Cooking Every Other Week 2024

11/23/2024 by Pat Shiplett 7 Comments

The man surprised his wife by offering to do the cooking every other week. He’d been listening to public radio.Barely an evening went by without someone telling her how wonderful her kitchen smelled. But they weren’t allowed to ask what was on the menu before dinner was served.

Her husband always washed the dishes. It was an arrangement both of them found comfortable.

One evening he surprised her by offering to do the cooking every other week. “It’s only fair,” he said. He’d been shamed by a domestic-equity expose on NPR.

He had recipes from his single days but he was determined to expand his repertoire beyond ground beef. To his credit he never resorted to emergency scrambled eggs.

He learned from The Food Network which spices combine to add depth and subtlety. His wife had a lazy-Susan filled with of seasonings. How hard could this be?

The woman shopped for weekly specials. Unfortunately he wasn’t capable of planning an entire week’s menu so he ran out every several days and bought things she already had in the refrigerator.

Another complication was that she could fit an array of utensils into very tight quarters. He was never able to crack her algorithm, after he took things out they wouldn’t go back in.

Family etiquette didn’t allow her to complain about the meals he served, so she started to critique the pans he chose to fry things. She complained when he dirtied test bowls before finding the right size. She challenged his presentation skills.

Finally, she flatly refused to wash some pots he had burnt. Since doing the dishes was her job when he cooked, she was now in blatant violation of their new contract.

“Okay, I quit,” he said. “I’m not cooking anymore…AND IT SERVES YOU RIGHT!!!!”

The woman turned away to hide her smile. What she didn’t want her husband to realize was how desperately she wanted him out of her kitchen.

And he was more than happy to play along. What he didn’t want her to know is how much he wanted things to get back to the way they used to be, back before NPR nearly destroyed their happy home.

Knots, Zhenyi

11/06/2024 by Pat Shiplett 3 Comments

People at a coffee shopSlip knots, square knots, Windsors and all manner of Boy Scout knots are actually not knots at all. To mathematicians like Zhenyi, a ‘knot’ is a very specific phenomenon, a continuous circle, a ring with no openings. Rubber bands, wedding rings and fan belts qualify as knots. So do the tangles found in your DNA molecules.

Give a ring a half twist and you have a figure eight. Wrap it around your fingers and you create a cat’s cradle which can be changed into any number of playful knots.

Since the beginnings of Knot Theory in the 1800s, mathematicians have classified and tabulated all prime knots of up to 16 crossings and more than 6 billion other variations. The configuration on Zhenyi’s screen is the Legendrian trefoil knot.

Different-looking knots may actually be the same one in disguise. Proving or disproving ‘equivalence’ is part of what gets Zhenyi out of bed in the morning.

His work is “pure” mathematics, however much of scholarship once considered “pure” has found applications later. Non-Euclidean geometry became the foundation of Einstein’s Theory of Relativity.

Along with the elegance of the math, Zhenyi is fascinated by the labyrinthine calligraphy and knot motifs that have graced manuscripts and mosques for millennia.

He’ll soon submit his findings to pre-publication review and then beyond that to formal peer review journals. So the intense, young man who works standing upright in the windows of our coffee shop will be standing there for at least some part of another year.

Comfort Food

10/03/2024 by Pat Shiplett 1 Comment

LisbonThey travel the world in the search for ‘authentic’ experiences but here they stand, lined up fifty deep, desperate for a fix of comfort food.

“How was the food?”

That’s a question friends will ask when they return home from the far ends of the earth.

Experiencing a region’s cuisine, whether Sri Lanka, Hungary or Patagonia is part of what we have in mind when we book our itineraries.

Travel only exacerbates the reality that what we eat and at what time of the day we eat it, plays a role in our well-being. Hotel breakfast buffets are filled with foods your stomach may refuse to recognize before noon.

Sometimes the miseries we blame on food poisoning is actually caused by overindulgence – too many shop windows with irresistible temptations.

We crave simple sustenance when we’re under stress from boarding the wrong train or reserving a hotel room for the wrong date.

Travel sites know that ‘comfort food’ is an powerful magnet, ditto for burgers or the mention of bacon (although what’s served up as such may be unrecognizable.)

The draw of an insanely popular restaurant in Lisbon’s Restauradores Station district is a humble roasted chicken. Travel-weary tourists stroll or uber back to their hotels with renewed strength to face yet another day on vacation.

Note to world: Is peanut butter too much to ask?

Ten years of Spanish, 2

09/08/2024 by Pat Shiplett 14 Comments

Spanish FeverAfter ten years of Spanish, you‘d think a guy could order from the menu of the day with absolute confidence and even a little flair.

That’s an easy mistake to make given that Babbel (I haven’t tried it) promises to get you “speaking Spanish in just 3 weeks.”

But according to Malcolm Gladwell’s ten-thousand-hours theory on peak proficiency, yours truly is barely half way to fluency.

The idea of studying a new language materialized in the shower one random morning.

Twenty-five hours of classes a week in Barcelona, I speculated, would allow me to be with interesting people while spending months alone in a foreign city. The daily commute on the Metro would give me the sensation of working and living there.

Why Spanish? It’s widely spoken in the U.S. and shares its Latin roots with English. The sounds of its alphabet are familiar.

After ten years, I now read Spanish well enough, and I can make myself understood. But grasping things said to me is still hit and miss. It’s not easy to decipher a phone number, for example, before the next commercial comes on.

Like us, Spanish speakers are fond of swallowed syllables, shortcuts and non sequiturs. Textbooks lay things out as best they can but you grope to find your own individual path through the maze. Learning a third or fourth language, my friends in Barcelona say, gets much easier.

Nothing’s quite like finally breaking through a barrier and realizing you’ve reached the next level – it’s a crossword puzzle with no end of discoveries in sight. The irony is I now understand Spanish grammar better than the English I learned as a child.

Taking on a language is not for everybody of course. Both English and Spanish have a expression for us enthusiasts who get seduced by a pastime like this.

It’s the same word in both languages: a nerd, un/una nerd.

Fourth of July

07/04/2024 by Pat Shiplett 7 Comments

The enduring promise of the American Dream is written all over this woman’s face.Being born mid-century and being born an American, she’s lived through a more prosperous and less violent period than any the world has experienced.

Her country hasn’t seen war within its borders during her lifetime, nukes weren’t deployed. She’s been spared decades-long famines and droughts. Much of the working class has earned living wages. Store shelves have been stocked with foods and conveniences unimaginable even decades earlier

She grew up learning patriotic slogans and accepting myths that marshaled a nation during WWII. Schoolbooks described a land of exceptional virtue and opportunity that welcomed huddled masses from around the world.

She’s seen eighteen presidential inaugurations and depending on how she consumes events of the day, and how capable she is of reexamining her own thinking, her understanding of America today may be different from the ideas she inherited.

The child sitting on her lap knows nothing of the past and even less of the future that awaits him. He’s not sure why his (grandmother?) is having him wave a flag; but the ice cream and fireworks later in the day, those he will understand.

Seventy years from now, he may take a child to an Independence Day parade. And what he explains to him or her will depend on the whims of history and on the wisdom of American voters and the continued peaceful transition of power.

Thanks to Roland Lieber, who captured this image in a small town on the western edge of the Great Lakes.