The electrical conveniences of modern life

First off the snooze alarm simply did not work; it has black fur and green eyes and was sure it was time for breakfast makers to get up. She was only an hour early, but would not reset. Then just as us lazy humans get stirring, the electricity goes out. Now this presents some interesting problems to solve perhaps without coffee, which itself is one of the problems. Fortunately the Phactors own an Italian range top coffee brewer and a gas range.  So there you go, coffee and hot milch easy as that but maybe that manual coffee grinder should have been kept?  Just enough ground coffee saved us.  Some Italian bread fried in a bit of butter solved the third problem. Fortunately the garage door can be opened fairly easily once you get inside to disengage the opener.  No lights was a great excuse to sit out on the patio to read the morning paper listening to a lonely house wren and looking at the iris and peonies in bloom. It was a bit like camping out and the lack of electricity was not a problem for most because they simply get coffee and breakfast out at a fast foodie place just like they get din-dins.  It was only a 2 hour outage in our extended neighborhood. But you had best make sure you are prepared for such things.  Next step would have been a camp stove and percolator.  

End of the line for the field trip

Field trips tend to end with a whimper rather than a bang.  It's because people get tired physically and mentally; you begin to long for the comfort of the familiar, and the ease of you regular day-to-day life although TPP has on several occasions gotten into a new field trip routine where it feels familiar, sort of.  Usually that takes a few weeks.  So tomorrow the troops get packed up and depart. The mud gets washed off the boots and everything that has gotten strewn around gets gathered back up and stowed. How did it expand in size? Everything is heavier because of the humidity. Repacking is rather a depressing thing to do the more so that TPP is suffering from some sort of GI tract discomfort.  Never fun, especially when getting ready to travel overseas.  Another bit of last minute business is to make an order for Costa Rican coffee.  As you may know TPP never endorses anyone, but should you be in San Jose, TPP cannot say enough good things about Cafe Trebol, a 100 year old coffee roasting business located on the Calle 8 side of the Mercado Central. It's top notch coffee at fair prices, and TPP has been buying it for over 20 years now. Coffee is an easy to pack gift being nearly non-breakable. They also have cacoa of several grades.  Time to wrap up a few things for packing especially the plant press. 

Sweet teeth are growing up

A thought occurred to TPP this AM after seeing an ad for a new flavored gin from the little distillery visited yesterday. Why are these sweet, flavored things so popular? The answer is both pragmatic and reflective of market reality, although not all that pleasing on a personal level. While the buying power of my baby-boomer generation still has an impact (was not Mick Jagger host of SNL last night, and hilarious to boot?) on marketing, sweet flavored things are all over the place, but of no interest to people of my generation. TPP first noticed it in his coffee shoppe. Order a latte and the young thing operating the touch screen asks, "Do you want any flavoring in that?" No, I rather like the taste of coffee. And at that nice boutique distillery, along with some fine whiskeys there were several flavored whiskeys (chili pepper seems to be a flavor of immediate choice), but there are cherry-flavored, and cinnamon-flavored ones, and others TPP has barely noticed. Why a new little brewery in Snohomish WA had a beer flavored with roasted green chilis, and all that can be said is at least it wasn't sweet. The simplistic answer to all of this is that the sweet teeth of millennials has come of age, so the corollary is that TPP is becoming as old as dirt. The problem with all these flavored whiskeys (coffee, etc.) is that the thing that turns up missing is the flavor of whiskey drown in a sea of cloyingly-sweet flavor. TPP also noted this with young-adult nieces and nephews who while visiting at his Tuscan villa found the taste of negroni cocktails too bitter.  One asked if it would be OK to add sugar? They have grown up, but their palate hasn't. The makers of whiskey, the purveyors of coffee, and other flavored liquors don't necessarily like their products this way, but they are catering to a new market, young adults with kiddie sweet teeth, or is it tooths when used this way? Will their palates eventually grow up too? In some cases, yes. The nieces and nephews seemed to enjoy decent wine (especially when they weren't paying). If these flavor adulterated items begin to push out the real thing, then it will get ugly. Hmm, TPP left one store the other day when they failed to have a single anejo rum that was not spice flavored! That comes from shopping too close to a college campus.

Coffee & wine bars - too cultured for the USA?

Zurich is littered with coffee and wine bars.  Most of them are pretty small, quite intimate, with little tables and a couple of lithe young women in tight black jeans and white blouses waiting tables.  When your feet get tired of the coble stones, or going through one of the best collections of European art, you find an inviting looking place, and sit for a spell while sipping a coffee, wine, or beer.  You don't pay when you are served.  The wait staff doesn't bug you about paying or ordering more until you are more or less ready, and sometimes not even then.  Of course, anything this civilized

is quite rare in the USA where somehow such an activity is still considered a sinful waste of time, especially on a Sunday. Yesterday was rainy, and today, a Sunday, was mostly sunny and everyone was out walking because most retail places, other than afore mentioned social bars, were closed. How nice. People came and went; groups, old couples (the Phactors were not out of place), young couples, people with strollers, guys with mostly shaved heads and tattoos, fashionable ladies, a real cross section of the humanity strolling by.  Now why are such places not more common in the USA?  Primarily, it's because such places only exist where urban centers are vibrant and where a significant part of the population walks from place to place. Cities and towns in the USA have to develop active, people places for places like this to be successful. The closest things in smaller cities are campus town areas adjacent to university campuses. Now don't get TPP started on the mass transit system in a place like Zurich. 

Brrrrr! Temperature and wind chil

It's bloody cold outside, and a recent trip to the tropics makes it seem even colder.  The temperature this morning was 1 F (-17 C) and a moderately brisk breeze contributed a -15 F wind chill factor so the apparent temperature is -14 F (-26 C).  It makes TPP's sinuses hurt just thinking about this.  Weather persons in the USA quite often screw up the wind chill reporting the factor as the apparent temperature, which today are fairly close numbers.  The apparent temperature is the temperature it feels like when the wind chill factor is subtracted from the air temperature.  They say something like "the temperature is XX and the wind chill is YY", and you have no idea what they are talking about, was that the wind chill factor or the apparent temperature once the WCF was subtracted?  In all likelihood they have no idea themselves, but it's annoying when it comes from someone whose job it is to report the weather that they don't make that clear especially when they portray themselves as a meteorologist.  However, this is quite cold no matter what.  Once in Chi-town the temperature was near zero (F) and the wind was strong enough to generate something like a -50 degree wind chill.  Walking just two blocks was torture. Temperatures like this make it a great pleasure to walk into the local coffee shoppe this AM with its steamy roasted coffee humidity and aroma. Roasted coffee just has an appealing smell, and you also get to wrap both your hands around the cup.  Nice.  A colleague was sitting there with a pile of evolution exams to grade and he has no intention of going anywhere else for quite awhile.  Such a good idea.

Return, re-entry, and readjustment

Returning from the tropics to the northern temperate late fall is not a good idea, just a necessity.  At the coffee shoppe this AM the friendly clerk asked if it were still warm outside?  It was 40 F.  How a particular temperature feels depends a great deal upon what recent ambient temperatures you have been experiencing.  So, no, it's bloody damp and cold.  As much as TPP would like to gently and gradually adjust to regular academic life, the re-entry plunges you directly into the deep water since there are only 3 days left in the semester.  At one of the last class meetings, a student asked if there was a lab scheduled for today.  No, no lab, but there will be a regular 50 min lecture.  Apparently about half the class tuned out as soon as TPP said, no lab.  This will certainly help the teaching evaluations as the situation guarantees half the class will be pissed no matter what you do.  Since there is no jet lag, you wouldn't think the change would be so bad.  However without the constant white noise of the rainforest at night, or in the rain, TPP finds it hard to sleep.  Guess that sound track needs to be packaged up and sold, and with the additional gimick that you can set a wakeup time, and then a recording of howler monkeys greeting the day will be inserted.  And no really ripe, succulent pineapple for breakfast.  Such a downer.  Good thing TPP got a couple of kilos of dark roasted Costa Rican coffee to bring home, which set such a good example that the class cumulatively brought home well over 20 kilos of coffee, so much that a 5% discount was given.  "Do you have anything to declare?"  Just some coffee.  "How much coffee?"  Just two kilos.  "Where is it?"  In that big blue duffle bag.  "What's in the bag with the coffee?"  Just more coffee.  And yet it's good to be home. 

Field trip packing

The only thing worse than packing for a field trip is repacking everything for the trip home.  All the careful packing has degenerated into near chaos as students have pursued their projects, and then revised their projects, and then punted, and then finally succeeded in wringing a bit of information, some data, some new understanding, out of the rainforest.  Now all this stuff has to get put away.  You figure out that biologists use way too much plastic; what would happen without Tupperware and zip lock bags?  Biological progress would grind to a halt. But you get real pragmatic on the way home and you have to make room for some Costa Rican coffee, a lot of coffee, 40-50 pounds of coffee (it's 15 people after all).  If you get to Costa Rica, do visit Café Trebol on the Calle Ocho side of the Mercado Central. Getting everything clean including your boots is difficult; getting it all dry is next to impossible especially as it is pouring buckets outside.  The troops are sorting everything on the veranda of their cabina, so it continues.  Unfortunately, the students don't/won't pack for their instructors.  Go figure.  Monday the trip will start at 5:30 AM bus loading to reverse the trip down.  Too bad all that coffee is packed away and inaccessible. 

Robotic barista?

Remember the scene in a Star Wars movie where R2D2 was busy serving drinks on Jabba's party barge?  Well, this Brigga "robotic" barista machine is no R2D2.  Not self-propelled at all, in fact a fork lift would be necessary to move it.  You could actually talk to R2D2 and get some squeeks and whistles in return, sort of like petting a talky cat.  Don't people want to talk, briefly socialize, with the barista making their lattes?  Why do people want to take jobs away from college students, out of work actors, or under employed PhDs?  This thing strikes TPP as total overkill and no way would it fit in my office, so what use is it anyways?  Looks like you have to punch a lot of buttons, or say, "Computer, earl grey, hot", or have it linked to some app on your cell phone, and then it delivers the same Sanka decaf for everything and psychologically no one would notice because it came from such an imposing ediface.  Actually this doesn't look too different from some automatic coffee/espresso machines you see at truck stops and the like, and they never deliver anything drinkable. Anyone have anything like this in their work place break/lunch rooms?  Hmm, a bit of reflection reminds TPP that the little cafeteria at the U. Zurich's botanical garden had a little coffee machine that actually delivered a pretty nice latte at the push of a button, and it would fit in my office! 

Sad news; glad news

Naked, hungry, and miserable.  That's what we'd be without plants, or at the very least fur-clad carnivores.  Dreadful thought!  Nothing contributes more to our "happiness" than caffeine, facing the start of our day with a cuppa coffee (or tea, or exchanging a CH3 for a H), hot chocolate).  A study by the famous Kew Gardens warns that wild populations of Caffea arabica, a native of Ethiopia, may go extinct in the wild, a victim of global warming and climate change.  Now of course coffee is raised in many places now so what is the problem?  All of the coffee being grown on plantations comes from a very few initial sources so it possesses very little genetic diversity, and this is why wild coffee is so important; it's our only reservoir of genetic diversity.  Low diversity crops are at risk of diseases and pests.  Such things happen slowly, so no, TPP isn't worried about his coffee tomorrow, or next year, or next decade, but by the end of the century this could be a done deal. The idea of doing without something so pleasantly comforting is profoundly sad.  Sounds like time to begin trying to save some of this diversity before it's too late.
TPP, a long time Mets and Jets fan, sort of likes supporting underdogs and takes perverse delight when the high and mighty get taken down a peg.  In this case, acording to CBS News, the Sunlight Foundation reports that only 1.29% of the $104 million mostly in dark money spent to defeat Bronco Bama and other Hemicrats had the desired result.  Most of this money came from a relatively few extremely wealthy people (e.g., Joe Ricketts, Bob Perry, Sheldon Adelson, the Kochs, Harold Simmons), people who like The Donald were clearly dumbfounded and outraged that they were unable to get their way by throwing their money at the situation.  This is not something they are used to and political con-men like Karl Rove got some splainin to do.  Even here in Lincolnland, a ton of money was spent on electing T-party favorite Joe Walsh who lost, and to add to the outrage, to a woman!  The thought of these good fellows spending so much money on a losing effort cheers TPP greatly, almost as much as a cuppa coffee.

Car constructed of pot runs on coffee?

Far out, man, a car made of hemp, but if memory serves the Phactor correctly, and not all of those years are remembered clearly, didn’t Cheech and Chong come up with this idea years ago?  Will it be a worry if your car is smoking?  Still hemp as a fiber is great stuff, but it’s development as a crop has been hampered by demonization of cannabis in the USA.  But then you take all those used coffee grounds, extract the residual oil and make biodiesel to power your cannabis car, now that’s pretty nifty.  But somehow this won’t work out because just to get enough biodiesel to drive you to the coffee shop you’d have to drink a hell of a lot of coffee, so getting enough coffee grounds to supply any meaningful amount of biodiesel just doesn’t seem feasible. Think about it.  For a cross-country trip fueled by coffee you'd have to make so many pit stops, it would take forever.  But let's continue this thinking; maybe the tires will be made from chocolate. Now we need some model names: the Reefer, the Roach.  You'll have to help.  Not enough biodiesel production yet this AM.

Good news, everyone! Drink coffee and live longer and better!

Not that this information actually means anything to the addict, but it appears that not only is the modest imbibing of coffee not harmful, caffeine may actually help you live a longer life.  Back when coffee was being panned as unhealthy by really unhappy people, the Phactor figured that the people who didn't drink coffee didn't really live longer; it was just that their miserable existence seemed longer. One does wonder about all the factors involved.  Perhaps the socializing in the convivial company of coffee house patrons improves your outlook on life, which in turn provides a positive impact on your health, if only everyone didn't talk so fast.  But even if such studies did not exist, a true caffeine addict is not easily guilted into quitting their morning upper.  Such a study also should not be used as an excuse for over indulgence so as to increase your chances of living to 120.  So, to Mr. 4 shots, straight up, you're probably near the limit.  HT to Scientific American blog.  And a wag of the finger for their stupid commercial delay.  None of that stuff here, folks! 

Coffee, bugs, and death

Tiny minds are at work worrying about tiny things, in this case whether a dye from ground up insects ruins your vegan diet when used in a coffee drink.  Well, not as much as a strawberry frappacino (it's a red dye).  Ah, the vegan belief system in fundamentalist, fanatic mode, and the Gleaming Retort has said it with more humor and information than the Phactor can muster today.  This craziness had to have originated in California; I mean you're getting drinks from Starbucks and you worry about a dye from an insect in your drink?  Just be happy it isn't a fly or cockroach swimming around.  But just remember vegans, fungi and animals are each others most recent common ancestors forming a single lineage, so phylogenetically eu-vegans (true vegans) you should probably avoid fungi and their metabolic products too, just to be safe.  Leave the beer and bread for us poor omnivores.

Fair trade Lincolnland coffee

For a number of years our teaching greenhouse had a very nice coffee tree that produced several handfulls of coffee beans each year, then some moron decided to break in and steal the plant, in the winter with temperatures well below freezing, in the process killing the poor tree and leaving a trail of leaves and berries even our campus cops could follow. The replacements were really small cuttings and it has taken several years to get coffee production going again, so it was very pleasant to see that this year our coffee trees were bearing a modest crop, and suffice it to say that if you have never seen coffee in fruit, the red berries among the glossy green foliage, it's pretty! The crop will be harvested and processed by my very own non-immigrant labor force, students, because it does them good to know where the stuff you put in your mush comes from, and too few people know and appreciate such things. In a class of 24, even here in Lincolnland, a couple of them would have no idea what kind of plant a tomato grows on never having seen one grown! So the Phactor gets some very exclusive coffee and the students learn something at the same time. That's a fair trade!

Uplifting news for a Monday

At times it seems if we didn't have bad news, and news done badly, we'd have no news at all. Well, my dear fellows, it seems that one to three cups of coffee at day reduces the risk of prostate cancer. You just got to love these double duty toxins: a stimulant and healthy to boot! Now to go out and find a big damned cup.

Talk about a stimulating tattoo!

The Phactor gets asked to identify lots of botanical specimens, often from just an image. This arrived via email thanks to some anonymous correspondent, and they simply asked if this was botanically accurate? Well, to know that you have to determine what was being illustrated. And that isn’t too difficult, this is clearly Coffea arabica, coffee, and it not only is botanically accurate but copy of a classic botanical illustration. But this is almost a new one on the Phactor. Only once before has the identification been based on an image tattooed into someone’s dermis. One of my recent students had a hibiscus on her shoulder blade. Are gardeners going to start sporting tattoos of their favorite plant? Are botanists going to start bearing some indelible record of their research organisms? Who knows where this may lead, perhaps more students in my plant taxonomy class! Perhaps more tattoo pictures!