Economics of Hamburgers

This week the news has been dominated by the debate over the Confederate Battle flag.  I don’t care!  A man brutally murdered innocents and the news media is pouring causation bullshit down our throats.  I would like to know from you social pundits, not what affect a piece of colored cloth played in motivating this shit bag, but an intelligent, coherent definition of hatred and its root causes.  I’m waiting…

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

As we slide into the midsummer grilling season and near its milestone July 4^th date, I will share my thoughts on comestible fare of the season.  My experience has been that fried chicken is a dish best served cold at picnics.  Cucumber salad is a poor substitute for high-mayonnaise content potato salad and an obvious move by the food Nazis to undermine the egg ranching industry.  But these issues are miniscule compared to the great debate:  Hot Dogs or Burgers?

Let me make this short and sweet so the pinkos out there can get back to marinating their cucumbers.  Hot Dogs suck, burgers rule.  I can hear the “inclusives” now, “But it all depends on what you like!”  No, it does not.  A hamburger is a sandwich whose primary flavor ingredient is ground beef.  I dare any of you to tell me authoritatively (that means you must cite a reputed source) what is contained within that tubing you so lovingly call “wiener”.  I’m waiting…

Yeah, I didn’t think so.

So, debate settled (believe me, it is… if you don’t believe it, go back and read the last paragraph until it becomes your mantra) the question is, “What makes a great hamburger?”   If you agree, then you haven’t been paying attention.  What makes a hamburger great is that it is not a hot dog!  How many times must I repeat this?

I have suffered through the inane discussions in which self-styled epicures have waxed poetic over memories of hamburgers past.  But they have missed the point because their argument always turns on condiments.  Whether their taste favors applewood bacon or peanut butter and jelly, shitake mushrooms or quail’s eggs, if you can build the sandwich using said ingredients sans the hamburger patty, you are not improving the quality of the burger; you are just demonstrating some kind of non-mainstream sexual orientation.

Here’s the recipe for the perfect burger; one-third pound “hamburger” patty (the higher the fat content the better; if you want a steak sandwich, buy a filet mignon and put it into a baguette) cooked over coals to individual taste, a standard sized white flour hamburger bun (“Wonder” brand, if you can find it in this no-gluten, politically-correct, neo-modern world), Heinz ketchup; French’s yellow mustard, sweet pickle slices or pickle relish, one slice of American cheese, one leaf of iceberg (don’t you dare put kale on this masterpiece, you commie) lettuce trimmed so as not to extend more than one-eighth inch beyond the rim of the bun, one slice of nearly ripe tomato.  The order of assembly should be obvious to anyone who has achieved the age where they can hold their own burger, even if it takes two hands. 

Oh, yeah… if you are stupid enough to display a confederate battle flag to make a political, cultural or philosophical statement in 2015, please report to the museum, they are missing figures from their Neanderthal diorama.  No, leave your hamburger here and just go.

   

Q.E.D.

The title of this week’s offering should serve as a warning that the discussion will be of a scientific nature.  If the reader finds such material to be painful, confusing or sleep-inducing, they may wish to abandon this missive and try again next week.  This topic has a bit of the “Chicken or Egg” element to it, but as we unequivocally established that the Egg came first (see The Chicken or the Egg, 5/30/13) we will skip over that part of the discussion and jump right in.

Fabric of Space Time

We know from universally accepted scientific dogma that the Universe, as our limited sensory perspective interprets it, is measured in four dimensions: Height, Width, Depth and Time.  This can be simplified by stating that every event occupies an identifiable location at some measurable moment.  But which is more important; identifying the coordinates or the moment of the measurement?

This is a tricky question to answer (not a trick question, which would be a question leading to an unexpected obvious answer when the shroud of misdirection is removed) but I believe worthy of the effort as it addresses the fundamental nature or all existence.  Are you getting sleepy yet?

Astronomer Edwin Hubble

Once astronomer Edwin Hubble established that the Universe is expanding (The Big Pffft! 5/16/13), location of any observed event necessarily required the addition of a time element; because event identification became temporal.  Essentially; if you looked for it where you saw it last time, it wasn’t going to be there.  Perhaps this explains why it is so difficult to locate ones house keys.  It underscores the invalidity of the question asked by spouses in all languages, “Where did you last have them?”  A man of courage would respond, “Aha!  It doesn’t matter where I last had them, you old battleaxe, because Einstein has assured us that they are now in some different part of the Universe.”  In our eternal quest for harmony we have adopted the more congenial, “If I could remember that dear, I wouldn’t be searching for them. Thank you for your helpful suggestion.”  But I digress. 

With very little thought, the answer becomes self-evident.  Time is the more important element!  Our experience with motorcars and body repair has demonstrated that we cannot locate two (or any integer larger than one for that matter) independent objects consisting of matter in the same spatial coordinates at the same time.  We can so locate an infinite number of said objects in said spatial coordinates at different times without negative consequence.  But run one red light and, wham! –Q.E.D.

Now I know what you are thinking, “But Dale, what does this have to do with trains?”  Well, I’m going to tell you.  A couple decades before Hubble and Einstein more clearly defined the nature of our universe and peaceful coexistence within, the North American railroads (including Canadian, ay) discovered that scheduling train movements under the then popular solar time, in which every community set its own clocks to correspond with the local “noon” time, was not only impossibly difficult but extremely hazardous.  If you’ve ever sat yourself down on a heretofore non located porcupine, you know of which I speak.  Just imagine the consequence of two speeding trains asserting their inertial right to use the same stretch of railroad at the same time: Cataclysmic!

U.S. Naval Observatory

So, as the tracks are the tracks and run between fixed points in space, the variable we must turn to in hopes of avoiding the above described catastrophe is time.  If time were standardized, scheduling could be completed safely within the ever present limits of human performance.  Note we still have the occasional train collision, but it’s not because the time zone suddenly changed itself.  To accomplish this safety improvement, and time management facilitation, the railroads joined together in 1879 following the suggestion of Mr. Cleveland Abbe to establish what we now know as the five (Canada has one more than the U.S.) standard time zones.

It became the responsibility of several major observatories (e.g. the Naval Observatory in Washington D.C. and Harvard University) to send a telegraph signal each day at noon Eastern Standard Time by which operators would set their clocks as necessary for their time zone; e.g. San Francisco (Pacific Standard Time zone) would set its clocks to 9:00 A.M. when it received the signal that was telegraphed at Noon (12:00 PM) from the Eastern Standard Time zone. And they accomplished feat of non-compulsory cooperation before the government could get its spindly hands into the batter. 

So there you have it.  Before the Big Bang Theory, before the Theory of Relativity, American entrepreneurs using good, old-fashioned, profit-driven motives solved the problems associated with traveling through four-dimensional space-time... in a train!

 

Cereal Killer; or

…fun with homonyms!

Inspired by a new reader’s casual comment, I began to dwell on my history with cereal.  My first memories of the ultimate breakfast fare are sitting on the floor on Saturday mornings watching cartoons while my parents slept in.  Now remember, this was back in the old days when there were only three channels, maybe five or six if the atmospheric conditions allowed reception of the Los Angeles independents (non-network… we didn’t have any of those in San Diego).  Sometimes I was limited to two, if the local weather messed with Channel Six, which was broadcast from Mexico.  Funny thing, even though Channel Six (XETV) was broadcast in English for an American audience, their Mexican license required that addresses by the Presidente of Mexico be broadcast.  This resulted in the occasional limiting of available cartoon fare; I suppose it was for the good of the peoples.  But I digress.

My career as a cereal killer began with Kellog’s Frosty Flakes.  It was the perfect food for a five-year old; corn flakes encrusted with sugar.  This built-in convenience stripped away one whole step in breakfast preparation.  Just pour in the bowl, splash on some milk and you were ready to assume multi-tasking; calorie intake and intellectual sterilization ala Huckleberry Hound.  If Tony the Tiger’s favorite was not available there was usually Raisin Bran; most probably responsible for this authors lifetime of efficient evacuation, or regular corn flakes (just add sugar).

As I aged, the purveyors of boxed breakfast fare developed ingenious stratagems for increasing the population-wide consumption of the produce of our nation’s breadbasket.  First, there were the box-top offerings.  Cereals marketed to wee folk offered incredible toy acquisition opportunities if one could amass the requisite number of box tops, later proof of purchase tabs, and manage to scribble the correct address on an envelope as directed by the manufacturer.  In a mere six to eight weeks, voila!  The much anticipated prize was delivered, never quite meeting the expectations generated by the promises inscribed on the back of the cereal box.  Sometimes, if the offer was for a more sophisticated goo-gaw, the transaction required a small monetary stipend accompany the box tops, but the quality of the bauble was generally of much higher caliber than the gratis offerings.  I remember sending away for two (had to eat a lot of cereal in furtherance of this acquisition) F-100 Super Saber fighter jet models.  To my surprise, when they arrived, they were of reasonable scale, relatively accurate in design detail, featured retracting landing gear and fired a missile from a spring-loaded recess in the jet intake.  Okay, I recognized that last bit of engineering as a stretch of reality, but I lost the projectiles the first day anyway so I wasn’t too troubled by it.

The next development in the marketing of high-sugar content dietary offerings was the cross marketing of cartoons with cereals.  As I recall, the originator and run-away leader of this strategy was Post.  Some network executive, or maybe it was a corn farmer, came up with the notion of creating animated animal characters as brand identifiers for their products.  These characters first appeared in commercials.  But they quickly expanded into actual episodic television shows which in reality were half-hour long advertisements.  Brilliant!!!  One could not watch Post’s Crispy Critters featuring Linus the Lionhearted while eating Kellog’s Frosty Flakes.  The half-hour program which featured a plethora of Post Cereal trademark characters was first aired in 1964 on CBS, running until 1966.  The program was then picked up by ABC until 1969 when the FCC made a ruling that prevented children’s show characters from appearing in advertisements on the same program.  That sure seems like governmental creep to me!

One of the universal experiences of cereal killers is the milk: cereal ratio conundrum.  I challenge any one of my readers to honestly attest that they were able, on the first pour, to achieve the optimum ratio of cereal to milk so as to result in the same relative density with the first spoonful as with the last.  I’ll be able to tell if you’re lying… because your lips will be moving!  No one has ever achieved this lofty goal.  If we’re honest, we admit to having to add just a little more cereal to absorb the excess milk.  Then, with the second application of cereal, the mix proves too dry and we add a just a splash of moo-juice.  And it seems, by the time we have accomplished our goal of perfect resource allocation, we have eaten a whole box of cereal and a half-gallon of milk (Uuurp!)

I don’t each that much cereal today.  Oh, I’ll imbibe in a bit of granola (gluten free, of course) when part of the motel breakfast bar offering. But the truth is, one cannot pack that kind of dense fodder into the stomach after reaching a certain age.  And the roof of my mouth is just too sensitive to handle Cap’n Crunch anymore.

Don't Look Up!

Well it seems that all of you paranoids who have been listening for the black helicopters were just wasting your time.  This week, the Associated Press (AP) reported the FBI has deployed an air force of what would typically be described as general aviation (as opposed to commercial) airplanes for the purposes of criminal investigations and intelligence gathering.  So while you were listening for the whisper of suppressed helicopter rotors, you should have been looking for red and white Cessnas!  Hiding in “plane” sight?

A spokesman (agency not delineated) declared in a statement to AP that “The FBI’s aviation program is not secret.” (Of course not, if it had been secret we’d have heard about it by now!) But the planes are all registered to shill companies set up by the feds to “protect the aircraft and their capabilities for operational security purposes.”  Hmm!

According to the article, the planes’ surveillance equipment is generally used without a judge’s approval and the flights are used for specific, ongoing investigations.  The spokesman stated that the FBI planes are not equipped… for bulk collection or mass surveillance activities. Some of the aircraft can be (well, are they?) equipped with technology that can identify people on the ground through the cell phones they carry, even when not making a call. Officials said that practice, which mimics cell towers, is rare.  AP reports that since at least 2003 this program might be the basis for reports of suspicious-looking planes slowly orbiting neighborhoods.

If you’re interested in more details, my source was:

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2015/06/02/fbi-flying-surveillance-aircraft-over-us-cities-planes-traced-to-fake-companies/

Sometimes, I think the grid is becoming too much like a spider’s web!

Sorry for the short offering this week, but I just can’t spend any more time thinking about this.  Now where did I leave my aluminum-foil hat?