Tuesday Tool: the Ballot.

Election day, here.  The one issue on the ballot has to do with changing the county charter, basically de-professionalizing county government.  It's brought out much of what I don't care for in local politics.  When I first heard of this issue, it struck me as an expression of the generalized all-government-is-bad sentiment of the area, as well as the no-expertise-or-knowledge-is-necessary-for-governing sentiment one sees nowadays, especially on the conservative side of the spectrum.

But then, somebody noticed that this charter would have allowed citizens to block or delay logging on certain county lands.  Indeed, one of the people who proposed the new charter was involved in protests against the logging of a county park.  That led to a county-wide blossoming of signs urging us to STOP EXTREME ENVIRONMENTALISTS! And vote no on the charter.

Then our county sheriff jumped in.  He's absurdly popular around here, because during the Obama administration, he sent a letter to the Vice President--apparently because the President wasn't legitimate?--saying that he wouldn't enforce any gun regulation laws.  (He also had on his Face book page a link to a video suggesting that Sandy Hook was a "false flag" operation.  Trucks all around here have stickers saying "I SUPPORT SHERIFF HANLIN").  Well, the new charter could possibly be interpreted to possibly maybe limit his powers, so he came out against it.  So, a picture of him making a Mussolini face is now up on the "no" posters, which urge us to SUPPORT SHERIFF HANLIN VOTE NO!

And then there's the letters to the editor in the local paper.  Hoo boy.  "Fight Communism--vote no!"  "New charter is first step on road to Nazism."  One of the originators of the charter (a woman) apparently has been subject to menacing, grotesquely threatening phone calls, mail, and social media.  Around here, if somebody says they're coming after you with an AR-15, it's believable.

I don't think the charter will pass.  Backers have been massively out-spent (by a hundred to one), out-postered, and have no support from the business or education community.  I don't care for the charter, because government requires skill and professionalism, and nobody worthwhile will serve as a volunteer county commissioner.  But geez, it sure has brought out the ugly in Douglas County.

Monday Musical Offering of Thanks

This has been a rotten year for practicing--a combination of farm work, family stuff, stiff hands and other excuses.  When I am in good shape, I try to keep three or four pieces in practice.  There has to be some Bach, a Classical piece (Mozart/Haydn/Beethoven/Schubert and their ilk), something from the Romantic repertoire (Mendelssohn through Rachmaninov), and one or two other things, maybe something by Shostakovich or Byrd or whatever.  As my time (and hands) have withered, it's gotten pared back to just Bach, and nothing big, maybe an Invention or a number from the WTC.  Right now, I am working, piece by piece, through a French Suite, but a few pages of music that have taken me months to learn.  I am just starting the Gigue.

I could not survive this age without Bach.

The news, day in and day out, is awful.  Horrible.  The night of the election, I could not sleep--the demons of the future were gibbering in my head, warning me of all the terrible things that were to come.  Well, those demons were understating the case, and every day the news fills my head with excrement.  It is getting to be that one of the only things that can silence those demons is playing Bach.  I am chipping away at it, and by focusing very hard on moving my fingers in the way my brain wants them to, I can buy myself--or maybe steal--a half hour a day of peace, in which my neighbors and my government are not trying to poison the wells from which we all drink.  Bach is still the pure spring.

Incoherent rant

Last week's news should have been all about Puerto Rico dealing with the destruction of a hurricane.  Instead, too much of it was focused on the rantings of a bigot who has spent his life wiping his ass with the American flag, complaining about people who have a legitimate problem respectfully exercising their right to protest.  The bigot confused respectful protest with disrespect for the flag and the soldiers who fought under it.  The bigot also thought that the soldiers fought for the flag and not for the values it represents.

The bigot, and the party of whom he is the leader, are dedicated to the primacy of the second amendment to the constitution, or specifically one phrase thereof.  To the bigot and his party, this one isolated phrase, stripped of its modifying companion in its sentence, is sacred.

Last night, facilitated by the bigot's party, a guy armed with military weapons (and not acting as part of a well-regulated militia) opened fire on a crowd in Las Vegas, killing (as of this time) 59 people and wounding hundreds.

As I drove through town today, the flag at the National Cemetery was at half-mast, per the bigot's orders.  As I listened to the radio recounting the night's events, I had to wonder if the people now interred under those ranks and ranks of tombstones were really serving, fighting, and dying so that a guy could legally arm himself with a platoon's weapons and kill and injure so many citizens.  Would any of them be moved to rise from the earth and yell like banshees at the bigot and his party?  Could they shamble out of their graves and trouble the dreams of the bigot and his party?  Could one of them gesture at regiments of the risen dead, and point out the bit of the constitution that mentions a well-regulated militia?

I don't think that the dead at the National Cemetery can do this, and I don't think that the dead from Las Vegas this week can teach the bigot or his party either.  Nor can the dead from Roseburg, two years ago, or Sandy Hook or Columbine or Aurora.  I don't think anything can teach the bigot or his party.  I don't think anything can teach half of our country, either.  I am not feeling optimistic tonight.

Monday Musical Exhortation

Get it right!

In some parallel universe, I am a radio announcer for a classical music station.  In this universe, I'm not, for several reasons:  insufficient breadth of musical knowledge due to an education based primarily on the liner notes from LP's, an inability to correctly pronounce umlauts, and I would probably quit on-air rather than play Pachelbel's Canon or Ravel's Bolero are among these.  But, perhaps because of that parallel-universe Appleman, I get irked when announcers screw up something that they really should get.

So, the other day the announcer queued up some music, and told us it came from Richard Strauss' opera about the question of which is more important in an opera--the words or the music.  He went on about some of the details of the opera, Capriccio, and how it elides the question, and then played the music: selections from Ariadne auf Naxos, which if it is about anything, is about the difficulties of creativity in the real world and just how pelvic new love is.  I had a bit of whiplash, as it was kind of like hearing somebody talking about a good friend of yours, and then pointing them out--and it's somebody else entirely.

Oh well, not really a big deal.  But, since he didn't play it, here is some of the best music ever--the opening sextet from Capriccio.  Enjoy.

Enzymes and Food

I spent the afternoon teaching a class on cheesemaking for the Douglas County Master Food Preservers.  It went quite well; they are a group that knows about food, fermentation, some biology and food chemistry, and yet for most of them dairy products were terra incognita.  This made them ideal students, engaged, intelligent, and naive.

An essential part of making most cheeeses involves rennet.  One can use animal rennet, which is a crude extract of the stomach lining of a young ruminant.  One can use (as I do) a microbial rennet, which is a single enzyme extracted from the fungus Mucor miehi.  One can use an extract from the flower of the cardoon thistle, which doesn't work as well as normal rennet and is only used in a handful of unusual cheeses.  Or, these days, one can use recombinant rennet, which is an enzyme extracted from bacteria that have been given the genes that are expressed in the stomach lining of a young ruminant.  In all cases, the active ingredient in rennet is a specific protease.  This enzyme cuts proteins between two specific amino acids, and in a specific amino acid context (to make an analogy to language, it would be like a text editor that only cuts between the letters "x" and "t" but only if they occur at the end of a word--not very common).  Almost all the protein in milk is casein, which happens to have the target for rennet; and when rennet cuts casein at that spot, the casein sticks together so that cheese can be made.  No rennet, no fromage. All praise to rennet!

This set me to thinking.  Are there other examples where a specific enzyme, with a specific target, is absolutely essential for making a food?  Here's all the others that I can think of, after mulling on and off for a day.  

1.  Candy with syrupy centers.  How do they put liquid in a chocolate shell?  They don't.  They put a solid disaccharide sugar and an enzyme, invertase.  Invertase cuts the disaccharide into two monosaccharides and a molecule of water; the sugars dissolve into the water, and there you are.  The ingredients on the package will say "invert sugar."  

2.  Chicha. This is a maize-based beer like product from the Inca empire.  Beer requires some sugar to ferment, but corn, which the Inca grew, only has starch.  Fortunately, starch can be hydrolyzed to glucose by the very specific enzyme amylase.  Where would an Inca find amylase?  In spit.  There were people whose job it was to chew corn; the amylase in their saliva would act upon the starch in the corn, and they would spit the pulp into a jar.  The pulp of chewed-up corn, spit, and glucose liberated from the starch by saliva amylase would then ferment into a beer, which the Inca would drink.  Yum!  (You can do the same trick; put a little bit of raw potato in your mouth, and eventually it will start to taste sweet.)

3.  Not essential, but interesting--papain and bromelain for a tender steak.  There's a couple of enzymes, derived from papayas and bromeliads (pineapples), that like rennet, are proteases.  However, their specificity differs from that of rennet, and it turns out that they are really good at breaking some of the tougher fibers in muscle proteins.   It's not essential for preparing meat, but if you buy meat tenderizer, most likely you'll be getting one of these two plant enzymes.

I would love to hear of other examples of specific enzymes, independent of an organism, being essential for the production of a particular food.  There's zillions of examples of specific species being required for a food, but a single cell brings hundreds of enzymes to bear.  A single, purifyable enzyme?  That's much rarer.  

Wednesday Wordage Rough 'n' Tough Stuff Edition

German may be difficult for a foreigner to learn, but at least making the move from written word to spoken language is uncomplicated:  if a letter is there on the page, it is pronounced, and only in one way.  English?  Good luck.  A friend of mine had a visitor from Germany who suggested that they go out for some "coffee and duffnuts."  Perfectly understandable, given the myriad ways that "-ough" can be pronounced.

This is a curse for radio announcers, who have to read wire reports and record labels and try to guess at names.  For instance, I have a bunch of albums by Stephen...well, here's a challenge.  How do you pronounce the following?

1.  Hough (Stephen, outstanding British-Australian pianist/composer/blogger)
2.  Gough (Gough Whitlam, Australian Prime Minister 1972-75, famed for wit)
3.  Pough (Richard, founder of the Nature Conservancy)
4.  Brough (a town in Cumbria, England; also, a brand of motorcycles named after a racer)
5.  Blough (a town in southern Pennsylvania)
6.  Sough (a rather poetic verb describing the movement of wind through trees)
7.  Chough (a corvine bird)
8.  Lough (a body of water)
9.  Slough (a body of water)
10. Slough (to shed skin, or the shed skin of a reptile)

Answers will eventually show up in comments, where you are also free to add your own ways to confuse those for whom English is a second language.

Friday Fauna Green and Blue Edition

This guy was in one of the goat's water buckets--he's got a bug in his maw, yum!