Rumor has it that quarks and gluons abound in the cities of Sweden.
So, given that 2007 – 2008 is Frank’s sabbatical year, we’re headed to Stockholm (and Uppsala) for the fall term. Frank will be doing research and writing while finishing up a couple of books in progress. I will be boning up on philosophies of science in general and Nobel history in particular for my book Meta-Physics: Lives With, About, and Sometimes After the Cosmos.
Our plane leaves Boston tonight, which I hope excuses some of the recent silence on this blog.
Elsewhere, Jim talks about his own South Pole adventure, battling frostbite and altitude sickness as he dragged a 110-lb sled for 8 hours a day–burning 1000 calories per hour! That part, at least, sounds very good to me!
Ronni’s bright-red time machine and my beige-y gold one whisked us last Friday into a lovely mid-century twilight zone of stage-settings from the 1940’s and 1950’s.
The remarkable thing about NH’s “Strawbery Banke” is that wandering there lets you side-slip from the many memory-objects on display there into your own private world of forgotten memories.
What a pleasure it was to wander there riffing on memories with Ronni Bennett, who has even more photos in her blog “As Time Goes By”.
On July 1, 2007, 11,000 enthusiastic chowderheads will pay $10 a pop to sample contestants for New England’s signature dish–that hot, milky, salty, potato-ful, tomato-free, and clammy paradise known as New England clam chowder.
That and more will be going on in celebration of Fourth of July over at the big Boston Harborfest event.
I am delighted to learn that one earlier chowderfest winner is named Devine! Clam chowder recipes have gone through a big shift in the fifty-plus years I’ve been enjoying them–most notably starting in ’70s California when chefs began to add more and more thickening to the earlier just-milk-with-clam-juice-and-a-wee-tad-of-bacon broth.
My unprejudiced blogger verdict is that the clam chowders served at Legal Seafood and Jasper’s Summer Shack are way over-rated. The most delicious clam chowder in Boston, better than either of those and also much less expensive, is served at the little fast food outlets called Boston Chowda. There’s one inside “the Garage” at Harvard Square, another at Fanueil Hall.
If you go to Jasper’s or Legal, get just about anything except the clam chowder–and the chowder’s not bad, it’s just less good than Chowda’s. Both have great lobster rolls, and Jasper’s has awesome Rhode Island calamari.
One more local Boston-Cambridge-seafood-touristy note about Legal Seafood–their chain is so popular that most locations have people waiting for tables as soon as it’s mealtime. The Legal Seafood in Harvard Square (on the plaza with the Charles Hotel) is a welcome exception to this annoying rule–you can almost always get seated right away.
Hmmm, for some reason, I’m starting to feel very hungry!
…the breakfast toast-destroyer known as a toast rack.
In my NH growing-up family, we liked our toast hot–fresh out of the toaster and quickly slathered with butter. So your first bite of toast would be hot with a dab of still-cool butter on top, while your last bite would be warm, all the non-crust somewhat sodden with melted butter.
My first encounter with an English toast rack left me incredulous–was this a machine for cooling off hot toast and creating cold dry bread slices?
Now years later, I think I understand. It’s not a machine to make the toast lose heat, it’s a machine to keep toast from getting soggy. The English prize crisp toast that crunches. My family didn’t mind soggy if it came with buttery. The English way is healthier–but of course I like my way.
I spent today way down under the earth near Geneva, visiting CERN’s big particle detectors (still being built but expecting data in 2008.)
I’m told the engineer in charge of the scaffolding that helps other engineers clamber around building the big ATLAS detector is this woman, said to be from Finland.
Today deep in the earth, tomorrow up in the sky again, headed for home. So much good stuff, no time to blog anything more tonight–our taxi arrives at 7 a.m., groan, groan!
I know that Switzerland is a modern and diverse country (home of CERN, for goodness sake!) with many virtues beyond the old cliché of chocolate, bankers, and cheese.
“In retrospect, it always seems to be summer…” says Jan Morris in her book Oxford,
“…and a fine day at that.
The meteorological records for these parts assure us that July 4, 1862 was ‘cool and rather wet’: but on that day Lewis Carroll first told the tale of Alice in Wonderland to four people in a Thames gig, rowing upstream for a picnic tea, and to the ends of their lives all four remembered the afternoon as a dream of cloudless English sunshine.
