The rhythm of the semester

Slightly grumpy about the fact that train delays meant that I didn't get to 10am hot yoga - I waited on the platform for a few minutes to see if predicted train time (15min - usually it takes me 15min door to door!) would be reduced, but it didn't seem the odds were good that I'd get there in time for class, so I went and got cooked breakfast instead at the Deluxe Diner. Morning task is checking the PDF of my style index - if I can get a chunk of work done on that, maybe I can go to 12:30 yoga instead....

I am finding this semester's work genuinely stimulating and fresh, but it is also kicking my ass! Again slept for 4 hours yesterday afternoon due to cumulative fatigue of the week. Busy week ahead, including evening work things on Wednesday and Thursday - but then I am flying to see B. very early Friday morning. I have to take quite a lot of work with me, but there will be spinning and a 3hr outdoor ride and yoga for sure as well.

Very small amounts of light reading around the edges of slightly insane piles of work reading: Ian Rankin, Saints of the Shadow Bible; Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes (latest installment in the Rivers of London series). I still want someone to make a massive chart of how the fantasy police-procedural mode snowballed into a dominant subgenre - I suspect that there are strong television antecedents that are largely outside my ken (Doctor Who?).

Closing tabs:

At the Guardian, Andy Beckett on the lasting impact of Raymond Williams' Keywords.

Leslie Jamison on the syndrome called Morgellons (her forthcoming collection is The Empathy Exams).

Last but not least, an astonishing demonstration of the behaviour-warping allure of fried potatoes!

Mouth feel

The section on potato chips is a must-read! Here is a snippet I liked:

The food technicians stopped worrying about inventing new products and instead embraced the industry’s most reliable method for getting consumers to buy more: the line extension. The classic Lay’s potato chips were joined by Salt & Vinegar, Salt & Pepper and Cheddar & Sour Cream. They put out Chili-Cheese-flavored Fritos, and Cheetos were transformed into 21 varieties. Frito-Lay had a formidable research complex near Dallas, where nearly 500 chemists, psychologists and technicians conducted research that cost up to $30 million a year, and the science corps focused intense amounts of resources on questions of crunch, mouth feel and aroma for each of these items. Their tools included a $40,000 device that simulated a chewing mouth to test and perfect the chips, discovering things like the perfect break point: people like a chip that snaps with about four pounds of pressure per square inch.

Stackables

I was intrigued to learn earlier today that the inventor of the Pringles can was so proud that he asked for his ashes to be interred in one; further illumination arrives via Alexis Madrigal (and a surprising sequel featuring a can of Pringles and a very young Brad Pitt).

(I well remember the first Pringles I ever encountered as a child. I was probably five years old? They were not in the can; they had been laid out, decoratively, on some sort of a platter at the house of a family we knew from Montessori school, and they struck me as so much the most sublimely delicious food that I basically couldn't believe they existed. The only other early food encounter that holds a candle to it is my first time eating meringues, at my Aunt Pauline's house. Really Pringles and meringues have a certain amount in common [lack of substantiality, simple saltiness or sweetness], and they are both still foods that I can get pretty excited about, though it happens more frequently that I encounter a Pringle than a meringue...)

Workload breakdown

At the Times, a delightful piece by Alicia DeSantis on "This Progress" in light of its being done. Some very funny quotations in there, many of which I endorse (I was much less grumpy than usual on the last day because the break room was full of donut holes, mini-cupcakes and possibly the most delicious chocolate-chip cookies I have ever eaten in my life, baked by a teen who I happened to see on campus the next day as I hurried into Schermerhorn for a meeting - she was forlorn, the show was over!):

The schedule could be grueling even for much younger interpreters, who, unlike their elders, were unpaid. (They did receive a hat, bag and a museum membership; adults were paid $18.75 an hour, teenagers $7.25 an hour.) Solomon Dworkin, an 11-year-old sixth grader at the School at Columbia University who was one of the oldest children in the piece, said many of the younger ones had trouble with the pace of 40 to 50 interactions a day, 60 to 70 on weekends.

“They had a workload breakdown,” he said. “They would have liked more snacks.”

Some of the problem may have had to do with the intellectual rigors of the job. The younger children were “all pretty smart for their age,” he said, but “I’ve never met a 7-year-old who can match an 11-year-old in a conversation about philosophy.”

Cockles and mussels

Archeologists sift through remains to determine Elizabethan theatergoers' snack preferences:

The preferred snacks for Tudor theatre-goers appear to have been oysters, crabs, cockles, mussels, periwinkles and whelks, as well as walnuts, hazelnuts, raisins, plums, cherries, dried figs and peaches.

Some clues even suggest that 16th-century fans of William Shakespeare and Christopher Marlowe also ploughed through vast quantities of elderberry and blackberry pie – and some may even have snacked on sturgeon steaks.

Bonus link: a nice WNYC piece about Tino's Guggenheim exhibit - I did a shift this afternoon, it was quite tiring but also very enjoyable...

"Tempting little rectangles"

The Spam cook of the year.

"Daddy's dirtied up his room already"

I have been enjoying the review coverage of Penelope Fitzgerald's recently released collection of letters. Hilary Spurling's piece at the Observer is particularly good:

Fitzgerald's regular bulletins, like Mr Pooter's, involve a good deal of shopping ('I've bought a new vest in M&S'), housework ('It's always a great thing to have the spring cleaning started by Palm Sunday') and brushing her best coat with a damp brush to get rid of hairs that invariably return ('They appear to be growing out of the coat while my back is turned').

She drinks tea in the morning, dyes her hair with teabags and unpicks a pair of red woollen gloves so as to knit them together again. Some of these rites are so arcane it's hard to tell if they are genuinely eccentric or simply the domestic routines of a bygone age.

The highlights are studiously modest. One February, Fitzgerald got an unsigned Valentine card accompanied by '2 bottles of sno-pack for eliminating typing errors'. Invited by the Guardian to name her wishes for the world in 1998, she 'couldn't think of anything except to abolish off-road motoring and have those little packets of salt in crisps again'. Even on the night she won the Booker Prize as an outsider with Offshore, the best moment came, by her own account, when the editor of the Financial Times inspected the cheque and said to Booker's company chairman: '"Hmph, I see you've changed your chief cashier." Both their faces were alight with interest.'