Dr. Metablog

Feeding Me

I calculate that for the last seventy-five years I've eaten a box of raisins every month (I'm a big fan of raisins and of dried fruit in general). A box of raisins is about 5 inches tall, 4 inches wide and 2 inches deep, or forty cubic inches. In a an average year, I eat 40 x 12 or 480 cubic inches of raisins. If I maintained my raisin-eating pace, it would take me four years to eat through a cubic foot of them. And it follows that in the last seventy-five years I've eaten approximately 19 cubic feet of raisins, which amounts to a stack or block of raisins three feet long, three feet wide and two feet high. That's a heck of a lot of raisins. And that's just raisins --  I'm not even counting table grapes, also eaten plentifully over the decades. And wine.

I myself did not breed, plant, trim, fertilize or harvest the Thompson Seedless or Flame grapes. I did not fence the deer out of the orchard. No did I process the grapes. Nor box, ship, load, unload, or stock them in the market. Someone else made the boxes from wood that another person chainsawed to the ground. I just brought the raisins home from the market and sprinkled them on my oatmeal. Someone else, many someone elses, did all the hard work.  

I wonder how many people and how much accumulated skill it took to provide me with 19 lifetime cubic feet of raisins. 

Then there's milk. I've drunk many many cartons of milk. I'm too lazy to do the calculations, but I'm going to guess that I've consumed a hundred times more cubic feet of milk than I have of raisins. Probably a spacious roomful. And once again, I did not domesticate those fearsome wild European cattle, nor did I breed or milk them, or pasteurize  the milk, or ship it. I did not invent refrigeration, nor did I manufacture or install the refrigerators. I did not drive the milk truck (itself the creation of many hands). I hunted and gathered by walking to the market and plucking a carton (whole milk, vitamin D added) from the case. Easy as pie.

And what about potatoes? And pasta?

I don't think I need to go through any other of the commodities I consume. My point is simple: that it takes a titanic effort by society to keep me me me going. That I am borne on the shoulders of farmers, truckers, engineers, mechanics -- not to mention our neolithic ancestors who first looked at a cow and thought "glass of cold milk" or at a wild grape and thought "those would make good raisins if we could just get the moisture content down."

So to all those people who think they are "independent" and who assert that they can fend for themselves, I say bullshit. If you eat anything at all, you're part of the great web of humanity that stretches around the earth and also extends back 65,000 years.  

So when you sit down to eat, and offer a prayer, don't thank god. Thank your industrious imaginative fellow humans.

 

Bringing Us up to Date on Otzi the Ice Man

Otzi the freeze-dried 5300 year old Tyrolean man/mummy continues to be studied and his corpse regularly yields new information.  

Otzi was about 45 years old, stood 5'3" and weighed only about 110 pounds. He had been wounded with an arrow in the shoulder which pierced an artery. He may have bled to death or, alternatively, died from a blow to the head. He had brown eyes, a dark beard, and long dark brown hair. He was wearing a bearskin hat, a goat loincloth, a goat cloak, and goat leggings with deerskin laces. His shoes were complex -- bearskin soles and deerskin uppers and were lined with hay -- presumably for both comfort and insulation. He had a calfskin belt in which he carried flint and bone tools, including a flint dagger, a large bow and a quiver of chamois hide reinforced with hazelwood. The quiver contained unfinished arrows made of shoots from the guelder rose tree. He had a container constructed of birch bark. He carried equipment for lighting a fire -- a flammable fungus, a piece of pyrite, and a flint. Otzi also carried a woven net for trapping prey and a mat made of grass fibers which probably served as a raincoat. And frameworks of hazel twigs that most likely were snowshoes. His outfit consisted of materials drawn from 18 different kinds of wood. His last meal, consumed two hours before his death, was of various unidentified plant material, and a helping of ibex meat. Otzi was lactose intolerant. His skin was marked in about 50 places with "tattoos" where charcoal had been rubbed into incisions. Some ribs (he lacked a twelfth rib) and his nose bone had been previously broken but had healed. He carried a stone ax with a copper edge --a rare and expensive possession. To judge from the traces of arsenic in his body he might have been a copper smith. An analysis of his mitochondria revealed that he belonged to haplogroup K which was a typical marker of members of the farming culture that was then expanding into Europe. His closest relatives today are found on Corsica and Sardinia. He also belonged to a Y-chromosome haploid group G which which is also associated with migrating farmers. He had a rare mutation known as G-L91 which has been discovered in 19 contemporary residents of the Tyrol. He was not healthy. His knee joints were in bad shape and caused him considerable pain, his teeth were worn down and inflamed, his lungs show traces of soot particles probably from living in badly ventilated spaces. He suffered from Lyme disease, rheumatism, intestinal parasites, hardened arteries, gallstones, and an ugly growth on his little toe perhaps caused by frostbite. It would appear that he had had a hard life.

"Jumping the Broom"

In Charles Dickens' Great Expectations, it is reported that the woman who is eventually revealed to be Estella's mother was married "over the broomstick (as we say), to a tramping man." Dickens offers no explanation for "over the broomstick," apparently assuming that it was a concept with which his readers were familiar. There is in fact a long tradition of 'jumping the broom" to certify informally a marriage sanctioned neither by state or church. It was practiced in west Africa where it symbolized the sweeping away of the old life and of a leap into the new world of fertility and increase. "Jumping the broom" was also a frequent practice in southern American slave culture where legal marriage was prohibited. The custom was a feature of ancient Celtic societies, especially among the Welsh and the Picts. As practiced by the Picts, broom jumping neither predicted nor solicited fertility.  

Yet Another Comcast Experience

I had to change the name on my Comcast -- now they call it Xfinity -- account (internet, TV, "landline"). In the pencil and paper days, you would just cross out the old name and put in the new. But that's not how it works nowadays. I didn't want to call the company and be put on hold for a half an hour, and then accidentally disconnected, which happens pretty regularly, so I drove over to the Xfinity storefront on Baseline. Very slick modern spacious venue. You're supposed to sign in on the computer at the front desk, but the computer was down so they just had a paper sign-up sheet -- embarrassing I would think to the employees to have to resort to something as antique as a written list. I noticed that I was tenth in line and I looked around and I saw that there were only two clerks -- they're probably called "technicians" or some other highfalutin' name, but they're clerks. I guessed a forty-five minute wait and I wasn't far off. I had forgotten to bring my cell phone so I couldn't amuse myself with FB or the NYT or texting friends so I looked at the various items for sale and I immediately felt mighty ignorant. There were all sorts of devices that I didn't know what they did, and if I did recognize them, they were described in language that made not the slightest bit of sense to me. One cellphone, for example, offered both CDMA and GSM. Which is probably a good thing, and maybe someone could explain to me what they do and why you need both of them. And would  I want the cellphone with or without the Qi charger? That sort of thing. There were lots of connectors with fancy plugs for connecting one device to another, which is good if you know what you want to connect, and why, and if you have a solid grasp of your ports. So the forty-five minutes flew by and eventually my name was called and there I was at the counter with this young guy with a scruffy beard that looked like his lifetime growth of facial hair. I explained that I wanted to change the name on the account and he got to work. It seems that you can't just change the name but you have to cancel the one account and set up a new one so we went through the "mother's maiden name" thing and "last four digits of your social" and so on. It seemed to go on forever and every once in a while my technician would look up and say sort of mournfully to me "the computer's kind of slow today." While I was with him, two old guys, older than me, brought their bills to the next technician over and said, essentially, "I don't understand a thing about my bill. What am I paying for. What is this charge." Both guys went away mollified by the explanation but both said that they had to figure out how to reduce the monthly bill. And it's a fact that the monthly bill is rather complex. For example, I don't know why I pay a $6.00 monthly "athletic fee" but the clerk explained that it allows the company to televise high school football and small college football games which means that I'd be able to see Cherry Creek play Fairview or the University of Northern Colorado play Mesa College which is something I suppose though no particular advantage to me inasmuch as I'm personally boycotting all football because of the incidence of traumatic dementia. But that's not the point. It took between half and hour and forty-five minutes for my technician to make all the changes and I signed my name several times to acknowledge this and that which I didn't entirely understand and I was about to leave at last, but my fuzzy-cheeked technician gave me a piece of paper on which he highlighted a telephone number. He said, "There's one more step. When you get home, you call this number and they will "activate" your TV and your internet and your telephone. I said, why don't you just call them, or hand me your telephone and I'll call the activator now but he said that wasn't the way it was done -- I had to call from my home. So I went home picked up the telephone, but it wasn't working. No dial tone. Of course it wasn't working -- it hadn't been "activated." The message on the telephone screen was "check tel line," but of course I had no idea how to do that. How did Xfinity in their wisdom and experience expect a consumer to activate an account from an inactivated telephone. A rather large glitch in the system I would think. However, I'm a resourceful guy so I picked up my cell phone and called the number. I got through immediately and went through the sequence of this press 1 if that press 2 but there was no option for activating, so I said, several times, "I would like to talk to a human being" and after a number of iterations and going around the choices from 1 to 5 I got through to a person. I explained the situation very carefully to my new clerk or technician who sounded as though he could be in India and we did the mother's maiden name thing and the last four digits of your social and I was put on hold several times which always makes me very nervous and finally he came back and said that he was going to transfer me to the "activation unit," who turned out to be a pleasant-voiced lightly-accented woman who was all business, but it took her about half an hour to activate me because Tel 2 kept lighting up on the modem before Tel 1 which is apparently not the way it's supposed to happen. But eventually it came to pass. I asked my new friend where she was physically located and she said "the Philippines." So now I'm back in business and it only took maybe three and a half hours at the very most to change the name on the account. Which is much longer than it took to find out why I had a $13.00 charge including a late payment fee on my Traveler's auto insurance (put on hold twice) or why I'm paying for a electronic newspaper subscription but can't access the newspaper on line (on hold three times), where I eventually gave up and canceled the subscription (it had been a long day).  

What I Said at Our "Event"

"Thank you all for coming. We appreciate it more than you can possibly imagine. We've needed, and relied on, the support that all of you have given us.

It's no secret that both Lynn and I have gone through some difficult times. It's good to host a cheerful event.    

A number of people have asked us about our use of the word "wed" in the invitation that we sent to you. (We said, you remember, that we were 'wed" on June 30). I don't want to mislead you. We didn't mean to imply that we involved either state or church in our relationship. There didn't seem to be any point for us to get married legally. People marry for the sake of children, but we've decided that we're not going to have children.

Here's the story. Lynn and I wanted to acknowledge in a public way the seriousness and permanence of our friendship -- for our families, and, I think, especially for our grandchildren (there are ten of them). We wanted our families to know that our relationship wasn't like some streetcar or trolley that you hop on and hop off. So we decided to invite our most nuclear family to Lynn's backyard garden for a brief "ceremony" -- just my children and grandchildren, her children and grandchildren, her brother, my brother, the various spouses -- and pledge our love and fidelity. But then one of my daughters-in-law, Connie, said that we couldn't ask people to fly in from all over the USA just for a five minute ceremony. She suggested that we at least exchange rings. It seemed like a good idea. So we walked over to Classic Facets on the Pearl Street Mall and bought two not antique but vintage rings -- because we're vintage people. Handsome rings, as you can see. And then as long as everyone was coming here a day early we decided that we should have dinner the night before. And if you're going to have a dinner you might as well have some music. So gradually the "ceremony" evolved and grew. But more importantly -- and here's the point -- the meaning of the event evolved as well. It became more significant, more profound, more intimate. We never liked the phrase "commitment ceremony" or even the word "commitment" because it sounds as though you are being sent either to jail or to a mental institution, and we didn't have the vocabulary for what we intended to do. But little by little, while we planned the event, and even more so, after we performed the ceremony, we began to feel more and more married -- in all the positive senses of the word. We can now say "wed" and mean it. I haven't yet been able to say "husband" or "wife" but I suspect that one day in the not too distant future those words will manifest themselves. But the point is that in all the ways that matter, we are "wed."

When my Vermont friend Bert, who's just my age, got married 18 years ago, I said to him, Bert, is it real --that you're head over heels in love at age 60? At the time, it seemed so improbable. But now, here I am, just a year and a half short of 80, and setting out on a new life. And 60 seems like dewy youth.  

So let me repeat to you now what I said to Lynn on June 30. "I bring you my children and my grandchildren, my prosthetic tooth, my lens implants, my hearing aids, my non-standard but warm heart, and I take you and your children and grandchildren and your titanium hip and arthritic finger and I say, "let us make a life of it."

And let me just add that between us we have been married for 100 years (an average of 50 apiece). So we ought to know what we're doing.

And what we're going to do is to ride this old trolley right to the end of the line."