Category: From Macromediocrity

Sidewalk rant

I took it into my head this afternoon to try to walk all the way home from my doctor’s office, it being a beautiful day. I was pretty sure the walk was less than 4 miles, and I got out of my appointment just before 4pm, and I was wearing sturdy shoes. So I set out.
Problem: once you get past the Grosvenor Metro station on southbound Rockville Pike, the sidewalk ends. Sort of. Not definitively. There are bits of sidewalk, enough that I tried going a couple of different ways before I gave up and took the path of least resistance, which was Beach Drive to the Rock Creek trail. I asked a fellow walker if she knew where it let out, and she told me that it hits Cedar Lane. I expressed my dismay that I had been unable to walk to Medical Center from Grosvenor along Rockville Pike, and she expressed sympathetic outrage. “It’s like we’re not supposed to be walking.” So I found Cedar Lane, walked up hill and down, past Stone Ridge to Rockville Pike.
It was a lovely walk, but it was 5.25 miles instead of 3.8 (thanks to the Gmap Pedometer), and I didn’t have any water and I felt a bit panicky not always knowing where I was or how much longer it would take me to get home.
There should be sidewalks. Or there should be big giant signs saying that the sidewalk is ending and to go another way. Or preferably, a sign at the Grosvenor Metro pedestrian access point that says “no thru pedestrians to Medical Center”.

The joy of variety

Tiny Garnet sweet potatoes are much, much yummier than big ol’ Beauregard sweet potatoes.
Also, re. the “yam” vs. “sweet potato” question: This has bothered me for ages, and this is a summary of my informal research:

YAMS (from Wolof “nyam” meaning “to taste”) are a food plant grown across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania. The tubers involved are often ginormous, and they have oxalic acid (an irritant) in their skins. They don’t look anything like sweet potatoes to me, except for the general shape and starchiness.

SWEET POTATOES are a food plant grown across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, and parts of Oceania. Some varieties (mostly the very-orange ones) are colloquially called “yams” in the U.S. and Canada; speculation is that this is a linguistic transfer from kidnapped Africans who stuck the word “nyam” on the closest parallel big starchy tuber widely grown in the American South.

So, it’s not wrong to call a sweet potato a yam; it just might get you the wrong thing if you’re in an international market.

Not Pandora’s best day.

Tell me, friends:
Are any of these what you would consider Celtic music?

  • Something accordion-heavy called Chicago Cajun Aces
  • A fingerpicked guitar piece called Resolucion. The cover of the album has our guitarist standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.
  • A bluegrass version of the Moody Blues’ In Your Wildest Dreams (really, I couldn’t make this up).

Me neither.
I need direct access to the algorithms…

Roughage

Two things:
(1) Three cups of raw shredded cabbage takes a really, really long time to eat. It has yummy dijon vinaigrette on it, but it’s just a lot to chew through.
(2) I think Mead has discontinued my preferred notebook for journaling. My needs are very specific: non-snaggy double wire spiral binding, cardboard or fabric cover, 3 subjects, at least 100 pages, 9×6 not 8.5×11, and pocket dividers. I’ve been journaling for twenty-eight years (!) and I know what I want in a notebook. Snaggy bindings piss me off. Journals that you can’t fold completely in half piss me off. The backing has to be sturdy enough to write on. The pockets are necessary for corralling random notes and letters and pertinent emails and rough drafts of poems. I have looked in every office supply/school supply store around (ooh, except Bruce Variety, I should check there…) and I can’t find what I want. I am tempted to order a lifetime supply online, but I’m waiting to find out from Mead if the notebooks in question are made in China, because that pisses me off too. (It’s an outgrowth of the whole ecoguilt thing, plus the whole human rights thing. I know it’s very hard to avoid Chinese products, but the little I’ve read about untraceable organ transplants makes my “Boycott now!” upbringing rear its head.)

From sexy Vikings to sexy monsters.

It somehow came up following our staff meeting this morning that vampires are sexy. (Work morale has been a lot better the past few months, have I mentioned?) This started us on a fairly lively discussion about how other monsters generally are not sexy. (We did decide that werewolves can be sexy too, depending on how they are portrayed.)
This of course led to some musings on what constitutes a “monster” vs. a “non-monster”, e.g., are faeries/goblins monsters or not? Because if monsters, then they can belong in the “sexy” column (e.g., David Bowie’s Jareth in Labyrinth (technically a goblin), Roiben in Tithe).
So, I know Macromediocrity doesn’t have a lot of readers, but I’m looking for nominations of “monsters that are sexy besides vampires”, with the above caveat that we don’t have a very stable definition of what a monster actually is.

I guessed wrong!

I was walking down Old Georgetown Road this morning and passed a newspaper box for the Montgomery Gazette, and I started wondering if “Gazette” was a newspaper name in the same way as “Mirror”–e.g., if “gazette” was some kind of archaic word for mirror, like “little gazing glass”. I liked the idea, but I was completely wrong. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it’s because of magpies, and coins.

HFCS rant.

Here’s my contribution to the massive blogospheric response to the “Sweet Surprise” pro-high fructose corn syrup ads. HFCS is not a food choice I would make. I think that “food” should be “something you can figure out how to make yourself, in a normal kitchen, starting from pieces of plants and/or animals.” (Admittedly, I don’t know how to make baking soda, but then, I use it mostly as a cleaning product.)

I also feel strongly that food should be artisanal, not industrial. I was waiting for a freight train to pass at the intersection of Seminary Road and Capital View, and I was watching the cars go by, and I got a bit alarmed at one point by the progression of petroleum product-petroleum product-some kinda sulfate-some kinda sulfate-petroleum product-corn syrup-corn syrup. Just kinda freaked me out.

This is a “best of all possible worlds” rant. I’m not naive. I know I’m privileged beyond the dreams of most humans ever in history in terms of the options available to me in choosing food. I don’t think everyone in the world (or even everyone in my neighborhood) has regular, affordable access to fresh fruit and vegetables and protein sources; I just think they should. I’d rather see social changes to encourage that than corporate profit-driven monoculture schemes to feed the burgeoning masses as cheaply as possible, and the stockholders as richly as possible. It’s a giant weird Malthusian/Hieronymus Bosch nightmare to me, the way economics and agriculture have twisted around each other.

The ads say it’s “made from corn”.
Well, yes, in a way.
But it’s not made from corn in the same way as, for example, maple syrup is made from maple trees.
Maple Syrup:
Step 1- Tap tree.
Step 2- Boil sap.
Done.

Corn Syrup:
Step 1- Mix dried corn kernels with water and sulfur dioxide for a day or two.
Step 2- Grind up the corn.
Step 3- Separate the germ (oily part) from the pulp (starchy/protein/fiber part) using a centrifuge.
Step 4- Filter off the fiber with some more milling and screening.
Step 5- Centrifuge the remainder, to separate the gluten from the starch.
Step 6- Keep diluting and centrifuging the starch mixture up to 14 times to make sure you’ve got just starch. (I’m pretty sure I could handle this recipe myself up to this point, but I don’t have the right screens and I don’t know where to get sulfur dioxide.)
Step 7- Get some bacteria (Bacillus sp., but I don’t know what the sp. stands for) to make some alpha amylase (that’s an enzyme that occurs naturally in saliva and pancreatic juices).
Step 8- Mix the alpha amylase with the starch. This breaks it down into polysaccharides. I guess if you were trying to do this at home, you could spit in it.
Step 9- Get some aspergillus fungi to make you someglucoamylase.
Step 10- Mix the glucoamylase with the polysaccharide solution. This gets you glucose.
Step 11- Get some D-xylose isomerase. (I don’t know where you get this, or how it’s made.)
Step 12- Mix the D-xylose isomerase with the glucose. This gets you a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose (and some other sugars).
Step 13- Using liquid chromatography, get your fructose level up to 90%. (I don’t think you can get a liquid chromatograph setup for the home kitchen. Not even at Sur La Table.)
Step 14- Blend some of your 90% fructose with the 42% fructose/52% glucose so you have a 55% fructose solution. (SAT mixture problems, anyone?)
Done.

So, corn syrup is sort of made from corn. But I’d argue that it’s made from corn even less than Velveeta is made from milk. (Acknowledged: Beer and cheese are produced in multi-stage processes involving bacteria and/or fungus, too. Also acknowledged: I don’t know what liquid chromatography is, and it probably isn’t scary.)

And it makes rats’ hearts get really big. (I couldn’t find a proper scientific study that actually says their hearts exploded, but this study says “fructose feeding induced significant increases in…left ventricular weight.”)