Dessert with a side of race

My first moblog-style post! Getting lunch in the hospital cafeteria, I just had to snap a picture of this peculiar thing in the refrigerated case: White Texas Cake.

Having grown up in Texas, I can honestly say: I have no idea what this is. And Texas, as anyone who's been there can tell you, is far from white. Even if there were such a place known as White Texas, why they'd have their own cake is beyond me.

"One I Love" vs. "One I Love" vs. "One I Love"

Tonight I was in the lab with the radio on, and this song came on: David Gray's "The One I Love". I'd heard it before, thought it was nice, but never gave it a second thought. Until tonight.

Have a listen if you haven't heard it before:



For whatever reason, I was trying to make out the lyrics, but David Gray's nasally British squawk kept getting in the way. So Googling the lyrics I got:

Gonna close my eyes
Gonna watch you go
Running through this life, darlin',
Like a field of snow

As the tracer glides
In its graceful arc
Send a little prayer out to you
'Cross the falling dark

Tell the repo man
And the stars above
That you're the one I love

Perfect summer's night
Not a wind that breathes
Just the bullets whisperin' gentle
Amongst the new green leaves

There's things I might have said
Only wish I could
Now I'm leaking life faster
Than I'm leaking blood

Tell the repo man
And the stars above
That you're the one I love
You're the one I love
The one I love

Don't see Elysium
Don't see no fiery Hell
Just the lights all bright, baby,
In the Bay Hotel

Next wave comin' in
Like an ocean roar
Won't you take my hand, darlin',
On that old dance floor

We can twist and shout
Do the turtle dove
You're the one I love
You're the one I love
The one I love

Hmmm, I thought, that's a bit cryptic. What's all this talk about tracers and bullets?

Ohhh... the song's from a soldier's point of view.

Why would he be looking up at tracers in the sky?

Ohhh... he's on his back.

What's a "wave" got to do with this?

Ohhh... double meaning: wave of attack and the ocean wave he's remembering.

How's the repo man fit in?

Ohhh... borrowed time, got it. And possible play off "reaper".

Subtle, powerful, anti-war love ballad. Effin' brilliant. I'm in awe.

Then I remembered that another band had a song with almost exactly the same title: Coldplay in 2002 as a B-side to Rush of Blood. Just for fun, I thought I'd do a lyrics head-to-head:

Could you, could you come back?
Come back together
Put yourself on the band
And see us forever

Could you, could you come home?
Come home forever
Surely things in the band
Keep us together
'Cause you're the one I love
You're the one I love
You're the one I love

Ouch. There's actually more, but I'll spare you. The ironic thing is that I used to like this song, enough so that I bought it on iTunes. But I have to admit: In the "One I Love" Bowl, it's David Gray 1, Coldplay 0.

Google reminded me that one more band had a song with the same title. Any guess who? You know who, I'm sure. Here, it starts like this:

This one goes out to the one I love
This one goes out to the one I've left behind

A simple prop to occupy my time
This one goes out to the one I love
Fire. Fire.

Anyway, not the greatest of lyrics either. Better than Coldplay's "O.I.L"? Probably. Better than David Gray's "O.I.L."? Probably not, in my opinion.

Guatemalan Coffee Picker Happy If Single Person Starts Day Alert

Yesterday afternoon friend BH and I went searching for a place to have coffee and get some work done. Driving down Huron and then Washtenaw, we passed the usual suspects: Espresso Royale, Starbucks, and Beaner's. Crowded, crowded, and more crowded.

Coffeehouses closer to the center of town were packed with undergrads. I get enough of the North Face-and-Uggs crowd during the week, thanks. We drove on.

One radius out, the coffeehouses were still packed, this time with townies. You could actually see people holding up The New York Times to the window of Starbucks. We drove on.

Finally we got to Ypsilanti.

Crossing under the I-23 overpass into Ypsi, you're tempted to think everything you've heard about the neglected stepchild of Washtenaw County is true. It's pretty shoddy, has a lot of boarded-up businesses, and frankly isn't easy on the eyes.

But Ypsi's also got a feel that's ten times as real as Ann Arbor's. In Ann Arbor you never know what's fab and what's pre-fab. You walk into Starbucks and you know every light fixture, every sound from the espresso machine, every seat -- in fact, everything down to the fake fireplace -- has been planned with laser-guided focus to get you to do one thing: spend money. You like the place, and the marketers and researchers wouldn't have it any other way.

Now, you come to Ypsi and you take your chances. Some things you might like, some things you might hate. But that's probably the way you felt about your house while growing up. And the comparison is apt: Ypsi is comfortable, real, with idiosyncracies laid out in plan view.

After a few minutes, BH and I arrived at the Ypsi coffeehouse known as The Ugly Mug (317 W. Cross St., 734-484-4684). Dear reader, you should definitely go here.

Why?

(1) It's local. Locally baked goods (spinach pies and muffins) adorn the counter top. Locally made art adorns the walls.

(2) It's independent. The only things with corporate logos on them are the sugar packets.

(3) It's quality. Without exception, every espresso-based drink with milk that I've gotten here has looked and tasted beautiful. To wit, the leaf pattern on the foam of my latte:


In the lower-right corner you can also make out the little demitasse spoon Ugly Mug gives you with your for-here coffee. (Unfortunately you can make out the right edge of my laptop keyboard which, yes, is missing the down arrow key.)

In fairness Ann Arbor has its own share of local, independent coffeehouses. Portofino (2250 W. Stadium Blvd., 734-222-6066) on the West Side comes to mind. Unfortunately, Portofino keeps early hours. The Ugly Mug does not, and in that way it's more my style.

Anyway, The Ugly Mug and Portofino, two places to keep in mind if you ever get tired of ordering coffee in pseudo-Italian from those baristas in green aprons. And, by the way, the title of the post comes from an Onion article you can find here.

Two steps forward

Every now and then this phrase pops into my head: "height of civilization". Some might say it happened in Ancient Greece, or perhaps the 17th-century Netherlands, or 19th-century France. But the majority of people, I think, would say this is it.

Why? Because knowledge gets accumulated -- not counting the part that gets suppressed. Because we have more conveniences than historical man ever had -- even if we're ransoming the environment to get them. Because we have more freedoms to choose -- though we squander them regularly.

Yes, we're livin' the dream.

Ha. If only.

Two random things to relate, in part because it's Friday and I haven't posted anything since Sunday.

First, a poem that I think is balls-out funny, told from the female cubicle worker's perspective. Think Pam from The Office. The poet's name is Deborah Garrison, b. 1965, Ann Arbor, MI. From her first collection, A Working Girl Can't Win, "Please Fire Me":

Here comes another alpha male,
and all the other alphas
are snorting and pawing,
kicking up puffs of acrid dust

while the silly little hens
clatter back and forth
on quivering claws and raise
a titter about the fuss.

Here comes another alpha male --
a man's man, a dealmaker,
holds tanks of liquor,
charms them pantsless at lunch:

I've never been sicker.
Do I have to stare into his eyes
and sympathize? If I want my job
I do. Well I think I'm through

with the working world,
through with warming eggs
and being Zenlike in my detachment
from all things Ego.

I'd like to go
somewhere else entirely,
and I don't mean
Europe.

I like the sense that we're in the cubicle worker's head, hearing her recollect metaphors she's probably thought of for a long time but never told anyone. Who's she going to talk to, right? Not the other "hens" and definitely not the "alpha male" bulls.

If you accept this notion of people as animals, you might try to track down some of the science behind that notion. You know, the statistic that we share 99.9% of our DNA with chimps. (Actually, it's 94%, but who's counting?)

You might even get to this word: atavism. That's "recurrence in an organism of a trait or character typical of an ancestral form". All you need is one example -- hypertrichosis, let's say, or the brawl between the Pistons and the Pacers in November of 2004 -- to know we're kept from our animal natures by the most tenuous of bindings. Snap! and we're loose.

The second random thing I want to share is the feeling I get sometimes that there's a monkey living inside me. Sometimes instead of standing in the shower, I'll crouch. From tub-level the shower stream breaks into droplets and feels vaguely like rain. And I'll wonder if there isn't a monkey in a tree somewhere in the world feeling the same thing.

Other times I'll be having a drink with friends and wonder if I'm that far removed from the first monkey biting into a piece of rotting fruit, finding nothing else on the ground that's edible. The taste to him is slightly "off" -- some of the sugars and starches are fermenting -- and the juice of the fruit flesh produces a slight euphoria. But he'll be okay -- his body makes the enzymes to break the alcohol down. Meanwhile I'll take a sip of my drink and wonder if the Muslims don't have the right idea.

How much of our sophistication is just artifice. How much of our style is just animal preening. How much of our civilization is just repackaging. I swear, sometimes I feel I'm heading right back into the trees.

Immunology and the single life

Fascinating.

If you could take a genetic test to determine long-term compatibility with your partner, would you take it?

I already see you boys and girls sneaking looks at the quizzes in Cosmo while waiting in the check-out line. But the thought of a cheek scraping gives you cold feet?

Here's what I'm talking about: NewScientist.com recently highlighted a study linking a set of genes to "how faithful and sexually responsive" partners are in long-term relationships. (You can find the whole story here.)

What is this magical set of genes? None other than what yours truly works on: the major histocompatibility complex, a.k.a. the MHC. The MHC is a set of genes for receptors that bind molecules from pathogens (like the cold virus, * cough cough *) allowing the buggers to be identified as foreign and then targeted for elimination. Different MHC in the human population mean people respond to different pathogens which -- historically -- allowed some of us to carry on even in the face of devastating superbugs. Happy thought, right?

Anyway, the logic goes that mixing MHC -- which sounds only a little dirtier than it should -- gives the offspring a better chance to survive. In other words, finding a mate in the next tribe over rather than your own tribe endows your children with a better chance to survive avian flu. Or whatever the pandemic was 10 000 years ago.

And what if you could somehow sense other people's MHC? Wild idea, right? Hold on to your asses: You do. How does this happen? You sniff them (other people's MHC, that is, not their asses -- we're not talking dogs here).

Take this other study, for example: In what can only be attributed to genius, researchers had women sniff sweaty shirts that were worn by different men and then rate the shirts by odor. In the next room (or wherever -- but I like to imagine it was the next room), researchers then sequenced the men's DNA at the MHC. See where this is going? Women liked the shirts worn by men whose MHC were most dissimilar from their own. (In an earlier study, researchers found this to be the case with mice sniffing each other's pee. God, I love this field!)

Cutting to the chase: Last fall researchers in New Mexico decided to do a follow-up study and check whether "female sexual responsivity" correlated with MHC dissimilarity. Here's the result (used without permission):

I'm not exactly sure why the x-axis goes below 0, and the data seem pretty noisy, but according to statistical magic, you get a significant correlation. (Let's not even get into the methodological difficulties of measuring "female sexual responsivity" or why that scale goes below 0. Clearly the couple at (0.36, -7) just needs to call it quits. Seriously, guys.)

In other words, you get in more satisfying relationships with people immunologically dissimilar from yourself. Go forth and find your opposite.

The authors sum up their findings in slightly drier language (but include a bonus dig at cheaters):

"As the proportion of MHC alleles couples shared increased, women’s sexual responsivity to their partners decreased, their number of extrapair sexual partners increased, and their attraction to men other than their primary partners increased."

I'm awaiting the day we find DNA sequencers in bars:

Guy [to girl]: "Hey, how are you? Wait, can we step over here and do a swab?"

[Guy inserts dollar in machine. Guy and girl swab cheeks, insert toothpicks into slot, exchange uncomfortable looks over the next 30 seconds. Finally, a ticker tape emerges. Guy grabs it.]

Guy [reading the tape]: "Hmm, looks like this isn't going to work out. Can I call you sometime, though?" [Girl is already swabbing cheeks with someone else.]

[Sweats profusely]

Feel free to disagree, but I think this woman's voice is... uh... wow. Thank you, Pandora Internet Radio. I literally forgot that I was coming down with a cold and almost choked on my throat lozenge.

Two-th pics

Today, just a couple of pictures.

The first, a capture of the sight I got walking out of Medical Science Building II yesterday evening. You who live here know that a few days ago the temperature plummeted from 50 F to 10 F. Rain turned to ice, dew to frost. And the world, at least as defined by the borders of Ann Arbor, became encased in crystal.

Even the cold dark place that I call my heart was touched. Or at least intrigued.

The second, a capture of the place I call "my apartment". I forget sometimes what unbelievably nice digs I have made for myself. Take, e.g., the Sinophile lights I retrofitted with red bulbs.


This goes along with yesterday's post. Late nights spent working on my thesis with espresso, house music, and -- this I forgot to add -- red lighting.

Late nights

I haven't been sleeping well lately.

Three factors:

(1) Espresso.

(2) House music.

(3) The thesis.

Explanations to follow. As soon as I can keep still. And focus my eyes.

Here we are now, entertain us

By the way, the best entertainment on TV right now cannot be found on any of the major networks.

It is C-SPAN.

PSP should stand for "Post-Saddam Politics".

I encourage all of you to check out yesterday's Senate Foreign Relations Hearing here (launches RealPlayer). As Peter Grier of the Christian Science Monitor points out, no fewer than seven members of this panel have presidential aspirations, most of them Democrats. The topic: a new strategy in Iraq. The person taking questions: Condoleezza Rice.

You can't ask for a better powder keg than that. Watch Condoleezza's face as Joe Biden (D - Delaware) lets fly the opening salvo. There's fire burning underneath that glare.

UPDATE (2:30 pm, 1/14): Wow, okay, even I underestimated how big this hearing was. You can't turn on the radio or TV -- get off the reality show opiates! -- without hearing about the hearing, a.k.a. HATH. Like a good book, the hearing reveals more the more times you view it. Here are some highlights (with time points provided by yours truly):

0:59:00: Watch a heckler get dragged out on his heels by the Capitol Police as he screams "Stop the lies!" Chuck Hagel (R - Nebraska) makes snappy use of the distraction.

1:05:30: Minutes later Chuck Hagel's words take a caustic turn as he calls the surge "the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam". The crowd breaks into applause.

1:45:30: The thing that's really got the blogosphere on fire, though, is the statement by Barbara Boxer, Democrat from California (love those feisty California Democrat women). Talking about the human cost of decisions in Iraq, she tells Condoleezza: "You're not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, with an immediate family."

Yeow! Oh no she didn't. Oh yes she did. Watch Condi's eyebrows.

The blogosphere goes crazy. Right-wingers find themselves in the awkward position of defending single people and women. ("Umm, what do we say now? 9/11! War is peace!") The left, including Boxer herself, claims her words are being taken out of context. The British perspective on all this might be best.

To me the offense is just in telling someone, "You're going to die alone." Clear away all of the bulls**t rhetoric in the blogosphere, and you'll find that that is the heart of the sentiment no one wants to hear. Even if it's true.

Zooom

The weathermen tell us 2006 was the warmest on record. I worry for our planet but can't help feeling personally gratified. It's way too warm outside for January in Michigan, and I love it.

One by-product of these balmy conditions -- it's 50 degrees F outside, 50! -- is the daily ride I've been able to reinstate on my bike. Your cars, your buses, even your motorcycles -- you can keep 'em! I'm back to working on one of the things I love best -- shaving seconds off my ride to the medical center in the morning.

Seriously, I'm back to kid status again. Cutting through yards, back lots, and parking lots. Taking street signs and street lights as suggestions. Zipping past peds on the sidewalks like they were standing still. Especially the ones waiting at the three bus stops in between. I used to be one of you. Suckers.

It's been evident to me for about the last ten days that I've picked up a mean streak. No fewer than three people who have known me 5+ years have pointed it out. Raison d'insatisfaction? Too much coffee. Not enough sleep. Deadlines looming. Transients and drifters who pass as friends. Defense mechanisms. War. Too few Wesley Autreys in the world.

But at the heart of the ride is still something pure to me. It calls me back to afternoons, second-grade or third-, when I used to ride my bike out to the edges of the subdivision. To the undeveloped lots that had baseball diamonds scratched into the dry Texas dirt, where the husk of an old washing machine became a space pod with a lookout portal. Tall spear grass weeds with pointed seeds you could pluck out and chuck at your friends. And the one afternoon I rode out on Trinity Mills Road -- away from my house a distance of maybe four miles, gone three hours, along the gravelly shoulder -- and my mother called the police. Sorry about that, mom. Some things I'll always have to find out for myself.

As I suited up this morning -- put the jacket on, the hood, the helmet, the gloves -- the strangest thing popped in my head: "On the Road Again" by Willie Nelson. My dad used to play it in the car when the four of us -- my dad, my mom, my brother, and I -- headed out for two-week summer vacation. As the car split the Appalachians and I propped my feet on the cooler full of snacks, the song went: "Going places that I've never been / Seeing things that I may never see again / And I can't wait to get on the road again."

I see roads ahead both silky smooth and gravel-lined. I see myself traversing them alone.

Confess it

Three nights ago I woke up in a cold sweat, yanking myself out of a bad dream. About what I don't even remember, but when I came back from the bathroom, I saw that I'd sweat right through the sheets, right underneath where my head and shoulders lay. I eased back onto the cold damp sheets, too exhausted to care, and gazed vacantly at the ceiling.

If unexpurgated sins be one cause of nightmares, then perhaps I had one burdening me.

I thought back to my trip to my parents' house in Texas. On the first day of that stay, while my parents were still at work, I'd decided to go out for a coffee. They had only one extra house key, for the garage side door. Stepping out from the garage and into the backyard, I remember thinking about all that had happened in that backyard. The times I played baseball with my older brother and how much strength it took to smack a tennis ball over the fence. The time we buried my first pet, a blue-grey parakeet, in front of the tall bushes. And the time that I got into my only fight.

It was with a neighbor kid. I was maybe seven. He was younger, maybe five or six. No malice, no disagreement. As best as I can remember, we'd just decided to reenact some wrestling we'd seen on TV. Hell, we even had a referee, an older neighbor kid -- I'll peg him at twelve or thirteen.

Anyway, we -- the older kid and I -- had gotten some rope, wrapped it around the two locks on the gates leading out of the backyard, pulled on the free ends to tighten the knots. We were making a cage.

It was summertime. My parents weren't around. The air was humid, the sun hazy, yellow, indifferent.

And at some point, the younger kid and I just started going at it. Pummeling each other with pre-adolescent fists. There were no rules, and the only objective was to land hits with force, secondarily to make them look good.

Fair? No, it wasn't. Being older and bigger, I easily overpowered him.

But what I remember most was the feeling of whaling on this younger kid, blow after blow. And the feel of the grass in summertime -- when you were in it and hot, the way it pricked against your skin, stuck to you and made you itch. I remember being on top of this kid and hitting him senseless.

Was there blood? It's funny. I don't remember that part.

The kid somehow wriggled free and ran to one of the gates that we'd done up in rope. He was crying, I mean wailing like an animal, and grabbing furiously at every piece of rope that wasn't knotted. I remember watching him.

Eventually the older kid and I helped out, pulled the rope free. The kid got out and he was gone. The names have been lost to me. Maybe I never knew their names.

And that was it, the last time I ever fought in anything but jest. You could argue that we were, in fact, fighting in jest. But the memory doesn't feel that way. And sin, like life itself, seems nine-tenths what you make of it. So said Hamlet: "For there is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so."

On egg shells

How many times have I done this before? I wondered.

I was cracking eggs on the edge of my skillet and watching the whites spill onto the heated Teflon surface. Four make an omelet, and I was on number two. The white sizzled, congealed, and gave off a pleasant if familiar aroma.

The next one, egg three, cracked in my hand. That's weird, I thought. Part of the white spilled short of the skillet's edge and left a small, clear puddle on the stove top.

There's not much that surprises me about eggs anymore. Over the last five years I reckon I've gone through literally thousands of them. It all started back when I was getting serious about my health -- after the high blood pressure diagnosis at age 25 -- and a book I'd been reading called egg whites a "nutritional bargain" (source). And indeed, when you did the math egg whites were pretty damned cheap. At around 10 cents each, you could make a proteinaceous meal for about 50 cents from four egg whites cooked up and placed between slices of bread. That's what I was making this morning.

I watched the white from egg three run on the skillet surface until it met the other two whites. The egg shell, still in my right hand and ensconcing the yolk, felt paper-thin.

Occasionally I still got the heebie jeebies thinking about eggs as unfertilized chicken embryos, and the thought sometimes pushed me to buy eggs at Whole Foods Market, at 20 cents each supposedly the product of cage-free hens. And while I never really tasted a difference -- I considered myself an egg connoisseur by now -- one thing was evidently clear: it took more effort to crack an organic egg.

What did this mean? I wondered. I cracked the fourth egg and slid the white in the skillet.

While the omelet cooked, I looked up "thin egg shells" on Google. One site had an agenda -- to debunk the dangers of DDT -- but at least it went through the trouble of citing sources. This was good.

For the curious, the possible reasons an egg shell might be thin include: the presence of oil, lead, and/or mercury, age of the bird, size of the bird, exposure to stress, dehydration, temperature extremes, insufficient light, and/or human intrusion, and lack of calcium and/or phosphorous.

Hmmm.

Poultry happiness seems to have been left off the list.

Was 20 cents too much to pay for an egg? A book on ethical agriculture I'd read a month ago posed the question. Why did I feel $3.50 was an acceptable price for a few drops of coffee plus an ounce of heated milk while $2.40 for a dozen eggs was a fleecing?

I returned to the stove, folded the whites up, and rolled them into the new high-fiber flat bread I was trying out. And then I decided to stop thinking so much.