opportunities to everyone, as opposed as a technique of identifying elite students.  Additionally, Binet stressed the diversity of intelligence and the certain impact of environment. 

In this country, those caveats were largely ignored; the IQ test was initially used on a large scale by the military before WWI to identify potential officers.  The SAT perked along at a low level until it received a big boost from the Korean War when the government announced that college deferments for active service would be based on SAT scores.  The idea was that the education of future scientists who could contribute to the war effort should not be interrupted.  Some soldiers were certainly assigned to units reflecting known skills – i.e. doctors served in the medical corps – but this program deferred soldiers based on their potential worth (judged by their SAT scores) to a potential job that could be potentially useful in a future war effort.  The bottom line was that you didn’t want the next Albert Einstein killed in a trench somewhere.

One of the early champions of the SAT was a Harvard dean named Henry Chauncey.  He was infatuated with standardized testing in general, and thought that the SAT could be a great leveler that would serve to extend elite educational opportunities to those outside the usual students drawn from East coast boarding schools.  His belief in the objectivity of standardized testing seems hopelessly naïve, given the obvious flaws in every step of the logic train: 1) that you can define intelligence; 2) that you can produce a number that would reflect that intelligence; 3) that you can determine this number by a multiple choice test focused on math and vocabulary; and 4) that the test produces consistent results across genders, cultures and ethnicities. 

One of the persistent criticisms is the inherent bias in the test, particularly in the reading sections, where questions ask for interpretation of the dreary reading passages.  The SAT has to include questions with a range of difficulty in order to distinguish the bright from the average mind.  One way to introduce difficulty is simply to make both the questions and the answers more ambiguous.  And there is bias in the way the SAT decides which questions are easy or difficult.  In every SAT, there is a section which experiments with  new questions; these questions do not count toward the final score.  A question is considered difficult if only those students who get a high score on the “real” part of the SAT answer the experimental questions correctly.  Therefore, this circular definition reinforces any bias that favors students who have undergone coaching who presumably are scoring higher; these students are the final arbiters of what is considered difficult.  The other simple way to introduce difficulty is to just make the test longer so that not everyone can finish it – so at this point the SAT is testing speed, which is an interesting criteria for aptitude. 

And then of course there is the subjectivity in grading the essay section.  The SAT essay is graded from a low of 1 to 6.  Grade 6 is defined as an essay with “clear and consistent mastery with an effective and insightful point of view.” Grade 5 is defined as “reasonably consistent mastery with a effective (but not insightful) point of view, and so on.  The SAT states that their scorers are rigorously trained on sample tests that some sort of expert committee has judged as 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, etc.  While it is probably possible to come to some agreement on the extremes, the 6’s and the 1’s, the consistent discrimination of the intermediate zone, i.e. 2-5, where most essays will lie, just has to be more problematic.  I am just not buying the SATs breezy assurance of objectivity and the cross checking of scores among multiple scorers.   Another criticism is that good writing depends on thoughtful consideration of a topic and the ability to revise, two aspects that are clearly not part of the SAT essay, where a topic is sprung upon students who are writing with 25 minute shotguns pressed into their temples.  Finally, the SAT makes a point of stating that facts are not checked.  Therefore a student can cheerfully state that the Civil War began in 1842 without getting dinged.

The College Board’s steadfast assertion that the SAT cannot be coached is self-serving and silly.  Prep courses like the Princeton Review make millions of dollars in training students to think like the SAT so that they can answer the ambiguous questions.  In fact thoroughly prepped students can often answer the reading comprehension questions without even reading the passages.  The Princeton Review is absolutely gleeful about outsmarting the SAT; its president tells its students, “The SAT is bullshit, let’s blow these assholes away.”   

My indignation has risen as I have gathered more information on this cruel and stigmatizing hoax, and I would love to lambast the SAT.  But my message would be more convincing if delivered from a position of power, for example, an 800 ft. mountain.  So brings me to the question of how I did, and this is the first question that everyone asks when they hear of this experiment.  Truthfully, I don’t really want to know, but this is a story, and the story needs to have an end.  I can foresee several possible scenarios:

1.  The test is totally invalidated since I made additional errors in gridding in my name or number of the testing center on the score sheet.

2.  When I skipped those annoying math questions, my answers got misaligned, resulting in totally random answers.

3.  I could have held my own with middling SAT scores, which I could claim was a satisfying result, but these results would also feed into the conceit of the SAT who could claim that they had a test-retest reliability that extended over decades.

4.   I could have hit it out of the park.  From this vantage point, it would be a pleasure to totally dismiss and diss the SAT.    

5.  I could totally bomb out

And of these scenarios, which would I feel comfortable in sharing?  I am generally pretty agreeable about humiliating myself, but I think that there are some statistics that people feel more private about – for example, nobody goes around asking or telling people their IQs, which are not far from the SAT.  I found two interviews where the guest expert on the SAT was asked what his scores were; one said around 1500, which of course is a very high score and made me think he was pretty cocky, and the other said that it was a private matter, which made me think that maybe he was ashamed of his scores.  I went into this project thinking that it was just a lark, but now, with the scores imminent, I have to admit that I do have some ego riding on this.  I still recall with disappointment my high school scores, and perhaps I have put myself at risk by secretly trying to make amends.  It is disenheartening to realize that your high school intelligence – either under or over achievers –  is pegged to standardized test scores.  Underachievers have the gift of untapped potential and can always improve if they just pull it together, whereas the word overachiever has a negative whiff to it.  We overachievers (not test undertakers) are operating without the safety net of untapped potential and can only go down.  At any moment Toto could go skittering across the floor and pull the curtain away revealing that I was no Wizard, I was just an overachiever and that my nice plump GPA was a fluky sham.   

My friend Dick said, “Let’s make this interesting, I’m willing to put a little money on the over/under.  I bet you get under 600 on the math due to disuse atrophy, and over 700 on the reading.  Well I can triumphantly report that he lost the bet.  Reading:  Wow an 800!  Math: I got 48 out of 56 correct, which put me in the 90th percentile, which translated to a score of 680.  This leaves me in awe of the students who get 800.  Writing: 650.  It looks like they hated my essay, and my scorn for Standard Written English did me in.  

So what have I learned?  Well one thing the SAT has taught me is that every good essay must have a concluding paragraph.  So here it is.  I could not find one redeeming factor about the SAT.  It does not test aptitude – how could a timed, multiple choice test possibly – it is not a great leveler, due to the persistent cultural biases, and the ability to prep – and it is not a strong predictor of college success.  The validity of the predictive value of the test is its raison d’être, but the data only shows that the SAT test predicts a small fraction (8-15%) of the variability in freshman test scores.  This means that about 88% of the time the SAT results are no more predictive of first year grades than a role of the dice, and whatever predictive value the test does have, it dissipates by sophomore year.  At yet every year, Americans spend more than $100 million dollars on the test itself.    So why do we persist in this folly?  For one, colleges get the scores for free, but if you asked them if they would budget 100 million dollars for SAT information, they would surely decline.  Secondly, they can use the SAT scores to confirm their status as an elite institution and possibly attract more highly qualified candidates.  Finally, the SAT sucks them in by giving them additional demographic information about their students.  For me, it was an interesting experience and I am pleased with my scores, but if it were not so expensive I would be tempted to take the Princeton review and “blow those assholes away.”

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (like post, stop, spot).  The number of dashes indicates the number of letters.  One of the anagrams will rhyme with either the proceeding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the contex of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

Reasons Why the SAT is Bullshit

It is a test that is culturally biased, stigmatizing and —– 

Especially since it doesn’t really predict how well you do in school,

When everyone practices and preps hoping for Ivy League success,

The most likely result is an bleeding —– from anxiety and  stress.

Only the ETS benefits, rubbing their greedy hands with unfettered glee

As they rake in filthy —– from students’ admission fees. 

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Answers: cruel, ulcer, lucre

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Thank You Very Much

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Liza Blue

By the time that I got to the attic, I was far past dwelling on every single memento  removed from my parents’ emptying house.  A steady parade of dumpsters had hauled away umpteen boxes, and I had bequeathed the local library and rummage with untold books, cookware, and just plain gradoux (a most apt word of my mother’s).  But when boxes of old correspondence veiled in decades of dust and mung (my mother’s synonym for gradoux) started to emerge, my husband Nick stood guard in front of the dumpster as the arbiter of what should be saved or tossed.

He discovered several boxes that appeared to have been moved from attic to attic over the past 200 years.  One box included a numbered photograph of a very homely President Lincoln, another a whole sheaf of correspondence from some long ago ancestor named Charles Forseth, whose letters from the early 1800s detailed the appalling but routine deaths of children from such old fashioned diseases as the croup, quinsy or the dwindles.   But the biggest find was probably the box filled with every single letter that my father had ever written his parents – and he was a faithful correspondent throughout WWII and his married life. But then with a gasp I saw that this box contained every single thank you note that I had ever written my grandmother.

Granny Brown’s identity was solidly based on her role as a family matriarch to her five children and 23 grandchildren and many other nieces and nephews.  She was a consistent gift giver, for Christmas and birthdays for sure, and then I routinely got a Valentine’s day gift.  Giving gifts must have been a near full time job, and I remember a special room in her home that she used for flower arranging in the summer, but then was converted to a wrapping room around Christmas time.  For the 25 years that our lives overlapped, she used the same exact diagonally striped red and white wrapping paper with green velvetoid ribbon.  And then my parents would give gifts to all of their nieces and nephews and vice versa.  Since we did not routinely see these folks, Christmas could consist of a bizarre collection of somewhat anonymous gifts.

Moments after Christmas, my mother’s pestering would begin,

“How are you coming on those thank you notes?  It would be more manageable if you wrote at least one per day. Here I have gotten some special stationary for you, and I have a list here of all the gifts that you received.  If you put a thank you note on the counter, I will make sure to get in the mail today. Okay?”

The thank you note harangue could suck the life out of a holiday, so for several years I wrote a note the very minute I opened the gift on Christmas morning. Some were particularly challenging.  Aunt Lootie used to give all 5 of us the same gift and sometimes no one could figure what it was.  One year we all got a different type of plastic vegetable that had a secret compartment – mine was a cabbage.  We were collectively stumped, but then several months later I realized that these were intended to be clever hiding places for jewelry or other valuables that you could put in your fridge to fake out a burglar.  On occasion I would try to write a generic pre-emptive note before I even opened the present:

“Dear Aunt Lootie, Many thanks for the intriguing item.  I am sure that I will use it frequently.  I have never seen anything like it.  I hope that you are enjoying a happy Christmas with all your family.  We sure are.  Hope to see you soon.  Love, Bobbie.

As I stood in my parent’s driveway with the musty box, I realized that the thank you notes that seemed an odious chore were meticulously saved and appreciated by my grandmother.  She must have received several a day and her attic probably contained boxes and boxes of thank you notes.  I pictured her saying, “Wow that David certainly writes a lovely note.  I’m so glad to hear from Bobbie, but it sure sounds like she is writing it under duress.”  How would I measure up?

The first one I opened must have been from my college days since it was written in the brown ink that I favored.  I also used some sort of very fine tip pen – I think that it was called a Montblanc pen – which included the ritual of sucking up the ink from a bottle of ink, leading to spillages and smudges.  The note began:

“Dear Granny, I am sorry that I have not written to you in such a long time, but I have been very busy at school.  But I wanted to thank you for the Indian bird mirror and the collapsible purse…”

The rest of the note was basically illegible, but I was impressed at its length, so hopefully quantity balanced tardiness.  Then I spotted a bit of misfiling by my grandmother; the box contained a thank you note from my cousin David, the epitome of thoughtfulness.  I thought that for sure he would blow my feeble efforts out of the water.

David from college;  “Dear Granny, I am sorry that I have not written sooner, but I have been busy at school.  I want to thank you for the ten shiny dimes you sent me for Valentine’s day.  I am sure that I will put them to good use.”

And then I spotted a thank you note from my cousin Ralph.

Ralph from college:  “Dear Granny, I can’t believe that Christmas was already a month ago, so sorry that I am so late in getting back to you.  But I just wanted to thank you for the Christmas check, and to also let you know that you are the best grandmother in this whole wide, ever-expanding universal infinity.”

Okay, so Ralph gets points for creative hyperbole, but absolutely every thank you note I read, all of mine and all of my siblings, uniformly apologized for tardiness.  All in all, I think that I more than held my own.  My notes would quickly dispense with the actual thank you and provide updates on my life – what courses I was taking at college, plans for a summer job.  Probably just what my grandmother was eager to learn, particularly since both of us had probably long since forgotten the collapsible purse.

Of course, now I have turned into my mother as I cajole my kids into writing thank you notes, although to my credit I generally hold off until January 1st.  I even got them small embossed note cards so that they would not be overwhelmed by the expanse of a large blank page.   But I nix the email thank you or the phone call and firmly insist on the traditional hand written thank you note sent through the US Postal Service.  I also realized that no other form of communication requires penmanship, which is fast becoming a lost art.  I know that I could recognize the handwriting of all my grandparents – Granny Brown’s hurried scrawl, Granny Farwell’s more upright loopy writing, and Grampy’s which looked oddly feminine.  I spent many hours as a child creating the perfect handwriting, experimenting with slanting it backwards and then forwards, and then finally deciding that the spidery forward slanted looped style was going to be my personal style.  All of that is now gone – I don’t think that my kids could recognize my handwriting, and sometimes I forget what I thought it should look like.  And I don’t think that my kids think that their handwriting is a distinctive personal trait.  But all of that can by rectified by a proper thank you note.

However, the thank you note will remain a chore unless you actually receive one yourself.  I realized that unlike my grandmother, as an adult I have rarely received a thank you note.  Gift giving in general has dwindled on both sides of my family, so I have received very few thank notes from siblings, nieces and nephews.  Certainly my paltry collection would only require a binder clip and not a box.  But then out of the blue I received a thank you note from a cousin, not for a gift, but for a small favor, and in fact I would not have elevated it to a favored status.  I am sure she had shown her appreciation at the time, but there it was in the mail, with her own handwriting and with the added wallop of time and thought.  I was almost moved to tears at this simple act of gratitude.

Recently my husband and I joyously celebrated 25th years of wedded bliss and I realized that many of our wedding gifts (which I had dutifully written a thank you note for) had become part an integral part of our everyday lives – the white bowl with the blue flowers where I have mixed hundreds of batches of cookies, the large casserole dish that housed the jumbo turkey tetrazzini every Christmas eve, and the card table that saw frantic efforts to complete last minute dioramas.  This got me thinking again about the lost art of the thank you note.  So I sat down and wrote rethank you notes to my parent’s friends for my most memorable wedding gifts, but this time with the perspective of 25 years.  This was a huge success; I received very emotional thank you notes for my re-thank you notes.  As my husband and I often say to each other, “it doesn’t take much and it’s so easy.”  My faith in the thank you note has been reborn, and even if my dear grandmother couldn’t read my illegible notes, I am newly proud of what I had casually dismissed as a dreary chore for a dutiful granddaughter.  My new commitment is to write at least one thank you note a week.  It’s so easy.

The missing words in the follow poem consist of two sets of anagrams (like post, stop. spot), one with five letters marked with dashes (—–) and one with six letters marked with asterisks (******).   One of the anagrams in each set will rhyme with the preceding or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

Christmas is now clearly over, and it’s the —– of the New Year,

So I know my thank you note ***** are both near, dear and clear,

My mother harangues me with her increasing “I mean it” —–,

And I find paper and pen midst sighs, moans and groans.

“Dear Granny, the item you gave me is perfect and so well ******

And my tardiness in response does not mean that my thanks are diluted.

I have **** ** constantly so I think of you almost every day,

And if I really knew what this thing was, I’d have more to say.”

But now, as a recipient, I realize that the —– that were such a chore to send,

Can pack an appreciative wallop when you’re on the receiving end.

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Onset, duties, tones, suited, used it, tones

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Infinity Plus One

Posted on March 19, 2011 by Liza Blue

I just caught a snippet of the little boy’s conversation as he excitedly told the librarian, “It is going to last forever, like 140 million bazillion years.”  Ah, yes, I do recall that troublesome challenge of turning the philosophic concept of forever into a concrete number.  In my grade school days, we would said “infinity plus one.”  Ricocheting comments like “can so,” “can not”  could be promptly ended by saying, “can so, infinity plus one.”  Somehow using math seemed so concrete and definitive compared to saying “forever” or even “forever and a day,”  and the phrase had such a specific context that no one ever thought of saying “infinity plus two.”  However,  I certainly never pondered the deeper implications of infinity or forever, or its mirror image, zero, the null and void.   

The early 1960s was a troublesome time to think about forever.  We would sit in church and recite, “as it was in the beginning, now is and ever shall be, world without end,” smugly confident in the permanence of this world and our dominance.  But then the next day we would have bomb drills at school.  The siren went off and we immediately scurried beneath our desks and put our head between our knees and our hands over our heads.  Some of the luckier classes would crouch in a windowless hallway which seemed more secure than our flimsy wooden desks.   Regardless, as a fourth grader I intuitively knew that nothing could save us from the bomb.  We were all doomed – no world without end for us, we were headed for the void. 

Meanwhile our next door neighbors were busy building a bomb shelter in their basement.   For reasons I never completely understood, we had a prickly relationship with the Cartons – even our dogs snarled at each other across the property line.  Therefore, it was something of a surprise when the Cartons invited us to bunk in with them in the event of a nuclear attack.  Perhaps Mrs. Carton was just trying to be neighborly as a payback for all the block parties my mother worked so hard at.  Perhaps she wanted to create an invitation-only scenario to avoid the anticipated chaos that would descend on her bomb shelter door, like the last helicopter out of Saigon.  Regardless, my mother politely declined the offer saying, “I’d rather be dead than live in a world like that.”  I tried to put thoughts of my impending nullness aside.  Instead I wondered whether the world my mother was referring to was the thought of sharing cramped quarters with the Cartons, or the broader context of post apocalyptic devastation.  But the fragility of a world with an end was troubling.  

 “Mom, what will I feel like when I die?”  I asked. 

 My mother was not a deep thinker, and tended to push difficult questions aside, but she was infinitely clever and said, “Well, remember what you felt like the entire time before you were born, well I think that you will feel the same way the entire time after you die.  It is the now that is important.”

This simple philosophy seemed to settle the issue for a while and the collision between infinity, forever and reality did not come up again until high school.  My sophomore year I had reveled in geometry where I found security in the unassailable truths in proofs of geometric figures – side/angle/side, angle/side/angle, side/side/side.  You were given point A and point B and the challenge was figuring out how to get from one finite point to another.  But the destination, not the journey, was the final truth.  English was another story.  I struggled with our English teacher who aggressively challenged us to interpret the William Carlos Williams poem the Red Wheelbarrow.

 so much depends

upon

 a red wheel

barrow

 glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

 The  teacher said, “Do you think that the three points of the wheelbarrow represent the father, the son and the holy ghost?  What about the chickens, are they a symbol of man’s dominance, while the rain represents man’s impotence?  Why do you suppose the wheelbarrow is red as opposed to some other color?” 

“Good lord, I thought, “You’ve got to be kidding.  This is just a farm scene, and the wheelbarrow is red only because the farmer had extra paint after he fixed up his barn.  Why can’t a wheelbarrow be just a wheelbarrow?”

The truth was that since there was no one correct interpretation I really didn’t care about any interpretation.  In English, there was only point A and an infinite number of ways of getting to no particular destination original site.   I was so happy to rush off to my math class.

 Unfortunately the safe haven of geometry segued to calculus and math started to have symbols.  We were formally introduced to irrational numbers, like π (pi), the ratio between a diameter and a circumference.  For practical purposes pi was 3.14, but in reality the ratio went on to infinity.  Clever classmates would get up and recite pi to ten or twelve digits, and I suppose that you could earn some cachet by claiming that you were the only person on earth who knew the final digit of pi, but the pressing question from the calculus teacher was “How could pi be a real number if it cannot have a defined value.  Can infinity be real?  Is there any such thing as forever?”  I trembled – math had just gotten messy and philosophical and was veering off into the uncomfortable vagueness of the red wheelbarrow.  The teacher then wrote the irrational number 0.99999 stretching out ad infinitum.   He said, “let x equal .99999 and let 10x equal 9.999999, and when you subtract the first equation from the second the infinite string of .9999’s will cancel each other out, leaving you with 9x=9 or x=1:”

 10x = 9.9999999

    x = 0.9999999

9x = 9 and then x=1

“Now, students here is the paradox,  you can see that x equals both 0.9999 and 1, proving that at some infinite point the fraction will become one.”  In that moment I realized that there could be no such thing as infinity, forever or eternity and that the world must have an end.  It is just that we cannot know when the end is, when that last 9 will flip over like a odometer and trigger a mass conversion to the number 1.

The teacher then went on to explain that if we believed in infinity, we would not be able to sit down.  The surprising but seemingly logical line of reasoning was that before we could sit all the way down we would first need to sit half way down, and then a quarter of the way and an eighth of the way with smaller and small fractions extending on to infinity.  Our ass could hover ever closer to the seat as we continued to halve the distance, but if infinity existed the fractions would keep getting smaller and we would never get there.  As I sat there in calculus, I also realized that I should not be able to get up, but the bell rang and I stood in total defiance of infinity.

The sitting and standing example was actually a good example of the opposite of infinity, i.e. infinitesimal, the smallest number possible.  At some point there must be a fraction so small that it becomes zero.  But we have rejected that scenario, since no one wants to admit that there are hopeless situations.  There is a funny line in the movie “Dumb and Dumber” where the clueless doofus Jim Carey character is trying to wrangle a date with the attractive Lauren Holly.  She says that there is no chance that she would date him, and he replies “really there is no chance?”  To throw him a bone she replies, “yes maybe one in a million.” He beams ecstatically and says, “Well there is hope,” and we all laugh at his delusional optimism.  But his odds are a lot better than anyone who buys a lottery ticket.  As the pot grows bigger and bigger, more and more people rush out to buy a ticket even as the odds approach zero that any one individual will win.  But there it is in the paper the next day, some lucky bastard defying infinity by sitting in the lap of untold luxury.  You can’t deny hope if someone has got to win.

Calculus was the end of my math career.  It lost its appeal as it became more philosophical than practical and symbols exceeded numbers.  As I progressed through college I assiduously avoided any English courses and focused on the comforting facts of science.  The last course I took in college was the required course English 101 where I got randomly assigned to a poetry interpretation class with a bunch of eager freshman. 

I panicked, “it’s going to be that damn red wheelbarrow again with a bunch of chickens in the rain.  Unless I can figure out what it means I might never graduate.” 

But then I realized that even though there was a definite appeal to knowing when I was absolutely right, the impossibility of being totally wrong was also pretty attractive.   There are infinity plus one possible interpretations why chickens in the rain are important; I took a personal one, ran with it and aced the class. 

Forty years later, I still look to numbers for their concrete value as I have pursued a career in medicine, and I still avoid the collision of math and philosophy – after all if two wrongs cannot make a right, how can the multiplication of two negative numbers be positive?  The threat of nuclear war has been assimilated into the deep background of daily life, and the new owners of the Carton’s house turned the bomb shelter into a very snappy wine cellar.  Point A is receding into the distance, but I don’t spend any time dwelling on the where, when and how of point B and beyond, and appreciate that it is the big uncertain mess in the middle that makes life interesting.  Our son Ned told me about his 19 hour journey in a hot, dusty, overcrowded train in India.  A Muslim man asked him where he was going after he died, at which point Ned said, “Well I’m willing to be surprised.”  My mother, who is now beyond point B enjoying the hereafter, must be smiling at her grandson’s here and now response.

The missing words in the following poem are anagrams (like spot, stop, post) and the number of dashes indicated the number of letters.  One of the words will rhyme with either the previous or following line.  Your job is to solve the missing words based on the context of the poem.  Scroll down for the answers.

Math and geometry were my favorite subjects when I was just a youth,

I thought, “numbers — —- the universe” and provide us with the truth.

But in calculus, mathematical concepts of infinity began to appear,

And when added to philosophy suddenly things became ——-

Infinity must have a beginning and an end, a paradox that is hard to comprehend

Unless of course a ——- attack brings these thoughts to an apocalyptic end. 

So don’t get — —– worrying about the heretofore and the hereafter,

Just hope that the uncertainty of surprise brings you love and laughter.

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 Answers:  can rule, unclear, nuclear, an ulcer

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That Moment in Time

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Liza Blue

We were only about 45 minutes into our 7 hour drive north when the traffic came to a complete standstill just south of Milwaukee.  The highway was in the middle of construction and we were totally boxed in with concrete dividers and rumbling semis; there was no way to peek around and see what was going on.  The midday traffic had been light, so the abrupt halt was foreboding, promptly confirmed by the distant but oncoming sound of sirens. 

 We sat idling for about five minutes, but when the truck driver next to us turned off his rig, we realized that we might as well settle in and get comfortable.  “There’s big accident up ahead of us,” he said, “a south bound semi crashed into the divider and flipped over into the northbound traffic.  There are bodies.  Both sides of the highway are completely blocked off.” 

 The grim news traveled quickly through the trapped traffic, and one by one engines were turned off and people emerged from their cars into the bright sunlight.  I got out to look around and check out our new randomly selected social group.  The truck driver broke all my stereotypes as he stepped out of his van.  He was neat and trim, wearing khaki shorts and a polo shirt, and looked like he would be coaching a kid’s soccer game on Sunday.  Immediately ahead of us were a youngish looking man and woman who looked like they were returning from a business meeting.  They just didn’t look like a romantic couple.  But that image was shattered when the man sat on the trunk of the car, took off his shoes and starting clipping his toenails.  When he began to brush his teeth I revised my first impression and concluded that they had been married for years.  The older man in the sedan in front of them had a back seat filled with boxes of light fixtures.  He said that he had been in many traffic jams over his many years on the road, but never one so close to home.  He said that he could almost see his house from where we were trapped. 

 I thought back to my days of commuting on the El in Chicago from my apartment on the north side of the city, through the business center and then out to the sketchier West side.  When the El would mysteriously stop between stations in a pitch black tunnel, I would have an irrational fear that I might be stuck in the El train for the rest of my life, and if so, who would become my friends amongst this random collection of riders?  The easy choice would be the other medical student, or would I, by necessity, branch out and strike up a conversation with the guy wearing a doo rag and hoisting a boom box, or perhaps with the pleasant looking older women with huge bunions and cracked calluses, or maybe the pretty younger woman whose tongue was currently in the ear of her boyfriend?  The train would inevitably lurch forward as I was scoping out my options. 

 But here I knew I had a lot of time, we weren’t in a dank tunnel, and in fact it was a beautiful day and people began to mill about.   It actually seemed like a perfect setting for an impromptu block party.  I thought how great if we could find a couple of bridge players in the mix, and set up a game on the hood of our car.  A perfect way to pass a couple of hours in the cool spring sun.  Years ago just Nick and I were vacationing in the Caribbean and we put a sign up on the activities board that we were looking for middling bridge players, and were thrilled to see that room 214 responded.  We met our mystery opponents in the lobby that evening and spent a memorable evening playing bridge with an older couple (they were probably about our age now); the husband was a retired engineer who had built airplane bombers.  He slammed back bourbon after bourbon and sniped at his wife, who more than held her own.  Just last New Years we found Phil and Linda on a whale watching trip in the Sea of Cortez.  We had a fabulous time playing bridge with them for three straight nights, and I think that if we had maybe one or two more nights we might have exchanged addresses and Christmas cards and looked them up if we were ever in Oregon. 

 Our son Ned had now returned from his walk up the highway.  “The crash is really close, just ahead, under the bridge.  It’s a mess.  I saw an EMT with an axe breaking a window to get a guy out.  There is tipped over semi that is straddling both sides of the highway.  There are spilled hamburger buns all over the place.”

 I had not realized that we were so close to the accident, and immediately began to think of the series of coincidences that put us at one ripple away from ground zero.  At home, I thought that we were all set to go, and then at the last minute Ned hadn’t finished packing.  When we headed out, Ned took an unusual route to get on the tollway, which probably set us back another minute or so.  These were the most proximate factors that put us snuggled safely in traffic some 1000 yards away from a near death experience, but I probably could come with an infinite number.  Before leaving, Nick took the dogs for a final bio break.  If they had promptly performed instead requiring a couple of laps around the driveway, we could have been the bloodied bodies lying on top of hamburger buns.

 I grabbed my binoculars and started walking towards the crash.  The binoculars must have lent me an air of authority, because many people asked me what was going on.  When I repeated Ned’s story, almost universally, people said something along the lines of, “I don’t mind sitting in this traffic, that could have easily been us up there.”  As I walked further, I felt that I was approaching a bright line for the victims, separating the time before and after the crash.  I could imagine the waves of communications streaming out, sending on tragic news that would forever change lives.  Nick’s mother happened to call, and then she called Nick’s siblings to confirm that we were okay, on the off chance that one of them heard that there had been a major accident near Milwaukee, and the even more remote chance that they knew we might have been in the area.

 It made me think of a book that I had read in middle school called “The Bridge of San Luis Rey,” by Thornton Wilder.  This was a popular book since it was on the reading list for three straight years in junior high and thus was a perfect choice when you had to write a book report.  It told the story of an ancient Incan bridge spanning a chasm; the bridge  suddenly snapped and hurtled 5 seemingly random people to a violent death.  The tragedy is witnessed by a monk who then seeks to understand why God made these choices and how he engineered the set of circumstances that put these specific people on the bridge at that very moment.  He never finds an explanation, is accused of being a heretic and both he and his book are ultimately burned in the town square.  So if you strip away the story line, and Wilder’s elegant prose, the book report could simply conclude, “Shit happens, sometime good, sometimes bad.”

 I felt awkward about being a gawker over road kill, so I headed back to our car.  I noticed that other traffic was slowly being rerouted along a side road and realized that cars just a little further back had the good fortune of being able to exit – even though they were just inching along.  These cars were in the second ripple from ground zero, not close enough to the accident to think about near-death experiences, but close enough to our predicament to say, “Boy were we lucky not to get trapped in that traffic standstill.”  Traffic and bodies is a staple of local TV, and soon I heard news helicopters hovering over us.  This distinctive thwapping noise immediately made me think of the Vietnam War, imprinted in my memory from the many hours of nightly news in the 1960s.  With nothing else to do, I pondered on distinctive noises of our most prominent wars.  For World War II, I think of the menacing sound of German shepherds barking as they strain at their leashes, the sound of armies marching on cobblestone streets, and the dissonant two tones of French sirens – I suppose you would call them klaxons.  And then somewhat embarrassingly, the Korean War is represented by the M*A*S*H theme song.

 I snapped out of it when Nick said, “Hey I think that they are making progress.  They must have the bodies off the road, because now they have some device up there removing the concrete barriers.”  And then suddenly traffic starting inching forward; we were rerouted back south and then the traffic fanned out to fill up side roads as we made a big detour back north.  Altogether not a bad 2 hours.  And now we were on our way again, rushing into another infinite set of coincidences. 

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. like meat, mate, team) and the number of dashed indicates the number of letters.  One missing word will rhyme with either the preceding or following line.  Your job is to figure out the words from the context of the poem.  Scroll down for answers.

 Ever since you took your first breath and your life began,

Coincidences and circumstances have determined your life —-.

So don’t fritter away your nights foot loose and fancy free,

Or squander your afternoons taking —- in front of TV.

But also don’t spend too much time wondering what life is all about,

You’ll be wasting time waiting to see if your life —- out.

And don’t worry about making long term investments to get ahead,

Because with a —- of the fingers, shit happens, you may be dead.

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Answers:  span, naps, pans, snap

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Pitter Patter Putter Perfect

Posted on March 11, 2011 by Liza Blue

Here is last Saturday – overcast, dreary, a windy mix of sleet/rain/snow, particularly discouraging since this is the second consecutive month of such weather and I am desperate for signs of spring. Perfect day to start taxes and there are many other languishing house projects. Instead, I spend the day puttering.

Here is the dictionary definition of putter: “to move or go in a specified manner, with ineffective action or little energy or purpose.”

Alternatively, here is the definition of “putter away.” “to spend or fill in a random or inconsequential or unproductive way”

While these two definitions accurately describe my busy day, they do not capture the full richness of meaning in the various contexts the word is used. For example, I see a clear distinction between puttering and playing. Playing is more purposeful and has a specific agenda, while puttering is more random and fitful. For example, puttering in the garden implies that not much useful work was done, while weeding the garden describes a specific activity with expected results. Then there is “killing time,” a phrase with an explicit recognition you have nonproductive time between scheduled events, while puttering implies a bit of artifice – you are trying to fool mostly yourself, and maybe others, that you are accomplishing something. And finally the concept of “hanging out,” which similarly has no expected work output, but also implies a social activity involving a couch and a TV or maybe a thick Sunday newspaper. In contrast, puttering is a solo activity, although my friend Mary says that she and her husband Bob are known to parallel putter.

Puttering is a purely human pleasure, borne of our position atop the food chain – hopefully without the life or death grind of hunting or foraging for the next meal. Last summer, I watched my two year old nephew walk around the house, picking up a coaster and putting it down on another table, lifting up a ball and dropping it, pulling the dogs tail, and I realized that he perfectly fit the definition of puttering. Once he starts doing a puzzle, or running a car across the floor he will be playing. It is unfair to expect him to do purposeful work at this tender age, but basically he is perfecting a putter that will serve him well throughout his life.

Certainly, some animals are playful, such as otters and crows, but I do not think that animals putter. Our dogs are always eager to go for a walk, particularly in the winter when they can hunt for voles, but when they are on their own indoors they do exactly nothing. Our son, observing the dogs’ lazy life style once observed, “dogs sure have a lot of spare time, don’t they?” A life of spare time is just made for puttering but dogs just don’t have the intellectual capacity to do nothing creatively.

As adults, puttering is generally considered somewhat of a guilty pleasure and an important procrastination technique. You putter in the garden when you should really be weeding, you putter around the house when you should really be working on income taxes. Many years ago, I came home to find my husband mending his underwear, which might be considered useful work if he know how to mend, but his efforts perfectly fit the definition of “unproductive work.” In reality he was desperate to do anything but study for his MBA taxation class. The last ditch mending project had been preceded by the usual menu of puttering, walking around the apartment, idly looking at yesterday’s newspaper, looking at the pile of clean laundry clothes on the floor, but not putting the laundry away since that would be purposeful work, and then noticing the tattered underwear and deciding to walk over to Walgreen’s to get a needle and thread. Once at Walgreen’s there was an opportunity to leaf through the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit edition or perhaps consider the purchase of a birthday card for his mother. Several hours had passed, nothing had been accomplished and the taxation homework was still an uncomfortable and lurking presence.

Puttering in the workplace is a definite skill. One of my first exposures to a professional working environment was one high school summer when I volunteered in the pathology laboratory at the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago. I was theoretically there to assist the single laboratory technician, but business was always slow, since the only pathology specimen was the infrequent muscle biopsy. She had developed a whole series of tasks to make herself look busy, like reorganizing the glassware on the shelves. In a misguided effort to be helpful, I took over all her putter projects and destroyed her façade. One day, she flat out told me, “I am not going to do any work today, so you might as well go to a movie or something.” She went around the corner to her desk and pulled out a stack of fashion magazines and started reading them.  The new trend of working from home is the ideal setting for puttering. In fact, working from home is best considered an oxymoron unless you have the discipline to control the putter or you lack the insight to distinguish unproductive from productive work. Some days are better then others.

As I edge closer to retirement age and am relieved of the time suck of work and sandwich generation responsibilities, I realize that I had better start sharpening my puttering skills. The once hectic pace is now showing signs of more flexibility and puttering will no longer be associated with guilt, but will become an established part of the day.  Here our generation has a tremendous advantage over our ancestors – we have the putter perfect internet where an entire morning can vanish into thin air. How I wish that my parents had embraced the computer. My father loved antique cars and Great Lakes shipping and would have enjoyed puttering around the internet looking at car auctions and the history of iron ore ships, but he was just not a technology adopter and instead spent hours watching golf, a sport that he never really liked. However, I do think that internet puttering veers slightly from the classic definition, which implies movement and some sort of physical activity. In contrast, internet puttering is entirely sedentary.

One day I heard the expression, “that horse should be sent to the glue factory,” perhaps describing my declining skills on the paddle tennis court. But it made me curious about glue factories, and I spent the next several hours puttering on the computer learning about Elmer’s glue, which is made from the bits and pieces of old diary cows, which segued to on an internet tour of animal rendering factories that process and repurpose all sorts of dead farm animals, and this segued to research on mad cow disease and finally to the history of dog food. A putter perfect morning.

The missing words in the following poem are all anagrams (i.e. like spot, post, stop, etc) and the number of dashes indicates the number of letters.   Your job is to solve the words using the context of the poem.  Scroll down for the answers.

Robinson —— worked hard on his island, the most solitary of men,

But even he had enough spare time to take a break now and then.

But the —— of his problems was that he had too much time on his hands

And no putter potential midst the crashing surf and shifting sands

Of —— once Friday arrived, he could stop his solitary muttering,

And start hanging out at the beach instead of relentless puttering.

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Crusoe, source, course

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