things that keep me up at night
I’ve been noticing that more and more computer jargon and abbreviations have been creeping into the New York Times Crossword puzzles. Here are a few –
ISP – Internet Service Provider
LAN – Local Area Network
URL – Uniform Resource Locator
and of course…
blog – We-b log – A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”
There are twelve Max’s out here in Northern California. Some of them are Opera Cafes, some Diner’s but they all have a New York deli style menu. Our family met for lunch at the one in Palo Alto this week. Max’s has a giant menu. There are daily specials (meat loaf on Wednesday), giant sandwiches, soups, salads, and dinner-type entrees. There’s also an extensive list of desserts but I’ve never had one of those so I can’t comment on their quality. I think at Max’s your experience depends on what you order. For instance, John always gets the cabbage soup and half a corned beef sandwich on rye. He loves it. I think it carries him back to eating deli in Chicago when he was growing up. Jon and Sarah had the Cobb salad which they both seemed to really enjoy. It is a composed salad with avocado, blue cheese, turkey, bacon, egg, tomato and marinated mushrooms sitting atop a mound of dressed lettuce. Ryan had a half turkey sandwich and matzoh ball soup. I noticed that she didn’t eat much of the sandwich. My problem with the turkey sandwich is that they serve it without condiments on floppy white bread. There are condiments on the table but no mayonnaise – mostly mustard based spreads. But maybe she just got full and the sandwich was perfectly okay. I had grilled vegetables on foccacia. Not a good choice. The vegetables were undercooked and cold. It had a nice small Caesar salad with it. My real choice, if I weren’t always concerned with trying to eat lo-cal, would be a corned beef and chopped liver sandwich. I know, sounds gross, but oh so yummy. Unfortunately, Max’s loads their chopped liver with big hard-cooked egg pieces which totally messes it up. So if you’d like to try this combo, find somewhere else to order it.
P.S. Since the bill came to $80 for the five of us, this is not a cheap eats lunch place.
Family grade (I’m guessing) – B
Marymom’s grade – C-
TODAY’S WORRY
Today there was an article from AP-Health titled, “CDC Links Extra Pounds, Lower Death Risk.” It seems that perhaps earlier studies were incorrect in telling us that if we carried some extra weight we might as well start picking out our coffins. There is instead a benefit in weighing more than the guidelines say. In fact, skinny old people have an increased risk of dying! Of course, they are not talking about really obese people. Obese people are still at an increased risk due to high cholesterol, high blood pressure and diabetes. But for all you people who are obsessing about that extra 10-20 pounds? Relax. It’s okay now. And I just want to thank all the people who did the earlier studies who made us feel desperately awful about ourselves.
The word for today is pulchritude. It is a noun meaning great physical beauty and appeal especially in women.
Perhaps we have overlooked the pulchritude of the zaftig woman. (look it up yourself!)
Be moderate in your food choices, passionate in your exercise and extreme in self-esteem.
TODAY’S COMMENT
What is it about ritual we enjoy so much? In our family, we have three big rituals a year – Christmas, Thanksgiving and Passover. We usually try to do them on the actual day of the holiday but sometimes that just doesn’t work with everybody’s schedule. So Christmas might be a day or two late or Thanksgiving , a week early. Last night, five nights early, we celebrated Passover. No one in our family is religious but we still like this holiday (ditto for Christmas.) We eat the same large dinner with the same components, we sing the same songs and make the same stupid jokes every year. Just like the clues at Christmas or the menu of “must have” food at Thanksgiving, the ritual is what binds us together, defines our little family “club” and actually makes us, us.
The word “seder” comes from the Hebrew meaning order. At a seder you have a booklet called a haggadah telling the story of the Jews’ departure from Egypt. There are several ceremonial foods including matzoh, haroses (a mixture of wine, nuts, and apples), horseradish and parsley. The significance of each of these are explained in the book; such as, “this matzoh, why do we eat it?” I’ve often thought it would be great if Thanksgiving had a similar book with lines such as, “these creamed onions, why do we eat them?” or “what does this cranberry sauce mean to you?”
seder – The feast commemorating the exodus of the Jews from Egypt, celebrated on the first night or the first two nights of Passover.
The problem for overweight people is that every day is either a celebration with its accompanying gastronomical delights or a depression that needs to be fed. Oh, to be a thin, even-tempered bore!
TODAY’S WORRY
Yesterday, we left Barstow, California around 7 AM. It might have been a little later because we filled an extra cup of coffee for the road. We had to make a couple of four-way stops before we got on the highway. Since Route 58 isn’t all freeway, we had to slow down for the light at Lenwood Road but after that averaged between 65 and 70 miles an hour all the way to Kramer’s Junction which is about 33 miles from Barstow. As I slowed down because I wasn’t sure whether the light would stay green, a large truck pulled out causing me to slow further, then someone crossed the street , and one of those double semis took the opportunity to pull in ahead of me. We went quite slowly since it took such a big truck a while to pick up speed. About two miles up the road traffic came to a halt. There had been a head-on collision between a materials tanker truck and a Saturn. The accident, which was a fatality, happened at 7:35 AM. The distance from our starting point was about 35 miles. All the little things that we did, saying an extra word to the hotel receptionist, filling an extra cup of coffee, slowing down for trucks and pedestrians, kept us about 5 minutes behind the time of the accident.
In the classic example of Chaos Theory, “the flapping of a single butterfly’s wing today produces a tiny change in the state of the atmosphere. Over a period of time, what the atmosphere actually does diverges from what it would have done. So, in a month’s time, a tornado that would have devastated the Indonesian coast doesn’t happen. Or maybe one that wasn’t going to happen, does. (Ian Stewart, Does God Play Dice? The Mathematics of Chaos, pg. 141)”
So all the little things we did seem to have kept us out of harm’s way but perhaps if we hadn’t done them, the results of that morning might have been completely different for everyone involved.
Kismet – fate or fortune
Kismet comes, via Turkish, from Arabic qismah, portion, lot.