⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

PAMPHLET NUMBER SIX: COFFEE

The most important beverage in my life is one that I am also very addicted to. I get cranky headaches if I don’t have it. I’m grumpy before I drink it. I’m drinking it right now (I just took a sip). It’s a cultural artifact of American life that we can’t live without: coffee.

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas Africa: Cradle of Civilization

We can trace coffee’s origins go back to Ethiopia, where the legend of the goats-eating-berries was born. The crux of that legend is that a Christian monk got the idea to make a drink for humans out of the berries that made a bunch of goats jump around like lunatics. The drink propagated throughout Africa and the Middle East and it became a staple of the Arab diet long before it got to Europe. Coffee: invented by Christians, perfected by Arabs. In all the controversy and dispute between the west and the Middle East, it’s good to remind ourselves of the times we worked together to make the world a beautiful place, and there are fewer things more beautiful than a steaming mug of black coffee.

Aristocratic Performance Rituals

Coffee was the dominant hot-and-stimulating drink of England, until tea came along in the 17th century and wealthy aristocrats made it a more desirable beverage to the lower classes who wanted to be fancy, too. A common trend in European history is this: fancy aristocrats invent elaborate social performances and then measure each other based on how fancy their peers’ performances are. The finicky and elaborate nature of making a good pot of tea provided the perfect opportunity to create one of those rituals. The poor wanted to be fancy, too. Thanks to the evergreen laws of supply and demand, higher demand led to higher supply, which led to lower prices. Suddenly, poor people could drink tea, too. I used the word “fancy” four times in the above paragraph, but I’m not sure it’s enough.

The aristos weren’t happy about that, but at least they had their fancy and extraordinarily expensive vessels! You can’t just grow more teapots — those had to be made, by hand, and the best stuff cost around $600 for just one tea cup. Good luck affording a so-white-it’s-translucent ceramic tea cup from China, plebs!

English “china”

Proper English tea has milk in it. Adding milk after you’ve poured the tea is the English way, at least for high-nosed toffs. Working class people put the milk in first. The reason for this, so the story goes, is because the clunky, cheap porcelain made in England would shatter at contact with boiling water. Chinese porcelain didn’t do that. It was the good stuff. It was strong, lightweight, translucent and durable. The European knock-offs weren’t.

Chinese porcelain was so expensive that the introduction of tea sparked a porcelain arms race all over Europe. Alchemists, potters, sculptors, and artisans worked together from France to Germany to England in little skunkworks to crack the Chinese recipe. They churned out a lot of almost-theres with varying levels of success.

This allegedly changed when a man with the extremely working-class British name Ben Lund added “Cornish soapstone” to the mixture. The humble powder of talc was all it took to keep his recipe for porcelain from shattering. His factory was bought by what is now Royal Worcester, the oldest (or maybe second-oldest) operating porcelain manufacturer in England.

Eventually, the cost of Chinese porcelain came down, too (supply and demand, baby), but not before England had flooded the market with bad copies and had the audacity to call the stuff “china.”

“Coffee – the favorite drink of the civilized world.” – Thomas Jefferson

Tea

Tea is the most versatile word in the English language (except, maybe, that word). It can refer to

⁃ a plant, Camellia sinensis
⁃ a small meal between lunch and supper
⁃ a drink, drunk at tea time, but not necessarily made of the plant called tea
⁃ gossip, as in “the tea,” the telling of which is called “spilling”
⁃ a river in Brazil

Revolution

Americans don’t drink tea the same way our English friends do because, well, they’re English. We’re Americans. We share a lot of cultural DNA with our English founders, but the big divergence put an end to that (the American Revolution, you might have heard of it). We rejected tea as our National Hot Drink and embraced the hardscrabble, hard-hitting, tar-black working man’s drink. We didn’t have to go without the meal called tea, though, because it didn’t exist yet — that didn’t come about until, you guessed it, a rich English Duchess invented it in 1850, because English aristocratic women had two jobs: socialize with other aristocrats and, most importantly, make male babies. If you’re like me, you can’t even mention making male babies without thinking of the most famous Male Baby Wanter in history, the irascible Henry Tudor.

Anne Boleyn

The only wife Henry truly loved was Jane Seymour, because she gave him a son. There’s no reason to doubt that his love was real, because he was a petulant bully who only really cared about himself and his legacy, and the Queen who eventually gave him a male heir was a dream come true. In case you doubt his true love for her, he had himself buried next to her at Windsor, which is the highest honor any dead king can give to a dead queen. Henry Tudor is known for executing his wives, but he didn’t have time to get bored with and subsequently get rid of Jane — she died two weeks after giving birth to Edward, an unremarkable monarch whose only laudable act was to die young and hasten the ascension of his half sister, Queen Elizabeth I.

The Queen right before Jane was the most famous of Henry’s wives, Anne Boleyn, who was executed on largely fictional charges of treason and incest. The method of her execution is just as noteworthy as the rest of her life — the executioner used a sword to do it (most people got the axe, as it were). This is often cited as a sudden and uncharacteristic honor on behalf of Anne’s royal mien and upbringing in France (where all executed monarchs get a sword).

But count me among the Anne Apologists, because I say that Henry decided to have a sword swing end her life because of his obsession with the British monarchy that he was so desperately trying to continue in his own image. More specifically, he was really, really into the Arthurian legends and chivalry and all that (French is the language of chivalry, and he wrote some embarrassing love letters to Anne in that language). He even had a big replica of the Round Table with himself in Arthur’s seat. The prime symbol of Arthuriana is the sword, and a monarch executing a traitorous queen with a sword was the ultimate act of Proper English Retribution. Like everything else in Henry’s life, Anne’s execution was about Henry.

While on the subject of Anne, she’s just about as close as we can get to a feminist icon in Tudor England. She knew what she wanted, and maneuvered herself and the people around her to get it. She was also an intellectual who argued with Henry and won. She refused to have sex with Henry until he made her Queen, which Horny Henry respected. She’s almost certainly innocent of the crimes she was executed for, not only because Henry wanted her out of his life and was capable of doing anything in order to make that happen, but because of what she did while waiting for her death in the Tower — she summoned the Archbishop of Canterbury to her cell and confessed everything to him.

Confession

During this confessional with the Archbishop, Anne Boleyn doubled-down on her innocence. For an observant Catholic, this is the Ultimate Truth Zone. If you lie during a confession, you’re heading straight to Hell when you die. You gotta hand it to Catholicism — there is no better way to keep tabs on a the politics of a parish than by a) forcing everybody to tell you every bad thing they did and b) damning them to hell if they don’t. This not only gave a priest leverage and protection (even if the implied, icky bad juju of doing social or physical harm to clergy weren’t enough), it put a lot of power in the hands of a powerful, educated minority. If you’re suspicious of large, pervasive organizations having too much power, maybe you would have been one of those guys throwing tea into Boston Harbor, too.

Recommendatae

A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

How To Make a Proper Cup of Tea

Boil water. Put a tea bag in a cup. Pour the boiling water into the cup. Let it steep for as long as you like. Remove the bag, add whatever you like to it (milk, honey, lemon, whiskey). There are a lot of fussy rules, if you want to be fussy (Americans are notoriously non-fussy). I suggest you look elsewhere for those. Like here, for example: http://www.vogue.com/article/english-teatime-etiquette-how-to

The Hot Jimmy

One of my favorite fall/winter drinks is a variation of a hot toddy that I’m calling the Hot Jimmy. (I didn’t know what a hot toddy was until after I had invented my version – thanks, Lisa!). I make a cup of herbal tea (which has no tea in it) — lemon ginger is my favorite — add a bit of honey and throw in a shot of Wigle hopped whiskey (which you can’t buy right now). It’s perfect for a damp, dark autumn evening.

ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS

Catherine of Aragon

I said Anne Boleyn was a feminist icon, but I don’t want to ignore her predecessor, Catherine. She was probably Henry’s true love, despite the way he treated her (annulment, banishment, forced estrangement from her daughter). He left her in charge while he went to fight the French, during which time she fought off an attempted invasion by the King of Scotland. She rallied her troops while in full armor and extremely pregnant, and got super pissed when the English military, fearing for her delicate nature, brought his clothes as proof of King James’s death rather than his actual dead body.

COLOPHON

Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

keep the coffee comin’

⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

PAMPHLET NUMBER SIX: FOOD

This is the first issue of the new year, the sixth issue total and the first in a new series. I’m going to be trying some new things (see the COLOPHON, below, for details). But enough of all that, let’s get into the object of our acts of culinary consumption: FOOD.

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal editorial; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

Mayflies

Here’s a workable definition of life: Life is the acquisition of adequate calories before reproduction. I offer you the mayfly as an example. It hatches underwater as a nymph, with a big digestive system and little else. The nymph eats as much as possible, sometimes for years, only to ascend into the air as a winged imago, its final form. The imago has a mouth, but it’s nonfunctional. It can’t eat. It doesn’t want to eat. It wants to get hella laid. The mayfly lives a day or two. It mates, lays its eggs, and drops dead. The eggs settle on the bottom of a pond and the cycle continues. The eggs hatch, and the hungry nymph starts collecting calories.

Calories

I often wonder what humans of the past would think of humans of the now. Drop one of our early human ancestors into our lives and he would be stunned by a whole bunch of things we take for granted. We live in the safest age of human history. We run for fun, not to save ourselves from marauding enemy tribes or hungry megafauna. We have so much food to eat for such little cost that the leading causes of death in humans arise directly from our diets. Losing weight is actually easy, mathematically speaking, for the baseline human (with “normal” bodies not beset by disease, hereditary flaw or misadventure): consume fewer calories than you use.

Our bodies are made to prefer high calorie foods. This instinctual drive to eat the lowest possible volume with the highest possible calorie content made Americans the fattest people in the world, but it also made us come up with some pretty amazing innovations.

“My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.” – Orson Welles

Preparation

The human life cycle is slightly different, with the same pieces rearranged. We get our calories from food we pick up and put in our mouths. This is true for most animals, but humans developed a unique twist that probably made us who we are today: we prepared it before putting it our mouths.

You thought I was going to say “we cooked it!” We did! But that came later. We evolved smaller teeth, smaller guts (see below) and smaller faces long before we ever cooked anything. Our ancestors used stone tools to tenderize meat and cut it up into smaller pieces. That’s some pre-human ingenuity!

The beauty of meat as a food source is that it lets some other poor animal collect the calories for us. Cows spend their lives eating and digesting because they have to. They eat plants, and plants have such a small calorie count for their volume that cows need a four-segmented stomach to get the most nutrition they can out. A cow converts those calories into big muscles that it needs in order to carry around all those big stomachs full of digesting grass, and then a human comes along and skips the boring part and eats the high-calorie muscles.

This all begins with the most efficient energy-creating system in the natural world, photosynthesis, which lets that crunchy grass grow into tasty food for a cow just by being in the right place at the right time to absorb the energy and carbon created when sunlight snaps ambient carbon dioxide molecules in half.

The grass uses the sunlight to make itself food for the cow, which uses the grass to make itself food for a human. Every animal takes the work of another to make itself.

After our pre-human ancestors discovered fire, they figured out how to use it to make their food better. Because meat is the easiest solution to the maximum calories for minimal effort problem, cooking meat was probably what catapulted those proto-humans into the big-brained dummies we are today.

By cooking meat, you make it easier to chew. You can eat more of it in less time. That little innovation made us who we are.

Vegetarianism

We eat meat because we always did. From fish to bison, meat was the high-calorie rocket fuel in our cognitive development. But that was a few thousand years ago.

As my morality and my politics begin to coalesce and align into a Do No Harm kind of lazy pacifism, I find the act of eating a dead animal less and less justifiable.

You might have noticed my interest in human evolution (this is the last issue to dwell on the subject). There’s no question that vegetarianism (or, dear god, veganism) in protohumans would have been disastrous. Eating cooked meat was a key to human survival over the last few bottlenecks, migrations and ice ages. But just because it was important then doesn’t make it important now.

Most of us don’t have to eat meat to survive (note: iron deficiencies and other medical issues still require many people to eat meat, bless them). My sessile, first world life makes me need fewer calories than my ancestors, and I have access to so many high-calorie, low-effort food sources that I probably wouldn’t even lose a single pound if I stopped eating meat (let alone starve).

I eat meat because I’m lazy and unsophisticated. I like hamburgers. I like hot dogs.

I believe that our species will one day look upon eating meat as a necessary evil that they will also have grown out of.

“If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” – J.R.R. Tolkien

Broccoli

When I was in grade school and was asked what my favorite food was, I said “broccoli.” I will defend this choice to the grave. It’s still my favorite. I prefer it raw, but I’ll eat it any way I can get it. I don’t put salt on it. I don’t put cheese on it. I just eat it. I would not pass up a pizza for a bowl of brocc, but that doesn’t mean pizza is my favorite food. They are not contrary ideas.

Broccoli was created by the ancient Romans, proving that people who are against genetically-modified foods can’t even be consistent in the foods they purposelessly fear. Broccoli didn’t become popular in the US until the 1920s. It only took broccoli 2500 years to go from a cultivated offshoot of cabbage in northern Italy to a staple food in America, though, be fair, America didn’t exist for most of that time.

Fractals

There’s a type of broccoli less popular than the kind you find in most stores here. It’s called “Romanesco,” also called “roman broccoli” (image above). It differs from the other varieties of broccoli in a few significant ways (it has a nutty flavor), but it is best known for its geometric fractal growth pattern.

You’ve probably heard the term “fractal” but maybe not know what it is. The geometric fractals are easiest to understand, so I’ll make it simple: a little piece of a fractal form looks just like the biggest piece. A fractal triangle would be a triangle made out of smaller triangles, where are also made out of triangles, etc. There’a also a lot of math involved in fractals, which you can see at the link at the bottom of this pamphlet, if you’re into that sort of thing.

THE RECOMMENDATAE

A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

• A lot of kids know the word “fractal” because it’s a word in the song from Frozen, “Let it Go.” Elsa refers to her powers as creating “frozen fractals” and snowflakes kind of look like fractal patterns. Also, it’s a great song with a great message, but saying the message would just be restating the title.

• I used one of his comics up above, and I recommend Drew’s Toothpaste For Dinner. He’s hilarious and he wrote a song about his dog.

COLOPHON

Composed entirely by James Foreman on a notebook computer with additional edits via telephone.

I wrote five issues last year, so I think that’s how I’m going to continue doing it. Volume 1 was five issues, and Vol. 2 will also be five. I don’t know how much time will be between Volumes, but hopefully not as long as last time. I’ve toyed with the idea of formatting the previous issues for print, maybe with little illustrations instead of photos scrounged from the internet.

LINKS

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/

http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/

⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

“Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

PAMPHLET NUMBER FIVE: FIRE

Burn a log in a fireplace. The light and heat is a mirror of the activity on the surface of the sun. Energized oxygen locks into place with the dormant carbon atoms in the wood and the sunlight used to separate oxygen from carbon during photosynthesis comes bursting back out. That’s what a fire is, but it’s not everything a fire can be.

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

The Sun

The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees

That’s an old children’s song made famous by They Might Be Giants [youtube.com] and it’s all around exactly right. Without a giant, heavy, dense, ball of gas in the middle of our solar system for earth to orbit, we most definitely would never have evolved.

The sun is also a star, and stars are the source of all matter in the universe. A star is dense and that density increases as it ages, crunching atoms closer and closer together and pushing the resulting elements into its core, piling them on as it burns. When that star one day explodes, as they often do, it sends all those complex elements into space. When enough of that stuff gets in one spot and cools down, those elements clump together and spin around and, eventually, you get planets.

It’s such a weird, beautiful concept that I want to state it in the plainest terms: we’re made out of stars. The Big Bang threw all that radiation into space, where it cooled off and came together and got close enough to start slamming hydrogen atoms together, which made helium, etc. That’s the source of every single atom, even the ones in your body.

It’s tempting to get really deep into the science here, because it’s really, really awesome. For instance, the “necessities” of life seem less and less necessary as we learn more about our universe. We know that sunlight isn’t necessary for life (just look up a little thing called chemosynthesis [wikipedia.org]). Now we’re not even sure a stable orbit around a star is necessary. There is ample theoretical basis for an internally-heatedplanet (by decaying uranium, for instance) that could conceivably sustain an ecology of creatures that have never seen any kind of light at all, on planets drifting silently between stars. But as Richard Feynman says, I have to stop somewhere.

When you die, you can get cremated, and superheated oxygen collides with the carbon in your body, and the beautiful, glimmering sunlight that triggered the photosynthesis in the plants eaten by you and the animals you ate and then encorporated into the cells of your body splits open in a blaze of subatomic particles and rejoins the thermodynamia of the universe.

Or you can be buried, and then slowly consumed by tiny organisms that eat the carbon in your body and feed larger organisms that are eaten by even larger organisms that themselves die and on and on until the matter that made you makes a whole lot of things that aren’t you.

If you’re lucky, all this happens after the miraculous collection of carbon and atomic forces that came together to make you had a grand old time and the people left over on earth can console each other by saying “well, that’s was a good long life.”

Long Lives

World records are premised on the ability to document the achievement. The fastest living man could be Usain Bolt, but there’s no way to know without measuring the running speed of every human on earth, which is impossible. Just so, there’s no way to know how old the oldest living person is without a precise measurement of every human life, so we have to trust birth records in foreign countries to tell us who the oldest (verified) person is.

The oldest (verified) living human being is Emma Morana, an Italian woman who just turned a 117 years old in November. As far as ancient humans go, she doesn’t look quite as corpse-like as some of her fellow Oldest People:

The oldest (verified) person ever is Jeane Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days. She had one daughter who died at age 36 of pneumonia, who had one son who also died at the age of 36, in a car accident. Jeane lived in the same small town in France for the entirety of those 122 years.
Don’t let the cigarette picture fool you — she smoked only one or two of them a day, showing a moderation that defined her lifestyle of consistent exercise and clean living. She claimed to have never been sick, and she almost burned her apartment down at the age of 110 because of poor eyesight.

The list of Most Long-Lived (Verified) Humans shows that death has a clear preference for men: an overwhelming 94 of the 100 oldest (verified) people are women. There’s no consensus as to why women tend to live longer than men or why there are so few ancient men compared to ancient women (85% of centenarians are women).

One leading explanation puts the blame squarely on the lack of menstruation in men. Women have less iron in their bodies than men because blood and other iron-heavy stuff (I’m not a doctor) is lost at a reliable rate of once per month. More iron means a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, which is one reason why red meat isn’t very good for you and why vegetarians tend to be healthier than the omnivorous among us. Male and female iron levels eventually equal out, later in life, but women have those 50 years or so of a head start.

If you had to live in the same town and, for most of it, the same apartment for the entire duration, would you want to live to be 122? For some people, a long lifespan spent in one place is no life at all. It’s not how much time you spend on earth, it’s how you spend it. Besides, there’s really no such thing as linear time.

Nonlinear Time

Everything that ever happened has already happened, from the beginning of the universe to its end. We experience time at a rate of 60 seconds per minute. Life is a series of now moments strung together — those that haven’t happened yet are purely theoretical and we call them “the future” while nows that have passed are called “the past.” We can only perceive one now at a time.

I say the future is theoretical because there’s no way to know it will happen. We expect it to happen because of all the nows that preceded it. We’re all natural scientists, hypothesizing that the nows to come will resemble all the nows that came before, because those nows fit a certain pattern. Finding and anticipating patterns is also called “learning” and we immediately start doing it when we’re born. A baby who drops his toy on the floor over and over again is testing his environment (and his parents) and learning about gravity.

It’s not an easy concept to internalize until you use the flatland thought experiment. Since time is the fourth dimension, we can use the other three dimensions in the illustration.

Imagine a species of 2-dimensional creatures. They have no height, only length and width. They’re squares or circles or triangles but they’re all living side-by-side. The concept of “above” might exist in the minds of their scientists, but they’re incapable of perceiving it.
But not us. We’re 3D. We can look down on those poor 2D creatures and see their entire world spread out before us. We can even see inside their 2D bodies and their 2D buildings. No walls they made could keep us out — we could, at a whim, pick any one of them up at any time and take it on the ride of its life.

Now, add a dimension on top of that one. We’re the flatlanders, now, and some mysterious 4D creatures look at our poor, feeble 3D lives and pity us. We can’t perceive time but it effects us, just as the 3rd dimension effect the flatlanders. Those 4D beings perceive time just as we perceive the third dimension. They see time not as a linear progression of nows but as a set string of nows that they can see all at once.

It might feel like predestination, but it really isn’t. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, then how can you say what was supposed to happen? It’s not a curse, but a blessing, to not know how things are going to turn out.

THE RECOMMENDATAE

A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

Many of you already know me and already know that my nephew, Miles, died in the summer of 2014. He should be turning 20 next week, but he isn’t. His work lives on, frozen in time, and we can all still enjoy it. In honor of his birthday, I recommend you spend some time with him.

My other suggestion is to watch this video of Richard Feynman describing the chemical process of fire. He was a genius and a fantastic storyteller and a great bongo player.

THE ANECDOTUS

a memory retrieved from the depths of my mind’s ocean by bathysphere; or, a thing that happened recently

I have never liked the sun. I’ve won every Who’s More Pale contest I’ve ever entered, by clear margins. I burn easily. I’ve never had a tan. The sun stings my skin and hurts my eyes and heats everything up (the only thing I hate more than direct sunlight is too much heat). This is not revisionism based on present biases, and I offer photographic proof:
Yep, that’s me, hating the sun.

You light up my life, my sweet reader.