Category: junk thought

Picky (Apple Axiom)

My first taste of Christmas this year involved Alton Brown’s Good Eats – and I learned something during the show which answered a long standing question I’ve had.

Snow White meets the guy in charge of the local produce section

How and why does a single rotten apple ruin the barrel?

First, a little background from botany.org

In addition, ethylene promotes fruit ripening. Like many hormones, it does so at very low concentrations. Apple growers take advantage of this by picking fruit when it is not ripe, holding it in enclosed conditions without ethylene, and exposing it to ethylene right before taking it to market. This process is why we have newly ripened apples grown in temperate North America even in the spring and summer (apples ripen in the fall).

Ethylene acts as the signal for apples to ripen, but if that signal never reaches them, they can apparently be kept – unrefrigerated – for three or four months. The suggested method is to wrap each apple individually in newspaper, then simply store.

The trick is, you’ve got to be careful not to store a bruised fruit alongside your good ones – the bruise will throw off gouts of ethylene, causing your one bad apple to ripen the rest too early, and spoil the bunch.
Snow White Witch with Apple

Meese

Logging Moose(This image is a Photoshop-ed fake, but an interesting one.)

In a recent story, The Elg Herra, I greatly enjoyed turning moose from the forlorn forest roamers that they are, and into massive war mounts and beasts of burden.

I did get some guff about the unlikeliness of domesticating such an animal, but, in truth, I certainly wasn’t the first to consider attempting to tame the lanky monsters.

From the wikipedia:

Domestication of moose was investigated in the Soviet Union before World War II. Early experiments were inconclusive, but with the creation of a moose farm at Pechora-Ilych Nature Reserve in 1949 a small-scale moose domestication program was started, involving attempts at selective breeding of animals based on their behavioural characteristics. Since 1963, the programme has continued at Kostroma Moose Farm, which had a herd of 33 tame moose as of 2003.

Moose Drawn CarriageThis picture, originally found on Archives Alberta, depicts people carrying out activity not unlike that mentioned in the story.

The unusual beasts of burden pictured here were a pair of moose, hand-raised by owner Peachy Prouden. The photo was taken at Athabasca Landing, Alberta in 1898.

Although snapped 60 years after the time of the Blackhall tales, this was coincidentally taken just east of where Thomas first encounters the Moose Lords of the Northern Reaches.

Also, Peachy Prouden is a fantastic name.

By Sky or Sea

I’ve once again fallen in love with a technology that doesn’t yet exist.
aircraft/sail boatYelken Octuri, the creator, works for a plane manufacturer based in Toulouse, but in his spare time he designs fantastic craft that deserve a life of their own.

Normally I try to avoid chasing rainbows that will likely never come to fruition, but there’s something so intuitive about the design that it feels like this is closer to reality than most of the other digital daydreams that I run across.
plane modeI can only hope for a future where fishermen and pleasure-seekers flit over the glass surface of a summer lake like dragonflies.

Touched By A Drug Addled Angel

St James gives Charlemagne's soul a helping hand
Santiago, the capital of Chile, was founded by the Spanish Conquistador Pedro de Valdivia in 1541. The Spanish, not being particularly welcome in the neighbourhood, were met with some resistance from the natives.

The Inca ruler Manco Cápac II warned the new rulers that his Indigenous people would be hostile to the occupiers. – Wikipedia

This was a bit of an understatement, as the few hundred Spanish at the site were quickly inundated by thousands of natives who were annoyed with the land grab.

So why do we still have a city of Santiago at all? Was it the Spanish’s guns and armour that saved them? Gumption and technology?

Not according to the conquistadors.

Santiago Appearance

This is a footnote from The Spaniards: An Introduction to Their History By Américo Castro, Willard F. King, Selma Margaretten, but the book I originally read about this incident in, Lost Explorers*, pointed out that, while it was a useful bit of propaganda for the Spanish to claim that St. James (Sant Yago) arrived on the scene on his spectral pony, wearing a crisp waistcoat and bearing a white lance and shield, it’s hard to understand why the heavily overwhelming native force apparently suffered a mass delusion and broke into retreat.

1657 St James The Great In The Battle Of Juan Carre o de Miranda

While I personally don’t believe that a martial phantasm came down to take up the Spanish cause, I do believe the practice of chewing coca leaves was common amongst the South American population of the time.

* I apologize for the lack of further attribution, I’m physically well away from the book at the moment, and can’t recall the author’s name.

Old Time Gamblin'

Copyright Darren Kirby (Click For Original)cIf I might once again refer to the song Stagger Lee for a moment:

I was standing on the corner
When I heard my bulldog bark
He was barkin’ at the two men
Who were gamblin’ in the dark
It was Stagger Lee and Billy
Two men who gambled late
Stagger Lee threw seven
Billy swore that he threw eight

Whatever happened to old time gambling? The skeazy craps game is a classic fixture of a certain period of crime fiction – it seems as long as we’ve had alleys, we’ve had indigents hoping for a 7 or 11. I mean, dubious men tossing dice is a concept that goes at least all the way back to the Roman legion of the bible.

Cowboy Craps, original source unknownYet, these days, you don’t hear much about it. Maybe I’m just running with the wrong crowd, but it feels like sometime in the late-80s or early-90s, the on-the-street-casinos started to lose traction, at least in the popular consciousness.

So what happened?

Well, when the gin racket was run by criminals, the American government brought them down by simply legalizing and controlling the product. My suggestion is that we no longer have a large contingent of people tossing the bones because we’ve found new dim alleyways online.

Why pull on that heavy leather jacket and stand out in the cold when you can just as easily bilk a table full of grandmas from the comfort of your own home (or a public internet cafe)?

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZtmvvarZLwg]

Musical Spine

George 2007George Of The Jungle is a cartoon show about a man wearing animal skins swinging around the jungle. The newest iteration, launched in 2007, has pulled in high enough ratings that they’ve been allowed more than one season, but the original, launched in 1967, ran only seventeen episodes.

So what?

Well, I have a theory. George, frankly, isn’t very good. It’s too ridiculous for older children, and is entirely devoid of the educational content that assuages parental guilt about letting a small child watch TV. Both versions of the show strike me as perfect examples of mediocre television, run only to fill time for kids being babysat by the glass teat.

Old George

One of the truly weird aspects of its continued existence is the fact that this generation isn’t even really all that familiar with Tarzan, which the series is a direct spoof of – there hasn’t been a major iteration of the ape man in over a decade, although I suppose they may be familiar with the Phil Collins-filled Disney version.

So why is it still on?

My theory is that it’s the theme song. The theme song is also what got the 1997 movie, starring Brendan Frasier, made.

How could a theme song have reached out from 37 years previous to get a major motion picture put together?

Well, it was this remake, as done by Weird Al in 1985. My belief is that Al, looking for material, reached back into his childhood years and pulled out the one redeeming item that had stuck with him from the original cartoon, the music.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VJDmkCDqzFU]

Maybe it was a young go-getter, maybe it was a studio exec with a kid constantly playing Weird Al, but at some point the licensing must have crossed some listener’s desk, and the spark of resurrection was born.

I realize it may sound crazy, but: how many people can honestly say they’ve seen Saturday Night Fever? How many people are familiar with it because of Stayin’ Alive (the song, not the sequel film)?

Staying Alive

The original Shaft is another great example. A lot of folks know who is the man that would risk his neck for his brother man, but, when pressed on the details, they’ve got little info. Still, Samuel L. Jackson shafted us all out of admission fees in 2000.

Eye Of The Tiger got three or four more Rocky movies made, and the catchy Pink Panther theme launched an entire franchise separate from the Peter Sellers character.

I’m sure there are many missing examples, please feel free to chastise me with their titles in the comments.

The Real Thanksgiving?

Counterfeit $10This suite101 page got me thinking about the American Thanksgiving – and its follow up pseudo-event, Black Friday – and how they’re an interesting combination of history and materialism.

Massachussetts authorized the first mint in British North America in 1652. The mint created silver coins. Some were stamped with NE for “New England” or had images of trees.

Of course, 1652 seems a little late in the game to be utilizing legal tender, so what did people do before that?

It wasn’t all just British coinage:

Wampum in Rhode Island was made from white whelk shells and purple quahog shells. The quahog shells were worth twice as much as the whelk shells in the Indian economy.

With gold and silver coins in short supply, the colonist agreed to accept the wampum as legal tender.

I love the romantic notion of using a naturally occurring resource as legal tender, but, to return to the first American mint as an example, ne’er-do-wells will often crop up.

[The silver coins] also became the first coins counterfeited in America. John duPlessis was convicted of counterfeiting these coins in 1674.

How bad was it?

In 1682, William Penn complained that he could not bring his ‘holy experiment’ in Pennsylvania to fruition when half the coinage in the colony was phony.

Yikes – so, maybe we should all head back to the naturalistic idea of trading shells?

It wasn’t long before the Indians realized that here was an opportunity to take advantage of the newcomers. They hoarded the valuable quahog shells for themselves, dyed the cheaper white shells a dark purplish black, then passed them off as the real thing to undiscerning Europeans.

If there’s a lesson here, I think it has something to do with high-end laser printers.

Happy Thanksgiving to my American friends!