IMPROVE YOUR COFFEE part TWO

When this coffee mug went into the oven it was white as a dog's tooth. I had hand-washed, machine washed and air dried it. I put it, and about twenty other mugs into the oven for one hour at 450 degrees F. To my eye they were spotlessly clean, yet an hour later it looked like somebody had dipped a toothbrush in pine tar and got creative. There were some blobs that looked like they had been applied with an eyedropper where the handle connects to the cup. There were a lot of water level streaks on the inside as shown in the picture. Most of the cups had a small concentration on both sides of the rim where my lips contact the cup, as you might expect. Unexpected was the concentration of stain on the inside of the rim opposite the part my lips touch, the part my nose comes closest to.

It was there all along, affecting the taste and aroma of my coffee, even though I didn't know it. I never scrubbed hard enough to remove it because it was invisible. I thought I was cleaning my stoneware when I wasn't. Baking the mugs at log-fire temperatures burned the oils made them visible. Now that they're gone, I think my coffee tastes better.

To give an idea of how much invisible crud had built up on 20 mugs, when I opened the oven door my fire alarm went off.

I don't know what the invisi-crud is. It could be oils and proteins from contact with my own skin. It could also be connected to the aromatic oils I found on my coffee filters in IMPROVE YOUR COFFEE from SHORT RANTS volume 22. Wherever it comes from, now you know how to make it visible so you can remove it.

RTJ-12/7/2007

PAUL GREENBERG GETS IT WRONG

Arkansas Democrat/Gazette, Sunday, January 20th, Paul Greenberg's Column One article, paragraph 12. Mr. Greenberg is comparing Robert E. Lee to Dr. Martin Luther King. He writes: "Talk about gentle as the dove and cunning as the serpent, Dr. King personified that definition of Christian."

The text is from Matthew 10:16. Jesus is sending his desciples out to minister among the lost sheep of Israel, who are more hostile to his ministry than are gentiles on account of his criticism of the Pharisees. So he tells his people to be extra super duper careful this time, saying, "(16)I am sending you out like sheep among wolves. Therefore be as shrewd as snakes and as innocent as doves. (17)Be on your guard against men; they will hand you over to the local councils and flog you in their synagogues."

The "shrewd as serpents" thing is advice for those twelve abostles while ministering in Israel only, not a definition of Christian, not advice to all Christians for all time. It might be Mr. Greenberg's opinion of Christians, but cunning is not Christian teaching, not essential to Christian character, as Mr. Greenberg defines.

And I'm not sure it's the most respectful thing to do on the day before the observance of MLK day to compare Dr. King to a serpent. I don't think he meant it to be taken that way, but he's an experienced newspaper editor with a Pulitzer; and he should have anticipated that it could be taken that way.

Also, the phrase "the serpent" is one way Christians refer to the devil. He could have softened it a bit by saying "cunning as a serpent." He chose not to.

RTJ-1/20/2008

MATTHEW 23:23

"Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You give a tenth of your spices -- mint, dill and cummin. but you have neglected the more important matters of the law -- justice, mercy and faithfulness...."

This verse is typical of Jesus' criticism of the Priests and Pharisees. He thought they were corrupt, unjust, greedy, lazy, wicked, blah blah blah. Fine.

But what about that list of herbs and spices. Dill, cummin and mint. Was that a miscellaneous selection of spices chosen by Jesus for rhetorical purposes, or is there some particular reason that these three things are associated with the ruling elite? Jerusalem sits at the crossroads of Europe, Africa and Asia. Every imaginable spice and herb would have been available to the temple fat cats. Why did Jesus select these three out of hundreds of possibilites when talking about the ruling elite?

Mint is easy to grow. Plant it in your garden and you'll never get rid of it. Dill likewise self-sows, grows anywhere and is impervious to pests and diseases. Cummin can be grown all over the Medeterranean. These things were not expensive or hard to get. Jesus was not using them as examples of extravagance or excess. He might have been making a sarcastic reference about how the tightwad civic leaders were tithing the cheapest spices they could get their hands on.

Consider another possibility. Maybe these three herbs and spices had some associations with the Temple Elite. "Ever notice how every Pharisee house has that same dill-cummin-mint smell? What's up with that?" "You smell like chili powder and tic-tacs. Are you a Pharisee?" That combination isn't mentioned anywhere else in the Bible, so I'm speculating with one data point. Maybe this combination of spices was part of the uniform, a way that a true Pharisee could spot a phony who showed up wearing the outfit.

Suppose this combination had properties useful to the Temple Elite above and beyond just making food taste better. Herbs and spices have been used as medicine forever. Ginger, for example, zaps nausea in just a few seconds.

The Priests, Pharisees and Levites daily concerned themselves with the most dangerous technology in the land, namely the Ark of the Covenant. In the book of Samuel, seventy Levites were killed when they tried to look under the hood. Also in Samuel, the Philistines who had captured the Ark in battle returned it to the Israelites because it was causing tumors in people who came near it. The Ark could consume nearby objects in fire, and once, two sons of Aaron were consumed along with an offereing when they didn't back away fast enough. The Ark can also make a loud thunderclap and cause panic attacks and it'll kill you if you touch it without wearing the proper ceremonial robes, or hazmat suit as the case may be.

On top of that, Priests dealt daily with all kinds of personal afflictions, everything from skin rashes to household mildew, demon posessions, leprosy, curses, and other punishment for sins bestowed by The Lord, whose presence was in the Ark, which was there in the Temple.

In short, the Ark (a.k.a. the Presence of The Lord) was a big box of fear, pain, disease and misery and it was dangerous to work around. Everybody who had to work in the Temple complex would have taken any and all precautions against being afflicted by it. Then there were all these diseases and afflictions which were presumed to be the direct result of sin. Who sinned was determined by the Temple Elite gossiping in the Place of the Meeting and then punishement was meted out by The Lord, whose presence was in the Ark, which was just over there behind that curtain.

So these fat cats were messing with dangerous stuff all day every day. Anything they could do to protect themselves from accidental exposure, they would do. That would extend to clothing, diet, behavior, hygeine, prayer, whatever worked. I've got an undergraduate degree in biology, and I worked in an environmental testing laboratory for several years, so I tend to read things in terms of that idiom. If you read the book of Leviticus like I do, about two-thirds of it is hazmat protocol and sterile microbiology laboratory procedure.

These three spices and herbs, dill-cummin-mint, mentioned by Jesus as being particularly associated with the Pharisees and Priests, might be an antidote to or prophyllactic against some of the hazards encountered when hanging around the holy of holies on a daily basis. Perhaps they have antimicrobial properties that keep stray microbes from culturing in the offerings which they are required to eat. In any case, I don't think Jesus' mention of those three herbs and spices was arbitrary.

RTJ-2/17/2008

THE BEVERLY HILLBILLIES

I was watching the Beverly Hillbillies the other day, comparing the TV show to the Beverly Hillbillies movie that was released several years ago. The TV show was written by an authentic Ozarker. The movie was written by the usual Hollywood machine. Here's what I came up with.

The character of Sonny Drysdale in both the TV show and the movie is an angst-ridden, financially dependant, emotionally fragile, physically timid indoor type. He can't do anything for himself, and in a physicall confrontation it's Ellie May who does his fighting for him. In the TV show, he's an object of ridicule and scorn. In the movie, he's the hero. That should give you an idea of the difference in world views embraced in the Ozarks and in Hollywood.

RTJ-2/23/2008

STORIES FROM THE PARK

While strolling trhough the park one day.... I didn't write that line. I borrowed it from an old song. Normally I would have simply used it as a cliche and moved on, figuring that if a quote is familiar enough to the intended reader it doesn't need to be footnoted. Ever watch an episode of the Simpsons and count the unattributed cultural references? Nobody ever accuses them of plagiarism, but a politician dares to quote a passage from a famous speech of another politician without muddying up the prose with disclaimers and footnotes.... Where was I? Oh, yeah, the park.

Strolling through the park one day I was nearing the end of my hike, maybe three hundred yards from the parking lot and the visitor's center when I happened upon a young couple. They weren't doing anything, just standing there about six feet apart. He had his pants off. He had on his shirt, his socks, his tidy whities and a big grin. She was turned away so I couldn't see her face.

I said, "Hello, nice day," and I walked on past.

Now here's the unusual part. Four months earlier I saw another couple on the trail in the same park, and the guy had his pants off. I happened on this guy at a spot that gets a lot of hiker traffic and he was hurriedly pulling on his pants. I asked him if he was taking a dump. He said no, he was mooning people as they came by and his wife was taking pictures. I look back fifty or so yards away and sure enough there's this woman with a camera and a big lens.

That day when I got back to the visitor center I reported the incident.

Now back to the more recent incident. In the ten minutes between the incident and the visitor center I had time to think. Do I want to report this to the ranger? Two similar incidents in such a short period of time. I know what's going to happen. The ranger is going to get in his car. He's going to drive all the roads in the park. He's not going to find anything, and even though I've been hiking in that park twice a week for twelve years I will suddenly become the guy who sees nekkid people in the park. No matter whatever else you've accomplished in life, that's your new reputation. You might have written the Great American Novel. You might be a medical researcher who discovered a cure for the epizootic. Not any more. You're the guy who "sees" nekkid people, they say as they use a finger to stir the air next to their heads. You don't want to be that guy. You don't want to be the guy who sees sasquatch, and unless you have a carcass or a caged specimen, don't even bother reporting an ivory-billed woodpecker or a gowrow.

This is why airline pilots don't report flying saucers. Some day you might want to be taken seriously, although in my case I'm afraid that boat has sailed. So nekkid boy and the mis'ess got a free pass that day for no better reason that I had recently reported an almost identical incident. I haven't seen any pantless people in the park for several months now, and I look forward to many more years of uneventful hikes.

RTJ-2/26/2008

TAKING BETS ON NOSTRADAMUS

Sooner or later somebody is going to break the code on Nostradamus' prophecies, and when that happens it will be discovered that the Prophecies are a disguise for a medical manual. That's my bet.

In plague plagued medieval Europe, Nostradamus was a famous physician with a very high cure rate. He apparently had some medical knowledge that his contemporaries lacked. This knowledge would have been a physician's valuable collection of trade secrets. Since intellectual property was not protected by copyrights and patents in those days, people protected such property with codes, ciphers, disguises and allegories.

Some day some smart guy is going to excerpt all the latin words from the prophecies and discover that they make a list of botannicals, recipes for tinctures and extracts, lists of symptoms and sterile procedures, all the successful techniques he used in treating the medieval plagues. Or the latin words might fit together to explain how to decipher the french words. That'd be nice,but probably not. I can't imagine that hasn't been tried in five hundred years.

There's a famous quatrain concerning a star called "Wormwood." Wormwood is a commonly used medicinal plant, and in a book written by a doctor it's the only one mentioned. It's like a big red flag to any herbalist in any generation. It's as if you're reading The Chronicles of Narnia and the hero hops in a boat and sets sail for the island of Indomethacin. Maybe that's a whimsical name for an island and maybe it isn't. If you're a doctor or a pharmacist, the name of that island doesn't seem at all arbitrary to you. You would examine that book for other references to common drugs.

If you guess that this is a book of medicine, this is where you start. If he's using a substitution code, the Wormwood quatrain, possibly the word "wormwood" itself, is likely going to be the key Nostradamus left under the doormat. Wormwood would find its way into a lot of recipes, so check each line of the book for anagrams of Wormwood. (I'm assuming that each line is a separate anagram.) While you're at it, check every line for anagrams other of commonly used medical words like "fever," "poultice," "nausea," "bandage," "pain," and "swelling."

If I'm right, that Nostradamus is a big book of anagrams, these words will show up a lot and the Nostradamus code will crack like a paintball and all the doomers and gloomers who try to retrofit history into Nostradamus will have to get real jobs. If I'm wrong, this is the fastest way to determine I'm wrong.

The idea of disguising the meanings of prophecies with imagery and allegory doesn't make sense. He'd have no reason to obscure the names of people who wouldn't be born for five hundred years. He would, however, have a financial incentive to obscure the names of the roots and herbs that made up Granny's cold cure (or Cousin Skeeter's barbecue sauce), so that's what I think the "prophecies" are all about. Salves and ointments from five centuries ago.

RTJ-2/29/2008

Want to argue about it? Send me mail.