nanfeng oranges

For lunch today I tried a new item at McDonald’s, the Angus burger. What’s an angus burger? Who wants to eat it? And how does this fit into Ronald’s strategy for world domination?

 

When I Wikipedia’ed ‘Angus’ I discovered that ‘Angus’ is an administrtive region of Scotland. Not the right Angus. But not completely unrelated. A long long time ago (the beginning of the 19th century), in the Scottish counties of Aberdeenshire and Angus, Hugh Watson started breeding the local variety of hornless (as opposed to longhorn or shorthorn) cattle. Towards the end of the 19th century they showed up stateside, presumably having swum across the Atlantic.

 

Burger King was the first mover in the fast food market. I guess Angus beef is better than regular beef. McDonald’s started a pilot program all the way back in 2006. It did well. They launched the program everywhere in 2009…this month.

 

I’ve become more and more convinced of the legitimacy of a premise that I’ve heard multiple times in the last few weeks. The natural trajectory of the food industry is for its products to become more and more efficient vehicles for the delivery of fat, sugar, and salt to consumers. No matter what the marketing spin is—American, Mexican, Chinese, whatever—it’s all the same.

 

The Angus burger is just another step on that ladder. And I don’t have any great objection to that. If it robs Chili’s or Applebee’s of a few sales, those places are too expensive anyway and only give the illusion of providing a non-fast food experience. If it contributes to the homogenization of American culture, that ship’s long since sailed.

 

Speaking of the homogenization, Chili’s, Applebee’s, and Burger King aren’t the only franchises that Ronald has his eyes on. The story of the evolution of McCafe is the same, only this time the target is Starbucks, et al. Moreover, if you’ve enjoyed an item from the McCafe menu, those items confirm the notion that the food industry is in the sugar and fat distribution business. Maybe soon we’ll be adding salt to our mochas.

 

Just a few quick thoughts about the book I finally managed to read in its entirety, ‘A Brief History of Time’ by Stephen Hawking. Good book. Read it.

 

It is not a complete explanation of modern physics. Sometimes, the way its written, seems to suggest that its explained just about all there is to know about some paradoxical law of physics. But, when you take a closer look, you realize that its explanations hinge on concepts introduced but not elaborated on earlier.

 

If you take it for what it is, a cursory look at the foundations of modern physics, it’s worth a look. Special relativity, general relativity, black holes, white dwarfs, neutron stars, supernovas, quasars, pulsars, quarks, spin, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, the Pauli Exclusion Principle, string theory, gravitons, positrons, the bing bang, the big crunch, all included. If nothing else, it gives a strong vocabulary of scientific words.

 

And, it explains the thought process that theoretical (and experimental) physicists use to refine make and refine their theories.

Ed McMahon, Farrah Fawcett, Michael Jackson and Billy Mays.

‘Karate Kid II’ is available to watch for free on youtube. I didn’t catch this movie the first time around. I new of its existence, and saw bits and pieces here and there. But, until today, never saw it in it’s entirety.

 

I liked it.

 

Why did I like it so much? It was a plain and simple movie. Can a movie be played any straighter than this? A movie needs tension, so they added some. A movie needs drama, so they added some. A movie needs romance, so they added some.

 

Every piece of dialogue diligently moved the plot along. All in all, it had about as much complexity as a high school stage play.

 

Karate is cool. Okinawa is cool. Karate Kid I is cool. Those are all the ingredients necessary for a good movie. Good thing they didn’t muck it up with any distractions.

The discovery of granaries in Dhra, Jordan, that date to 1,000 years before the first known domestication of crops fits nicely with the premise of Jared Diamond’s book ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’.

 

Not sure whether or not this new find really moves the debate further. But, just being familiar with Diamond’s historical narrative, gives one a handy way to understand why the discovery at Dhra makes sense, and why the discovery is important.

 

Diamond’s thesis, if I’m paraphrasing it accurately, is that Western civilization conquered other civilizations because, among other reasons, the Mediterranean climate of the Fertile Crescent fostered the evolution of plants well-suited for domestication. Crops were domesticated. People settled down. (Or was it the other way around?) Technology evolved. Technology spread throughout Eurasia (because Eurasia’s axis lies east to west, rather than north to south). …I’ll stop there for now.

 

That last point is central to ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’. Because Eurasia is longer from east to west than it is north to south, the climate doesn’t vary as much. Similar climates across geographic distances mean people and animals and plants that are adapted for one climate can move about unencumbered. That is not true in the Americas or in Africa.

 

Of course, not everyone shares Diamond’s interpretation. The most common alternate theory (advocated by Victor Davis Hanson) that explains why European civilizations developed more rapidly than other civilizations is that a miracle happened in Greece. The Greeks recognized individuals’ contributions to society. That miracle, proponents of this theory contend, has much more to do with why Europe was what Europe was in the 16th century, and why South America was what South America was.

 

Critics notwithstanding, ‘Guns, Germs, and Steel’ does make strong, logical arguments that are based as much on tangible facts as on abstract theories.

 

Critics of the book do take their shots. But, I think they’re missing the point. The book does not provide a waterproof theory on the history of everything. Those sorts of standards don’t separate good books from bad books. Those standards separate all books from no books. Or, at a minimum, those sorts of standards filter out new ideas.

 

The book did run a little long. I only have so much tolerance for reading about domesticating cereals. And, some chapters were more rewarding than others. Reading a description of how bands of people become tribes of people, and how those tribes of people become chiefdoms of people, and how those chiefdoms of people become states of people is exactly why I read this book.

 

Chapters that describe, for example, how Chinese became Chinese, didn’t deliver everything I expected. In fact, the most interesting part about this chapter, I thought, was the fact that the Diamond recognized that this was a very meaningful question.

 

Why do I read books like this? Not for definitive answers, but just to get a hold of what we know and what we don’t know about the world we live in.