Crossing a Line

Guess what that yellow line is

 

When someone says to me, “You crossed a line!” (which you can only imagine how often that occurs in my life,) it generally means I have broken some social code or caused offense in a way that cannot be easily remedied. In this case, the line is a metaphoric line in the sand, and the sand is just as metaphoric as the line. In full disclosure, I did recently cross a line, but of a different sort.

There are many kinds of lines, metaphoric or actual. There are the aforementioned lines which bound social dictates. There are mathematical lines which stretch indefinitely in two directions. I suppose these are neither metaphoric, nor actual, but intellectual constructions, abstractions. You can’t really cross an abstraction, at least not concretely. There are picket lines, and those can be crossed! They aren’t truly lines, but groups of people with a metaphorical boundary, but we all know what it means to cross one. If you are wondering if that is what I crossed, no, I am not a scab.

But what about actual lines? There are a lot of these actual lines, though usually you can’t see them, and most of them are not really straight. They might seem locally straight, but they curve or bend. So here I need to expand my definition of a line to a one-dimensional curve in which corners and cusps are allowed, or to be mathematically precise, a shape which I can describe parametrically with only one real variable. (Many of you likely shudder at that last description, sorry, ignore it. You will know what I mean by a line.)

But even these actual lines I would separate into two categories: Lines that humans invented and lines that humans use to describe natural phenomena. This last category is, in my opinion, the coolest.

Let me explain what I mean. A month ago (and it feels like a lot longer ago than that,) Alrica and I visited Mount Sassafras Observation Tower. This is on the border of North Carolina and South Carolina. And we were able to stand with one foot in each state. Does it matter which state I am standing in? Well, I guess if Alrica had chosen that moment to murder me it might determine which set of state police had to solve the crime (Alrica is too smart to leave much evidence) and arrest the perpetrator. How would they decide that? Where the attack came from? Where the body fell? Where a larger proportion of the body fell?

My body (still alive) straddling the border

 

The border is one of these lines, the ones that humans invented. In fact, all borders are invented lines. We, as a people, have decided that this is where one set of property or governmental jurisdiction ends, and another begins. There is nothing in nature that describes a shift there, only in our minds. In a thousand years, those borders could be different. Think of the world a thousand years ago. Not too many borders have stayed the same.

Another example of these lines that are a product of our imagination is lines of longitude. Don’t misrepresent me. These are very useful lines and they make logical sense to encircle the Earth that way. But why is the Prime Meridian, the zero line, where it is? Because humans arbitrarily chose to put it there. Astronomers working out of an observatory in Greenwich, England set the line so it would go through their observatory. Had Muslim astronomers defined the zero line of longitude while math and science were flourishing in Arabia and Europe was in the Dark Ages, we might have Baghdad Mean Time.

At least the Prime Meridian is a semicircular arc! (I might say it was straight, but you and I both know that’s stretching the word straight.) If you want to see just how active the human imagination is, check out the International Date Line! Yeah, it is supposed to be the meridian directly opposite the Prime Meridian. But that would be so inconvenient for places that it cut through the middle of. It’s Friday at my house but Saturday at my workplace down the street. Do I have to go in today? To handle such inconvenience, we use our imagination once again. What the heck, don’t go round the bend getting bent out of shape if we bend over backwards to bend it like Beckham! (Though Beckham’s bending is of a very different bent than that of a meridian.)

What about lines of latitude? Some of these are more than just our imagination, they have astronomical reality.

Take, for example, the Arctic Circle (or the Antarctic Circle). The Earth revolves about an axis (another line which you can’t see but describes a real world phenomenon.) And the Earth orbits the sun in a plane we call the ecliptic. But our axis and the ecliptic are not perpendicular. The axis is tilted about 23.5° (from being perpendicular. It is tilted about 66.5° from being a line in the plane of the ecliptic.) The Arctic Circle is the line of latitude at 66.5° north (and the Antarctic Circle is at 66.5° south) corresponding to this tilt in the Earth’s axis. Beyond these circles, there will be some winter days without sun and some summer days where the sun never goes away. These two circles represent a physical reality.

The Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn do as well. These are the circles at 23.5° north (Cancer) and 23.5° south (Capricorn). They are the northernmost and southernmost latitudes where the sun could ever be directly overhead. And its all about that tilt!

There is a certain irony for me personally about these two circles. When we were in Namibia in December of 2015, we crossed the Tropic of Capricorn. I blogged about it then and you can check it out. You can even see pictures of my adorable children, much younger, at the Tropic of Capricorn with Alrica and me. But what’s the irony?

Even though I have lived most of my life in the northern hemisphere, I have stood upon the Tropic of Capricorn in the southern hemisphere, but never stood upon the Tropic of Cancer in my own home hemisphere. I’ve crossed it in airplanes and even on ships, but they don’t have signs you can stand next to midair or midwater. We were pretty close to it in Al Ain, UAE. But there is a limited list of when close counts, and I’ve never heard Tropic of Cancer included in that list.

Finally, there is the granddaddy of all the lines of latitude: the equator! (Granddaddy is also metaphoric. There is not biological descent among lines of latitude.) And that brings me to our recent trip to Mitad del Mundo! (Yes, it took me over 1,100 words to get to the story. But hopefully at least 315 of those words were interesting.)

Mitad del Mundo, which translates as Halfway Point of the World, is a destination of the equator, by the equator, and for the equator. (Apologies to Lincoln.) This is a real line (or circle really). It is the circle around the surface of the Earth that is equidistant to each pole. Here the days last twelve hours and the nights last twelve hours all year long.

Head in the Northern Hemisphere, Feet in the Southern Hemisphere

 

Friends, I have stood upon the equator! I have sat upon the equator! I have laid upon the equator! I have risked being pulled apart by Coriolis Effect forces to have part of me in one hemisphere and part of me in another. (That last sentence is only half true. I was in two hemispheres, but there is no risk of being torn apart by the Coriolis Effect.)

If you make it to Quito, I recommend this attraction highly. We came in the morning when it is a lot less busy. We visited the monument built on the equator. You get to go up in the elevator and walk around it, crossing hemispheres as you go. But there is a lot more there than just the monument and the line.

At one place, tables have been set up, each with a nail sticking up so that the nail is on the equator. You can try to balance an egg on the head of the nail. Alrica tried, no success. And it doesn’t make any sense to me why this would be easier or harder at the equator than anywhere else.

There are museums here, shops, and historical recreations. For example, there are houses, recreations of the houses that the indigenous people built before the Spanish came. All of the houses were built of local materials like mud, reed, and grasses. This portion was split into three parts. There was a house of the natives from the Amazon region. There were two houses of the natives from the mountains, one round house which showed techniques before the influence of the Spanish and one rectangular house that showed techniques after the influence of the Spanish. Finally, there was a house of the natives of the Pacific coast.

One of the museums was all about the expeditions that were sent to Ecuador to find the equator and measure the curvature of the Earth at it. The expeditions were French, but Ecuador was controlled by the Spanish at the time. Spain allowed France to send the scientists. Did you know that after Newton proposed Universal Gravitation, there was some disagreement about what that meant for the shape of the Earth?

Many of us are taught that the Earth is a sphere. It’s not, but, to be fair, it is close. Newton proposed that the Earth was an oblate spheroid, like an M&M. In an M&M, it is like a sphere got squashed pushing on its poles, so its equator bulged out and its poles got closer together. Well, Newton didn’t think the Earth was as squashed as an M&M (in fact, all reliable evidence indicates that Newton never once even ate an M&M), but he did say it was the same sort of shape, just not squashed so much. The radius at the equator, said Newton, is greater than the radius at the poles, but not by a huge amount.

There was another school of thought that said, no, the earth is a prolate spheroid, where you would pull on a sphere at the poles, more like an American football or a rugby ball. They believed that the earth’s radius at the poles was greater than its radius at the equator.

No one really knew for sure which was right. No one had ever made the appropriate measurements before. The French, believing this to be an important question, both scientifically, and due to its impact on mapmaking and worldwide commerce, decided to send out two expeditions. One would go to the North Pole, the other to the equator. Each was to measure the curvature of the earth at their destination to settle the question.

The expedition to the equator chose the province of Quito. They thought it would be very close to the equator (they were right) and would give them enough access to enough land that they could make the measurements needed to calculate the curvature of the earth. They built checkpoints over a huge area of land in the Andes mountains. They made measurements of the stars in Orion’s belt from these various checkpoints. Then mathematically, they measured the curvature of the Earth using their observations.

It turns out that Newton was right, the Earth is an oblate spheroid. The equator is further from the center of the Earth than the poles are. This is because the Earth spins. When the Earth was forming, that spin caused a bulge in the middle, a centrifugal force effect.

So if anyone out there is still holding onto a belief that the Earth is a prolate spheroid (or that it is flat), I’m sorry to tell you this: that’s not the case. If, in so challenging your belief, I have crossed a line, well, I think we’ve pretty well-established that I'm a line crosser.

Double Chocolate

I’m sorry if I have you thinking about muffins or ice cream flavors at this point. Not my intention. Instead, I wanted to share the results of two recent adventures we had into the fascinating society of chocolate.

The first of these was called the Chocolate Experience. We met a woman named Ruth who brought us to her house. It began in her garden and we picked some flowers and herbs that we would later use in the chocolate we were making from scratch! You could probably guess that after the garden it was on to the kitchen. The other adventure was visiting Chocolate World, a shop in la Cuidad de Mitad del Mundo.

Chocolate cocktails! (Though one is alcohol-free)

 

Between these, I learned a great deal about chocolate, its history, its present, and its variety. Where to begin? Logic dictates: the beginning.

When the Spanish arrived in the New World, chocolate was already being consumed in much of Mesoamerica. It was completely new to the Europeans. Chocolate comes from the cacao plant which had been domesticated and spread throughout the region. But where did it originate?

Cacao is a rather short tree that grows in the canopy of taller trees. It requires a lowland region with lots of heat and lots of rain. That still leaves a lot of possible locations for the origin of cacao. Yet, scientists have pretty good evidence of where it all began.

Anthropologists were able to find organic remnants of cacao on pottery artifacts that are 5,500 years old. This is the earliest known evidence of human interaction with cacao. These artifacts were found in the Amazon rainforest in what is today eastern Ecuador. Thus, the best evidence we have so far indicates this is where chocolate originated.

But you must understand how far it is from a cacao tree to chocolate to wonder how the earliest cocoa pioneers figured this out. The cacao plant, after pollination by bees or hummingbirds, produces cobs. They are bigger than an ear of corn, shaped somewhat like a football (an American football, a rugby ball for those unfamiliar with American football), but about half again as large. Within those cobs is a pulpy fruit and within that are what we call the cocoa beans. Each cob has between thirty and forty cocoa beans. (It takes about ten to fifteen cobs to make a pound of chocolate.) The process to get from tree to bean has many steps. The cobs are harvested. Then they are placed in a wooden box, covered by banana leaves, and allowed to ferment for several days. The banana leaves help keep the heat of fermentation in the pile to allow it to happen better.

After two days, the outer leaf of the cob has biodegraded. Now there is the pulpy fruit. The yeasts eat the sugars in the pulp, creating acetic acid as a byproduct. Everything smells like vinegar and the pulp turns into slime or liquid and drains out of holes in the bottom of the box. Acid is an important part of preparing the beans.

Four days after going in the box, the cocoa beans are taken out. Then they are dried in the sun for a couple weeks. Cacao farmers don’t want to take the beans too early or they won’t make good chocolate. They need to get down to 7% humidity or less. The beans themselves are in a thin shell, and the farmers press on this shell to see if it is still pliable (too wet) or starting to get brittle (dry enough).

Now the beans are ready to be roasted and this is where we came in during our Chocolate Experience. While cacao is grown and sold in many places in Ecuador, it is not grown in Quito. It isn’t grown anywhere in the Andes Mountains. That’s because cacao needs low elevation and lots of heat. The Andes are high are very temperate.

Ruth, who led our Chocolate Experience, travels about three hours by car toward the coast of Ecuador to find the cocoa beans fresh. One could also travel east out of Quito and head into the Amazon River region to find cocoa. In fact, the most elite, sought after, and expensive chocolate comes from that region, the birthplace (we believe) of chocolate. It is called Arriba Chocolate, but this is because of a problem in translation. When the Dutch and English traders came to the ports of South America to buy the cocoa beans, they would ask the Ecuadoreans what it was called. The Ecuadoreans (now Spanish speakers) didn’t really understand the question. They told the traders this chocolate was arriba (which means above), trying to indicate it came from upriver. The traders took that to be the name of the chocolate.

Where you get the cocoa beans does matter. Remember I mentioned the bees and hummingbirds that pollinate the plant? Those animals also collect nectar from the taller trees which surround the cacao plants. So some of the nectar and pollen of the taller trees gets mixed into the cacao flower and affects the flavor of the chocolate that will be produced by that cacao plant. The seeds that Ruth purchased came from cacao that grows in the shade of banana trees and so has just the subtlest banana flavor.

Recall the beans themselves are in a thin shell. You take these beans, with their shells, and you roast them. We used a clay pot to roast them. The shells get very black, and sometimes you hear a loud pop similar to popcorn popping. Legend has it that if you are more calm and at peace when you are stirring the cocoa beans as they roast, you will hear more pops. If you are stressed, you will hear fewer. I don’t think I am particularly stressed, but no beans popped while I was stirring. Syarra got one pop. Alrica didn’t get any pops either. The blessings of childhood, I guess.

After they are well roasted and the shells are black on all sides, you take the beans, one by one, in your hand. Yes, they are very hot! Now you crack the outer shell and pull the bean out of it. The bean is brown and shiny and has an outer layer of oil. This not only protects the bean during the roasting and makes it shiny, it also makes your fingers soft. The broken shells are collected in one dish and the released beans in another.

Shells left on the left, shiny on the right!

 

The shells are ground with a mortar and pestle. This powder can then be used to make tea or it can be used to make a lotion for your hands. The beans are also ground, but not by mortar and pestle. They are ground in a large crank grinder, like a sausage grinder. It is a lot of work to turn the crank and grind the beans. What comes out are thin shavings of brown cocoa. Tasting them at this point, they are very bitter.

That’s one big irony of chocolate, it’s actually quite bitter. Of course, sugars are going to be added in the cooking process.

Here is another interesting historical happy accident. Before the Europeans came to the New World, there were no cows in the Americas. In fact, the Americas had very few animals which could be domesticated. Wolves had been domesticated and became dogs. In South America, llamas and alpacas were domesticated to be used as pack animals and for wool. They were not generally eaten. And they were certainly not milked. So the natives didn’t have milk.

When the indigenous people of Mesoamerica cooked their chocolate, they mixed it with water. The Spanish were the first to bring the beans back to Europe where it was to be prepared for the king. The explorers had asked the natives how to prepare it, but in a multilingual game of telephone (metaphoric telephone, as telephones were not yet invented) mistakes were made. A group of nuns in Spain were preparing the cocoa for the king, and they thought they were supposed to use milk when they cooked it. So milk chocolate was born from an accident.

Before

 

Back in present day, we took our ground cocoa beans and mixed them in orange juice (for some natural sugars), milk powder, some lavender, and some white sugar. This is not really how the pre-Columbian natives would have made it. They didn’t have white sugar, and they didn’t have oranges. Oranges are native to East Asia. We cooked it for about thirty minutes to get a beautiful bubbling pot of brown goo.

After

 

Also, chocolate making is about joy, so you have to dance while you stir. Naturally, right? We listened to “Bate que bate el chocolate” and showed off our swaying hips as our spoons and feet when round.

We tried our chocolate with seven different flavors (one at a time): Rose (actual rose petals we had picked in the garden), peanuts, salted caramel, ginger, chili pepper, cinnamon, and coconut. They were all very different, even using the same chocolate. Alrica and Syarra liked the cinnamon best. I was all about the chili pepper. (You don’t really notice it at first and then there is a delightful transition of flavors in your mouth.)

At Chocolate World we got to experience chocolates made in Ecuador and the region. We learned how each company is a community or a village. Some are in the Amazon region, others nearer the coast. They are working to sustainably produce their chocolate and have various social justice initiatives. One community on the Ecuador-Colombia border is giving young men jobs and skills as chocolate makers so they won’t become drug mules making border runs. In another place, a group of indigenous women wanted to make chocolate, but their tribe restricted what women are allowed to do. So they moved to a nearby village and started their own chocolate harvesting and making company. They help other women to greater autonomy.

We purchased some chocolates from some of these communities. We also got cups of hot chocolate. They were so thick and so rich that the stirring straw stands straight up when you leave it in the liquid!

 

Straight up (and not because we are on the equator)

The next time you enjoy chocolate (even in muffins or ice cream), look at what percent cocoa it is. It’s likely not that high a percent. And when you consider how time-consuming and labor intensive it is to get and prepare the beans, you’ll understand. True 100% cocoa is expensive. But so worth it!

Highs (9350) and Lows (-2)

One week can change everything! Well, maybe not everything. I didn’t change my name, nor did I gain or lose toes. So, there are a few minor things that stayed the same. But plenty of things changed. Speaking as a mathematician, I would say I have had great changes in two axes, the vertical and one of the horizontal axes. I’m not even in the same hemisphere as I was.

So let’s lay it out from a Wednesday to a Wednesday. On Wednesday, January third, I woke up in Leesburg, Florida where I was pet sitting a dog and two guinea pigs. On Wednesday, January tenth, I woke up in Quito, Ecuador where dogs roam the streets and people eat guinea pigs as a delicacy. That may already sound like a lot of change, but I didn’t even get into what happened in between.

That first Wednesday was the last day of our housesit in Leesburg. Note: “Our” in this case is Alrica, Syarra, and me. Syarra is on break from school and is spending her Winter Break traveling with us. We left in the late Wednesday morning and headed to Destin, Florida to visit Alrica’s sister, Adana, and Adana’s husband, Don. Destin is a very pretty area that is 26 feet above sea level. Though, you can go to the beach (which we did) and be at sea level. Because you are at the sea. See?

We had a wonderful two days in the Destin area, dare I call it the Destin destination? But then, on Friday we traveled through a rainstorm to reach New Orleans, Louisiana. Here we met Alrica’s brother, Kevin, Kevin’s wife, Mandy (or Amanda, but she has always been Aunt Mandy to my kids), and their two kids, Konnor and Rosie. The rain tapered off and we did a bit of an exploration of the French Quarter that evening.

We had a fantastic seafood dinner. We shared so I got to try crawfish etouffee, gumbo, shrimp with a heavy-in-horseradish cocktail sauce, and delicious seafood boil on flatbread. Next, we wandered Bourbon Street. We heard some lovely live music and danced in the street (which is not the least unusual for Bourbon Street.) Alrica went into a bar she had heard of after which the bouncer freaked out that maybe Syarra (holding the hands of the two elementary school age cousins) was going to follow.

On Saturday, Adana drove in to spend time with us. This was the first time the three Green siblings had all been together in, well, awhile. (I should note that Green is an appellation not a description. They are neither emerald in hue nor, at this stage of life, wet behind the ears.) We did a more thorough exploration of the French Quarter, visited some amazing art galleries, watched a street magician whose finale was “the Frodo” (where he throws a ring up in the air and catches it on his outstretched index finger), saw the Cathedral of St. Louis, ate hand pies in Jackson Square, bought pralines, and visited the French Market. We played some dice games and board games, and then we bid goodbye to Adana.

Pics or it didn't happen! Adana, Kevin, and Alrica together in front of the Cathedral of St. Louis

 

That evening, we returned to Jackson Square. There was a parade honoring the birthday of Joan of Arc, part of an unofficial start of the Carnival season in New Orleans. This was a parade unlike any I have attended. It had a plot! First, they honored various saints such as Saint Andrew (including bagpipers), and Saint George (with a huge dragon with moving parts and lit eyes controlled by several puppeteers). Then the parade went through various stages of Joan’s life, her victories, her trial for heresy, her death, her posthumous pardon, and her eventual (like 450 years later) canonization.

The next day we visited the Garden District with its amazing architecture. We had incredible Po’ Boys for lunch. There was this gravy on my Po’ Boy which was so savory and delicious, I wonder what was in it. We took a ferry across the Mississippi River and visited Algiers Point. This is an adorable neighborhood in which the houses have bright colors and beautiful detail work. We ate beignets at Café Du Monde. I got coated in powdered sugar. And you can see the ground littered with powdered sugar for a block in each direction. Also, not to neglect the most important details, I saw the distinctive fire hydrants of New Orleans. They are narrower (smaller diameter) than most other cities and they have caps of various shapes, designs, and colors. (I know, most of my regular blog readers are in it for the hydrants.)

Pair of hydrants for my peeps!

 

On Monday, we left New Orleans which has points two feet below sea level to fly to Quito, Ecuador at a staggering 9350 feet above sea level. That’s our change in the vertical axis. (For full disclosure, we actually spent a night in Miami, Florida so we didn’t reach Quito until Tuesday.) But now we are in the Southern Hemisphere! Not by a lot, we are at 0.2 degrees south latitude. But that’s still south! (For those keeping track, that is the change in the horizontal axis.) As for the other horizontal axis, well, Quito is at almost the same longitude as Miami. Still, it is a change from New Orleans.

Yes, it was a lie, not everything has changed. I was being hyperbolic (meaning I was using hyperbole, not living on a hyperbola.) But wasn’t this sufficient justification for a bit of puffery? I’ll leave it to you to decide.

First Things, One Would Hope, First?

Back in the day, this is as opposed to now which is also day, but not the day. So, back in the day, when I was at NYU which is in Greenwich Village (in Manhattan) and Alrica was working at Scholastic which is in Soho (in Manhattan), we would often meet for lunch.

A digression for those who don’t know the layout of Manhattan. You can be comforted to know that Greenwich Village and Soho share a border. That border is called Houston Street. Two things about this: Soho is short for South of Houston, so as you might guess, Houston Street is the northern border of that section of town. The other thing, Houston Street is pronounced HOW-stun and not HUE-stun. It is not a city in Texas. It is not named for Sam Houston. I am not entirely sure for whom it is named, but whoever that Mr, Mrs, Miss, or Ms was, the person pronounced the name HOW-stun.

Now to regress (which probably isn’t the opposite of digress. Maybe to progress?) Many of our lunches were purchased at Hong Kong. No, not the one in Asia, but a restaurant conveniently close to both of us in our respective offices. Hong Kong was wonderful. It sold delicious foods such as Chicken with Cashews and Beef with Broccoli and other (Meat) with (Plant) which were not required to start and end with the same letter. Plus it was a very reasonable price.

The place had no atmosphere worth mentioning. If you wanted to eat there, you had choices of benches rather like picnic tables. But most of the time we took our food back to one of our offices or ate outside in a park. And it was scrumptious. Except the one time it wasn’t.

Once, when Alrica and I visited this fine purveyor of Chinese delicacies, we discovered the whereabouts of Jimmy Buffett’s famous lost shaker of salt. Someone had poured the entire thing into the sauces for the food made that day at Hong Kong. Our food was so salty it was inedible.

But we took it as a one-time error and the next time we returned there, the food was excellent as usual. That led me to realize (and probably Alrica too, but while I do not hesitate to speak for her in some things such as preferred ice tea making methods, I would not dare to do so in regards to realizations), it led me (us) to realize that it was lucky this was not our first trip to Hong Kong. (The restaurant in Manhattan, not the region in East Asia.)

If that had been the first meal we ever received from Hong Kong, we would have assumed that their recipes called for salt as the main ingredient and meat and vegetables as an afterthought. Why would we have possibly returned? The correct answer is: there is no reason or E) None of the Above. We would not have returned.

This supports the idiom which says you only get one chance to make a first impression. Though in this instance, that’s not entirely true. There could have been several people who bought food that day from Hong Kong for the first time. So Hong Kong had multiple changes to make first impressions, not just that day, but everyday it was open and serving meals. I suppose the more precise idiom would be you only get one chance to make a first impression per impressionable person on whom you are making an impression. But brevity and wit make it clear why the less precise version of the idiom is better known.

At present, Alrica and I are in South Carolina. My friend Jeff, who lives in North Carolina, told us we should try a fast-food chain of the south called Bojangles. I love trying regional fast-food chains. I like to see what is different, the same, and, for lack of a better term, regional, about them. Plus, if the chains ever spread nationwide, it is fun to think you knew about them when they weren’t so ubiquitous. For example, they have Culver’s in South Carolina. Of course, I remember Culver’s from living in Iowa and Wisconsin, when it was a Midwestern chain. It’s fascinating to see Culver’s locations spread like pancake batter emanating from Wisconsin and spreading across the United States. (And if you think I should have used a custard reference, rather than a pancake, I get that. But I am going back to a pancake theme below. Just have a little faith.)

Jeff recommended that we get, as our side, Bo Rounds. He accurately described the shape of them. He told me to imagine a tater tot, but someone had pounded it so it was much flatter and way more spread out. I like his metaphor of pounding it, presumably with a mallet or something malletish. As a mathematician, I would have probably said “Imagine a tater tot in which, while still cylindrical, no longer had a height greater than the diameter, but instead had a diameter greater than the height.” Mathematics is a wonderful language for expressing exactly what you mean, but it is rarely poetic.

Of course, we took Jeff’s recommendation and did eat at Bojangles on our drive to South Carolina. We got the Bo Rounds, as suggested. And while Jeff’s description did him credit in terms of shape and size, it was less on the nose about flavor. Because the moment I tasted my first Bo Round, I realized these are not a form of tater tots. No, these are latkes.

Latkes, also called potato pancakes, are shredded potato and onion with salt and other seasoning which are fried in a skillet, made almost like a pancake. (See, I promised a return to pancakes, and here it is!) It is a common food associated with Hanukkah. (Hanukkah involves miraculous oil, so foods fried in oil are a Hanukkah tradition. I’m sure even Judah Maccabee enjoyed a good jelly doughnut before revolting against the forces of oppression.) My first bite of Bo Round and I felt that ketchup was not the appropriate condiment. I hankered for either sour cream or applesauce. And given that now it is Hanukkah, how appropros!

But what I also found, at Bojangles, was Cheerwine. I had seen a billboard for Cheerwine on the road south. I didn’t know exactly what it was, but I guessed, from the aluminum cans in the picture, that it was not, as the name might imply, wine. I just think most vintners grimace at the idea of putting their product in a can. (I know there is wine in a box, though probably not your finer wines, but I am unfamiliar with wine in a can.)

Been around for 106 years and I am just learning about it?

 

It turns out Cheerwine is pop, if, like Culver’s, you originated in the Midwest. It is soda if, instead, like Subway, you originated in the Northeast. (On that note, and on a tangent, you would think Subway started in New York City given that there is NYC subway map wallpaper on all the stores. But no, it started in Bridgeport, Connecticut. Yes, that’s still the northeast, but it makes you wonder if this is a tepid form of cultural appropriation.) And if, like Bojangles, you originated in the South, you probably think Cheerwine is a kind of coke.

Regardless of the regional term you use for fizzy soft drinks, Bojangles has Cheerwine in the self-serve soda fountains. And I wanted to try it, and it was great. It is a cherry soda, refreshing and bubbly. But why do I bring this up?

Because a week later, I had a second chance to get Cheerwine from a soda fountain. And I found it wanting. It was barely any of the red cherry syrup and way too much of the colorless carbonated water. Bleah! Not good, let me assure you.

But, like Hong Kong, I realized how fortunate it was that this was not my first encounter with Cheerwine. I knew this was just a problem of that particular soda machine having too little syrup, either through the bag running out or a problem in the brix. (Aren’t you impressed that I know a technical term like brix? It refers to the ratio of the soda syrup to the carbonated water, so it is exactly what I want for this paragraph. And so many people told me my trivial knowledge would never be useful. Ha!)

Had that been my first drink of Cheerwine, my first impression, I might have disdained it. I might have declined future chances to repeat the experience. But having found it to my liking the first time, I know that this was more likely the fluke, and I will return to Cheerwine at some future opportunity.

This makes me wonder. How many things are there in the world that I think I dislike, but really it is a matter of my first experience with that thing being a negative one? I will give you an example: shrimp. Mom, if you are reading this, I love you very much and I enjoy many of the wonderful recipes you made for our family when I was growing up. But not your shrimp. For years, I thought I didn’t like shrimp and I wouldn’t eat it. It wasn’t until college, while dating Alrica, that she convinced me to try shrimp. I was surprised to find that I enjoyed it. It turns out I don’t dislike shrimp. I just didn’t enjoy the way my mother made it the first time I had it. That initial encounter led me to an erroneous conclusion. How many other such erroneous conclusions have I come to on the basis of a sample size of one?

I have tested some of my dislikes to be sure they are not just a one-time affair. For example, I am positive there is some chemical that cucumbers and melons have in common which most people seemingly cannot taste, but I can. And its flavor is reminiscent of a sour citrus juice which was breaded in baking soda and ashes, then left to rot in a tomb for a few centuries, and then reintroduced into the offending flesh of the fruit or vegetable (though horticulturally, cucumbers are also fruits.) I am also fully convinced that tea is a revenge plot by trees in response to the incessant human desire for paper and two-by-fours, offensive to taste buds, and probably a ploy by the sugar industry to maintain their profitable business.

But now think grander than just foods and beverages. Are there places that someone doesn’t like because of bad first impressions? Are there religions that some sectors of society demonize because of early impressions, possibly even those not personally experienced? Is this the root of bias, implicit or explicit?

I know I am a mathematician, not a sociologist. But how important are those first impressions on our way of thinking about big, important things? Can we overcome them with a good second impression, like my experience with shrimp? Or are some things so ingrained that we won’t allow ourselves to take that second chance?

Well, this is heady stuff now, way beyond Hong Kong and Cheerwine. But to paraphrase Jimmy Buffett:
I’m wastin’ away again in First Impressionville.
Hating foods with whole shakers of salt.
Some people claim that there’s whole subgroups to blame.
But I need to reset default.

The Fourth Thursday

Today’s the fourth Thursday. It’s likely I may
Be asked, now, for what are you thankful today?
And I guess, if you asked that, here’s what you’d be told.
I’m glad that I don’t have to stay in the mold.

This life where we nomad
And somehow don’t go mad
Come and go without pomp, without guilt
Though it’s plenty of fun,
It’s not easily done
‘Cause it’s not how America’s built.

Not to say we are homeless, but home we have not.
And a home is expected for really a lot.
Car registrations
And voting locations
Depositing royalty checks for creations.

There isn’t a system to do those with ease
But that is the price for the life that I please.
So I’m thankful that, even though sometimes it’s wild
We are able to live this way: undomiciled.

A River Cuts Through It

Here is an amazing story of geological history. And it began around 270 million years ago (give or take). It’s a pretty dramatic beginning too because the African plate and the North American plate collided. (Neither of the continents looked exactly as it does today.) This occurred on the eastern side of the North American plate, pushing massive volumes of rocks to the west. These rocks crunched and bent and piled and became… (any guesses?)

This rock pile became the Appalachian Mountains, version 1.0. These were big mountains. We’re talking size of the Himalayas big.

Then what happens? Erosion, same as is happening now. But this is the part I never knew before. Over millions of years, the Appalachian Mountains eroded away completely, down to the roots of the mountains. So, the Appalachian Mountains of that time would be better called the Appalachian Plains.

Those of you paying attention should be saying, “Wait a sec, there are mountains there now!” Yes. The movie is never as fun if you already know the ending. Like when I saw the movie Titanic, I already knew the giant squid was going to win. But, unlike that story, there is an interesting twist to our already known ending.

In the time of the Appalachian Plain, there was a river called the Taeys River. (Taeys rhymes with daze or maze or the phrase that pays.) The river began in what is present day North Carolina and ran northwest, which was downhill at the time. It flowed through present day Virginia, then West Virginia, and then into Ohio. It flowed as far north as what today is Columbus and then turned west. Here it ran through the middle of what is now Indiana and Illinois before turning southwest and hitting the Gulf of Mexico.

Again, if you’re paying attention, you probably think, “It must have gone through some other states before hitting the Gulf, right?” Surprisingly, no. The Gulf of Mexico stretched as far north as present-day Illinois in that time.

So yes, the Taeys River is very old, but you are justifiably asking, “Why is the Taeys River the twist of the story? And you still haven’t explained why there are mountains in this supposed plain!” Calm down, reader, I’m getting to it.

The Appalachian Plateau started to rise again, buoyed and thrust by magma from the Earth’s mantle. But the rise was very slow. Geologically slow. While this changed the courses of some rivers, not so the Taeys. The Taeys River managed to cut through the land at the same rate that the land was rising. So it isn’t that the Taeys cut down to form a canyon, but rather that the land rose on either side of it forming the canyon. Meanwhile the Taeys River stayed pretty much where it had already been. It survived the rise of the Appalachian Mountains 2.0.

However, while the river survived the rise of the mountains, later, the downstream part of the river wasn’t so lucky. Though it wasn’t mountains that wiped it out, rather glaciers. Glaciers came down through Ohio and Indiana and Illinois. They pushed earth and rock and filled in the channel that the Taeys River took through those states. In fact, the earth pushed by the glaciers dammed the Taeys River. A huge lake with several fingers of water was formed called Lake Bright along the present day border of West Virginia and Ohio.

Eventually Lake Bright got too full and had to go somewhere. A new outlet formed that tumbled down the present-day path of the Ohio River. From then on, the downstream part of the Taeys was gone.

That wasn’t the last change to the Taeys. When a new river out of the Appalachian Mountains formed, the Gauley River of West Virginia, it met the Taeys and changed the course of the Taeys downstream of their confluence. That new path is the present-day Kanawha River which runs through Charleston and eventually to the Ohio River. Interesting note: Kanawha is pronounced K'naw.

Still, the upriver part of the Taeys, the part that runs from North Carolina to the junction with the Gauley River in West Virginia, that part is still in its same bed. It is the oldest river in North America and one of the oldest in the world. Some geologists believe it may be the second oldest river in the world, second only to the Nile River of Africa. (Presumably, everyone knew where the Nile River was, but clarity is a virtue.)

This river is the only river that cuts across the Appalachians. It begins east of the mountains, but cuts through them and drains out to the west of the mountains. Not many rivers in the world do that!

One final note for the readers, who, as I mentioned previously, are paying attention. I would like to think that is many of you, but let’s be realistic. Still for those intrepid few, if you go looking for the Taeys River on a map or a globe or most likely the internet, you won’t find it. Because that isn’t its modern name.

And here is the irony: The river that run in this ancient bed, the oldest in the continent, the one that survived the rise of mountains, it’s called the New River. That brings a different meaning to the idiom “everything old is new again.”

The New River Gorge

 

We got to experience that amazing canyon that formed as the Appalachian rose around the river while we were in West Virginia. It is called the New River Gorge, and it is a national park. If you are ever in the area, you should check it out and know you are standing in a place not only of history, but prehistory. Really even pre what we usually call prehistoric. Though not so pre-prehistory that its primordial. Maybe just ordial. For those who are paying attention.

Authentic Chili Diving

When I was in college, my roommates and I made a distinction we called swimming vs. diving. It will likely come as no surprise that this definition came about while the Summer Olympics were going on. None of us were likely to achieve our dreams of standing on the awards platform, so we found tangential ways to be a part of the events.

The distinction between swimming and diving is this: In swimming events, meaning the races where you must do the breaststroke or backstroke for so many meters, there can be little argument about who wins the event. The person who swims the required distance in the minimum amount of time is the gold medalist. This is as opposed to diving which requires judges to give scores and hold up their scorecards. These scores are summed and the person with the highest total wins.

But the number of points given by two different judges who just watched the same dive may not agree. There is an element of subjectivity here. In fact, the entire event is subjective. Why is a small splash better than a huge splash that wets the first three rows. (This is transparently biased against breaching whales trying to enter the Olympics.) What determines if an tuck is more difficult than a curl (or whatever the terms in diving are.)

At some point, a group of self-proclaimed diving gurus decided upon the rules, what was good, what was bad, what was ugly. If a different group of gurus had decided upon the rules, the event might look very different. Well, the scoring would look different. The fundamentals of leaving a board and going downward into water would be the same. We can't overcome gravity. Even if the same group had decided upon the rules after having a very unpleasant meal, the event could look very different. This means the rules in diving are not only subjective, but arbitrary, as opposed to swimming where fastest is fastest and slowest is slowest and never the twain shall meet, because if they met, slowest would be going as fast as fastest and wouldn't be slowest, would it?

This post is, at its core, about several authentic experiences I had recently. But I want to make clear one point: Authenticity is diving. It is like deliciousness. It is possible for two people to eat the same thing and for one to say, "That's yummy," while the other believes the victuals have strayed far from delicious, tasty, or even palatable. 

Case in point: I made chili today. I would rate my chili's deliciousness at about a 5.5, but my wife would likely give it a 2 or less. I used too many jalapeños for her liking. There's an irony there. The very ingredient which, arguably, makes the chili authentic (namely, the chilis) is what detracts, in my wife's mind, from its deliciousness. So deliciousness is clearly diving. It is subjective, arbitrary.

I claim authenticity is similarly diving. So when I say, as I am about to say, that I had authentic experiences, you may disagree. It's just my arbitrary vision of what is authentic to various locales or foods or experiences.

Even above, when I said chili peppers are what determine the authenticity of chili (which does seem to follow from the name), that's still very diving of me. Just look at the insistence of Texans that real chili has no beans and the rest of the country's acceptance that beans are normal in chili. You can see that authentic chili has no universally agreed upon set of ingredients. (Or go to Iowa and get chili with a cinnamon bun, or go to Wisconsin where it is served over spaghetti. There's a lot of region flexibility to chili.)

I think the point is made. Let's move on to the experiences, shall we?

In Schenectady, NY, which is very fun to spell, Alrica and I had lunch one day at a place called First Prize Mike's. Alrica got a burger, I got a hot dog and a shake. We both had onion rings. The food was fine, not incredible, not bad, but fine. But the experience was so New York.

First Prize Mike's is laid out like a diner. It is long and narrow with a big bar around the open kitchen and then there are booths on the wall opposite the open kitchen. But it was the people who made it such an experience. The employees: cooks and wait staff, constantly razzed one another, griping that each was making everyone else's job harder to do. The waitress called her patron's "honey" and treated them like she'd known them all her life. She probably had known some of the regulars for a long time. But Alrica and I were first-timers, and we got that treatment too. It took forever to get our food, my chocolate shake, when it arrived, was strawberry, and when I tried to clean up my own table, I got scolded for taking away my waitress's job. It was fantastic, fast-talking, and friendly in that authentic matter-of-fact New York style. Or at least what I consider authentic for New York. It felt authentic to me.

When we traveled from Schenectady, NY to Cambridge, MA, we took a scenic route. This led us through country roads in Vermont. It so happened that we passed by a huge outdoor farmers' market and so we stopped. This market was so Vermont (a diving statement if ever there was one.)

What do I mean? The port-a-potties were sawdust compost toilets. If you bought food to eat on site, the utensils were all wooden or cardboard so they could be recycled. (There were multiple kinds of recycling at the recycling station, so you had to figure out which bin your utensils went into.) One vendor made a point to tell me that everything sold at the market was made or grown by the vendors selling at the market. And I found my fashion peeps, or at least I could camouflage as a Vermonter.

I like to wear t-shirts. I find them comfortable. But I do make concessions to the temperature. And one of those concessions is that when it is nippy, I put on a flannel shirt over my t-shirt. Usually I leave it unbuttoned in the front. For some reason I don't entirely know, the vast majority of flannel shirts are plaid. Mine are no exception to that rule. (In fact, now that we live out of a car and backpacks, I only have one flannel shirt. And it is plaid.) So, point being, I was wearing my plaid flannel shirt over my t-shirt.

Proof of my flannel shirt (and my ugly hat (and the Mohawk River))

 

As I looked around, I was astonished to see how many of the men were wearing plaid flannel shirts. (They did not have them open in front.) But by buttoning up my plaid flannel shirt, hiding the t-shirt beneath, I became one of the crowd, indistinguishable from lifelong Vermonters (or at least I couldn't distinguish between them and me, except I have the secret knowledge that I am not now nor have I ever been a Vermonter.) It's possible that the Vermonters could tell I wasn't one of them, but if so, I don't know what gave it away. I was certainly wearing the uniform.

You could argue this is more about stereotyping than a quest for authenticity. You might be right, but they were all dressed in plaid flannel. You can't take that away from me. That's swimming.

Alrica talked to a sugarmaker (a person who makes maple syrup, but isn't called a syrupmaker) about what causes the different grades (colors): golden, amber, dark, and very dark. Spoiler: It's bacteria. We got hot mozzarella (on a compostable wooden fork, of course) which is an entirely different experience from not hot (though not exactly cold) mozzarella, or so we were told by the cheesemaker (a person who makes cheese, though that word was pretty self-explanatory.)

Authentic Vermont, right? Unless you have a different definition of Vermontiness (or maybe Vermonticity,) which is totally diving of you.

In Charleston, West Virginia we visited a fast-food restaurant called Tudor's Biscuit World. (Sadly, people who make biscuits are not called biscuitmakers. They are called bakers. But it rhymes.) The biscuits were great. They are served with a variety of things inside, mainly products of pork, cheese, and potato. Definitely delicious (diving) and arguably authentic (diving).

Regardless of whether or not you agree with my various diving arguments, we all must concur that I need a deep dive into the leftover chili. I'm not likely to get much help in eating it. That's okay, because I think its reasonably good (diving), but not really good enough for a chili cook-off (which is completely a diving event.) Though maybe I could train for the Leftover Chili Eating Olympics. Then, just like all those years ago in college, I can dream about being an Olympian.