To live in a time and place in which a "light breakfast" can consist of marbled rye/pumpernickel toast with truffle butter is, really, stunning. Ancient Rome at the height of its power couldn't deliver this, not even to the Emperor: grit-free bread, fresh butter -- with truffles? Eat your heart out, Caesar. And the poor sods didn't even know they were missing out on coffee.
There's a reason things didn't really start rolling until coffee, tea and chocolate started to be consumed in quantity across the world. You could make a case for tobacco as well -- nicotine is a positively effective drug and if it wasn't, nobody would have tolerated inhaling the smoke -- but the delivery mechanism has serious downsides.
(For that matter, it'd make me even happier if a local grocer would start stocking flageolets verts, too. The old Atlas Supermarket had 'em, and plenty of other canned veggies we don't usually see in these parts. Those French green kidney beans were particularly tasty. But goodness, how obscure is that?)
Whatever. Those Moon-shotting tea- and coffee-drinking smokers, with their chocolate bars and big dreams, slide rules and limited-stock companies, built a pretty amazing world. I'd be a fool not to enjoy it.
BUILDING A 1:1 BALUN
4 years ago
5 comments:
Yep, we ARE lucky, no question. First world problems and complaints aren't even understood by the entitlement generation, since they've not even bothered to read history, and have to comprehension of true shortages of items.
I thought it was logarithms that did it.
Have you ever tried to stay awake without coffee while using a log table?
...And then she realized most people don't have much of a mental image for "log table," at least not one that doesn't consist of rustic joinery.
Old, old joke from Spider Robinson:
When Noah built the Ark he forgot to make provisions for the poisonous snakes. The worst of them were the adders, so he took a table that had been made out of logs and tied it off as a raft behind the Ark and put all of those snakes on it. One day as he was giving a math lesson to the children he saw that they were all sneaking peaks at the raft floating behind the Ark and giggling. Sure enough, when he looked over the stern he saw that the snakes were mating.
Never one to miss a lesson, he told the kids, "See? Even adders can multiply on a log table."
(Anyone who needs this joke explained also needs a refresher course in mathematics.)
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