Back on the food and drink theme de la semaine:
NPR reports that Kirin, the Japanese beer company, has developed a “soft-serve
yogurt-like” dispensing machine that’ll freeze
the foam on your glass of beer.
They claim it’ll keep the beer cold for 30 minutes,
though I can’t imagine it taking half an hour to drink a glass of beer.
Anyhow, if you’re anywhere but Japan, you’re going
to have to drink it the old-fashioned way. The machine is only available there.
I’m interrupting my weekly theme about food and taste trends to reflect upon the death, at 71, of Nora Ephron. Ephron was a
well-known screenwriter, director, produced and writer of novels and essays.
She gets most press over such romcoms as Sleepless in Seattle, When Harry Met SallyandYou’ve Got Mail. No one’s going to
forget the deli scene from WHMS or
the whole Empire State Building thing from SIS.
(You’ve
Got Mail didn’t click with me perhaps because I so clearly had
The Shop Around the Corner in my mind and heart. Although I did get a real
kick out of the love of Jean Stapleton’s life being Francisco Franco. “He ran
Spain,” as a throwaway line—that’s class.)
No—my favorite of Ephron’s films is My Blue Heaven—an entirely
different view of the federal witness protection program than you saw in In Plain Sight. In this classic
fish-out-of-water WitSec world, mob informant Vinnie Antonelli (Steve Martin)
is relocated to San Diego, given the name of Todd Wilkenson and left to fend
for himself.
“Fending” includes hooking up with a posse of Mafia
informants (including William Hickey as a strip mall pet shop owner), engaging
in various scams and writing his autobiography. In the process he opens up
the world for his nebbishy FBI minder (Rick Moranis) and sparks a romance
between the latter and a DA (Joan Cusack) whose baseball-player husband just dumped her for his psychotherapist.
Only a woman writing for her own sensibilities would
pair Moranis and Cusack—or their characters, Barney Coopersmith and Hannah
Stubbs—as a romantic duo. Only a woman with Ephron’s sensibilities would make
that work for the audience.
There’s a lot to love about MBH—the baseball sequence where, during the playing of the national
anthem, Vinnie teaches one of the DA’s boys how to guard against getting his
pocket picked; the scene where Hannah buys a turtle from Hickey to replace the
one she accidentally ran through the garbage disposer; or Vinnie’s
matter-of-fact testimony about a mob murderer, “Richie loved to use .22s
because the bullets are small and they don’t come out the other end like a
.45. See, a 45 will blow a barn door out the back of your head and there’s a
lot of dry cleaning involved; but a .22 will just rattle around like Pac-Man
until you’re dead.”
Two of my favorite bits involve the transformation
of Barney Coopersmith through…dance. In the first one, Vinney teaches Barney
how to merengue:
And in the second, under the influence of Vinnie’s
confidence-boosting emoluments, Barney applies this knowledge to sweeping
Hannah off her feet:
(The music also affects Barney’s partner.)
The whole thing is a delight. and you don’t find
movie writing or setups like that anymore. I’ll really miss Ephron.
Hmm, I’m seeing a theme developing this week, a
theme around food, studies, taste and tastes.
Hot on the trail of the Israeli study
supporting the practice of eating cake for breakfast, and the University of
Michigan study
on how the last chocolate you eat tastes best, here’s a study on wine.
Specifically on how consumers are inclined to rate the taste of a wine higher
in inverse proportion to how unpronounceable its name is.
So—the more you struggle with the name in the wine
list, the better you’re going to think it tastes. Also—you’ll be willing to pay
more for it.
Especially if you’re a “wine geek”.
Those of us with less sophisticated palates are not
neglected, though. “low knowledge consumers” tend towards wineries with cutesy
names—Fat Bastard, Toad Hollow, Cupcake—because they connote comfort with a
dash of difference. Wine from a toad’s abode? I’ll drink to that.
Following on my post yesterday about the Israeli study on the benefits of
chocolate
for breakfast, there’s another study indicating that…well, that people in Michigan
think the last chocolate they’re offered tastes best.
In this study, subjects were offered, in random
order, five kinds of Hershey’s Kisses: milk, dark, crème, caramel and almond.
One group wasn’t told when the supply of chocs was going to run out; the other
was informed when the fifth was brought out that it was the last.
In that second group, when asked to rate which Kiss
they liked best, they tended to pick the last one--to the tune of 64%. (The first group rated the last chocolate best only 22% of the time.) And researchers concluded
that if you think something is the last to come your way, you’ll choose it as
the best.
Here’s my response:
I’m not sure I’d have eaten any of the Kisses,
because Hershey’s? Please. Second, I’m going to choose dark chocolate no matter
what order it comes to me. I definitely wouldn’t have ingested the milk
chocolate one at all.
So, I don’t know what’s up with those Michiganders,
but this is one study that I'd send back for rework.
So, it turns out that eating dessert
at breakfast is an effective way to lose weight.
No kidding—researchers in Israel ran a 32-week study
in which two groups of dieters ate the same number of calories per day, but one
group had a cookie or cake or something sweet at the morning meal. And that
group lost on average 40 pounds more than the Spartan eaters.
To be honest, it’s not clear to me what kind of breakfast
you can have that amounts to 600 calories and still has a slice of chocolate
cake. According to one site,
a slice of commercially-made chocolate cake with icing weighs in at 235
calories. That leaves you 365 calories
Here are some 400
calorie possibilities. Or you could have an Egg McMuffin for 300 calories.
And then have your cake.
Hmm. In contrast to the Bronx Zoo, which has had a
problem keeping the critters inside its boundaries, the Oakland Zoo is taking
in non-paying guests.
(You’ll recall that within a couple of months last
year the Bronx Zoo lost both a cobra
& a peahen.
Both restored (so we’re told); but who knows what other exotic animals got out
that the press never got wind of?)
No—Oakland Zoo has apparently become a destination
for local fauna. Skunks, foxes, coyotes, wild turkeys & deer—they’ve
all found ways to break into the zoo.
& stay. & enjoy relative security & seemingly never-closing buffet.
I like the idea that the zoo co-exists with the
natives.
KQED, the local NPR outlet, runs listener commentaries
they call “perspectives”. Yesterday, summer solstice, the contribution was from
a Southerner about summer. & summer.
Basically, how summer in the Bay Area just doesn’t
cut it. It’s not particularly different from any of the other seasons here. &
she longs for the languid days & nights of the South.
I’m not really a Southerner (unless you count
Southern Californian, because I am that), but I so agree with her. My years in
Virginia & an unnamed state to the south of there have spoiled me when it
comes to expecting changes as the seasons roll round.
Around here, spring, summer, autumn—all pretty much
of a piece. During winter the temperatures dip…might reach the 50s or 60s. Boo-hoo.
Otherwise, just unremitting cloudless skies & really dry air.
In Virginia, right about now hot, sticky days carry
on into warm, sticky nights, but fireflies are lighting up the twilight &
in wooded areas bats are coming out to catch their mosquito dinners. You can
buy corn at roadside stands that was picked just this morning; it’s so sweet
you almost don’t have to cook it to gobble it down. If you walk down the town
street, people greet you, whether they know you or not.
When mom turns on the sprinklers & lets the kids
run through them, it’s a joyful relief for all concerned.
I understand that air conditioning has changed a lot
of the south—people go indoors & glue themselves to Netflix on 52” flat-screens instead of lounging
on front porches drinking lemonade & watching their kids play. & now
that places like Friendly’s
are in bankruptcy, I’m not sure where you’d get your ice cream & grassy
slope to cool down the evenings.
But I still miss it & I’d trade this dry, dusty
paradise for the Old Dominion in two blinks of a June bug’s eye.
Here’s a different sort of flash mob for your
entertainment, courtesy of my friend the Pundit's Apprentice.
Well—more street theatre than flash mob. But still—mixing it up for
the Belgians, who don’t ordinarily get a whole lot of excitement in their town
squares.
If I had a bucket list, I believe I’d have “be part
of a flash mob” in the top third. I recently received links to a couple, via my
friend the Pundit’s Apprentice. Here’s the first: “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, in
Moscow.
Now, leaving aside the fact that the video editing
on this sucks, there are a couple of things I find interesting about this.
The number & variety of digital devices that are
being used to record the event. Even a few tablets. I'm thinking that the recording is an integral part of these things.
Then there's he curious incident of the bride & groom. Hard
to determine whether or not they were intended to be part of it—the two of them
left standing at the end tends to indicate that they weren’t.
But I bet they’ll remember this day for a long, long
time.
Also, if this video goes viral, I’m betting that
bridezillas all over the country are going to demand a flash mob at their
receptions.
Really an amazing event this past week: Burmese
opposition leader & holder of the high moral ground for decades Aung San
Suu Kyi finally accepted
her Nobel Peace Prize in person.
When you consider what this woman has endured—her house
arrest was only lifted two years ago by the military dictatorship, &
she was elected
to parliament but two months ago—it’s just astonishing that things have shifted
such a distance that she’s in Oslo to accept her prize & will be able to
return to Myanmar.
Considering everything going on in the world, it’s
really heartening to have this story to put things into perspective.
