Crockery

Ah the electric potato peeler, the sandwich grill, the fondue set—the wedding gifts which mark the bounty of your first married garage sale. Maybe you use them once before you write the note—“Thank you so much for the lovely crystal bowl. I’ll think of you every time I dust it. And it goes so nicely with the matching seven others we received.”

The clay cooker I actually used. Maybe it was because I was a new bride and unafraid to try anything. In the kitchen.

First you soak both halves of the clay cooker in water, to allow the clay pores to absorb the moisture. Then as you heat the cooker, you essentially steam cook the food inside, very healthy for you and it seals in the juices and the flavors. It’s especially marvelous with sea bass…. Sorry, I got lost there in the reverie.

So why did I stop using my clay cooker, you may well ask. As you use the clay cooker, it turns colors: black and orange and deeper orange. The terra cotta becomes splotchy, which it’s supposed to do, but that scares me.

As a good little archaeologist, I learned that all ceramics fail eventually. Even CorningWare. However, I’ve never personally known CorningWare to fail, so I figure in a single lifetime, the CorningWare I received at my wedding will outlast me. The clay cooker, on the other hand….

Let’s put it this way: as an archaeologist, I never found a whole pot. I found pot sherds of Sand Tempered Plain and the occasional exciting St. Johns Checked Stamped, but never a piece larger than my hand. THEY ALWAYS BROKE. I don’t know how to emphasize to you that the original peoples of Florida ate sea catfish as much as their clay pots always broke. Perhaps if I didn’t know this fact first hand I’d feel safer putting my cooker into the oven.

Futhermore, you don’t preheat the oven. You place the clay cooker on the cold oven rack, THEN turn the oven on. Everybody knows you can’t shock clay or heat it unevenly; otherwise, the stuff will fly apart like a raw egg in a microwave. Firing kilns are brought up to temperature gradually on a steady increase. However, you put a clay cooker in an electric oven and guess what? That hard, hot element kicks on and shuts off, kicks on and shuts off, jeopardizing the fragile ceramic nature of a clay cooker. This may work more gradually with a gas oven, but I don’t have a gas oven. Thus I live in living fear of opening my oven door…and ruining yet another meal. With my clay cooker, I cannot rest a-sherd.

Smashing!

Most people try to avoid collision; at CERN, they’re seeking God.

It’s hard to talk about Big Bang without an exclamation, but in science, there are a lot of question marks. The beginning of the universe is one of them. Scientists working in Europe have gone underground to look for answers. They’ve been tunneling for over twenty years, and they’re only going around in circles.

If you thought Michael Phelps was fast, try seventeen miles 11,000 times per second, approaching the speed of enlightenment.

Collision may be cause for con-CERN; however, we would never have the Reece’s Peanut Butter Cup if it weren’t for the peanut butter running into the chocolate bar, and the chocolate bar running into the peanut butter. Sometimes collision is good. Sometimes it’s delicious. It could mean the end of the world.

Modern chemistry says things are made up of more than mere earth, wind, fire, and water. Water, for instance, is made of two hydrogens to one oxygen, and you may need to drink a lot of it if you use the NaCl shaker too much. Yes, science has rearranged the alphabet into the periodic table of elements, but it still comes down to a tool of description.

Each square of the checkered table has a little number indicating mass. Everything has mass. Even gas has mass. This is the curiosity. This is the question. When you think of the spirit world, or non-existence, non-mass can be a primary function. So if existence equates with mass, what lends mass to existence? Nuclear physicists posit there is a Higgs boson, nicknamed the God Particle, which gives mass to everything.

The world might end later this month when they do get those beams up to full speed and collide them, but I never could get the hang of September anyway.

May your day be fused with many happy occurrences!

Albert Bierstamp

To squeeze a Bierstadt painting on a postage stamp is mail fraud. His works ranged over six feet by ten feet, yet he’s been reduced to a one by one-and-a-half inch frame.

Albert Bierstadt painted canvases appropriate to the size of the American West. Founder of the Rocky Mountain School of Painting, his work is criticized for unrealistic lighting. Presumably those critics have never been to the Rocky Mountains, where light does bounce around clouds, off rock faces, a little stream here, a larger pool there, illuminating all kinds of depth in features you never thought possible. Okay, maybe Bierstadt gave the romance of sunset or storm, but I gotta tell ya, those storms are fast and violent and they move over the landscape quickly and dramatically and frequently. And sunsets do occur just about every day. Bierstadt captures the primordial, natural setting, where small detail stands out, even among grand majesty.

Despite his critics, Bierstadt was hugely successful even in his own lifetime. He made twenty-five thousand dollars off one painting. One painting. In the late Eighteen Hundreds! Now he’s offered on a first class stamp for forty-two cents. Talk about your downsizing—sheesh.

You cannot fit the American West on a postage stamp. You have to go there, and if you cannot go, standing before an original Bierstadt painting is a wonderful next-best-thing.

Fast Food

God invented fast food. From the time of Eden, to when Sir Isaac Newton got pelted on the head with an apple, we were doomed to the drive-thru lifestyle.

(Stupid Newton, though, instead of founding McDonald’s, he discovers gravity. Yes, gravity has over three billion served, but how much profit did Sir Isaac make from it? Even Fig Newtons come nowhere close to burger revenue.)

Eve had the right idea. Ever since that night in the garden when Eve said, “Oh honey, let’s don’t worry about inventing fire tonight. We can just eat these apples right off the tree!” Ever since that night, she recognized that FOOD REALLY DOES GROW ON TREES!

You cannot make a home-cooked meal between soccer and PTA. However, bananas come pre-wrapped in their own peel, grapes are already bite-sized, and an apple fits nicely in your hand. These foods are fast, portable, pre-packaged and require no refrigeration.

I’m not so much an advocate of “Slow Food” per se, as I am promoting what’s already at hand and up to speed. You don’t have to change your pace to eat right.