Requiem for a Seedless Grape

Not an Ode for Joy, but a Requiem for Loss? Is the seedless grape not sweet and good with no offsetting bitter seed to mar the experience? Indeed, good reader, but I think not of myself but of the poor, neutered grape.


What an abomination, how contrary to nature: the entire point of the vine's endeavors is to procreate! Using the fruit to entice us animals to eat and, in the process, sow the seeds so more vines can grow. The impulse of life encoded in those very seeds, we have ripped from thee. Oh, eunuch of a plant; you genetic dead end. The seedless grape has made the ultimate sacrifice: to die in vain. Oh, surely we enjoy thee and I will continue to eat the seedless ones, but their loss needs a voice - someone must mourn the passing of their evolutionary impetus. No selection from environmental pressures amongst your random mutations in the seedless ones' future. We will breed and graft you to our perfection, perfect your existence in relation to us alone, and rob you of any meaning independent of our will.

I shed no tear as I pop another of your smooth, cool globes of joy into my mouth. But I do wonder what your seeded cousins think of you. Are they jealous of your 21st century freedom from the shackles of genetic trial and error? Or do they snigger at your loss of genetic possibility: the sentient grape that never will be?

Sad, sad seedless one - doomed to have no fruit of your fruit. I hope you find solace in the happiness you bring us eaters of 21st century grapes...

Jaunty Tilt

 

What craziness is this?  Am I advertising to the world that I am an out-of-the-box thinker with my rear-view mirror tilted in such a jaunty manner?  Don't you just want to climb into the Rideout Minivan and straighten the mirror out - restoring rectilinear orthodoxy once again?

Well, first off, I must confess to not coming up with this myself but was one day following a car on 128 during heavy traffic.  I noticed the man in front of me had his rear-view mirror inclined as in the picture here.  I wanted to shout at him: "Buddy!  Get a clue - how can you not notice that sucker is way out of alignment?"  Then, I saw the hint of a car seat (as, indeed, you can see in this picture as well) and, like a bolt of spring-time lightening, I got it.

When you are a solo parent driving with a pre-verbal kid in a car seat, you keep tempting death by periodically glancing back - you just can't help yourself.  I have in the past resorted to re-angling the rear-view mirror so as to render it worthless for traffic (but very helpful to see if Sebastien is smiling, sleeping, pouting, in pain, etc.).  This genius of a dad in front of me had found the optimal solution:  see kid on one side of mirror, see traffic on the other.  Would that I had come up with the solution myself...

Case closed.

Horse or Tiger - either way, a Donkey!

One of the first non-food related Chinese expressions  that I learned was the great "MaMa HuHu" (literally:  "Horse Horse Tiger Tiger").   It mean "so-so". 
It calls to my mind an old Pied-Noir (french-algerian) expressions that I have known all my life "Kif Kif  Bourricot" (literally: "same same donkey") used to mean "it's all the same".  I love the combo of arabic and french.  And why a donkey?  Pourquoi?

I want my kids to someday combine these expressions into some super-hybrid pan-world "horse, tiger, donkey:  kif kif" for when all their choices are of similar mediocrity...wouldn't that just be the bee's knees?

Misconceptions About Teacher Benefits

Everyone always assumes that, as public employees, teachers must get great benefits. People say it all the time, after finding out that I'm a teacher. But, truth be told, Irene and I have both had private sector jobs and public school jobs, and, hands down, the private sector paid better AND had better benefits.*

The Boston Globe ran an article last week about how cash strapped towns in Massachusetts are having trouble meeting their public employee pension obligations.  I read the article carefully to see if it addressed a common misconception regarding teacher retirement benefits.  It did not. Since teachers are the largest slice of a town's employee costs, average readers may falsely assume that teacher pension costs are a primary drag on their town's pension obligations.

Towns pay zero dollars for teacher retirement pensions in the state of Massachusetts.  In fact, all teachers are required to contribute 11% of their salary into a mostly self-funded pension fund (which is separate from other municipal employees); the state of Massachusetts only contributes 0.61 percent of our salaries towards teacher retirement.  By 2025, the system will be fully funded and teacher contributions will more than take care of the whole thing.

(* but weren't nearly as satisfying!)

(related post on health insurance benefits here)

Rideout's Hideout

Hangin' out in my hideout

Doin' my rap write out

No need for any white out

Tell the fans i'll be right out.

Armed with bald spot and crooked nose,

I go forth to fight my foes.

My actions: seem kind of flighty

But the thoughts in my head: mighty mighty

Some days extroverted, 

full of fun;

Sometimes introverted, 

sort of glum.

Changing moods got your head spinnin'?

Your love for physics is what I'm winnin'!

In your head, tryin' to make connections -

Spreading out jokes across the sections.

Read those equations, like a novel

Before The Physics, we all grovel

Out of malaise I will fight out

For education, I get the might out

Come join me in the hideout

Hangin' out with mister rideout.

Yam or Sweet Potato?

A sweet potato is neither a potato nor a yam.

The yellow variety of sweet potato causes the confusion, for it is sometimes marketed as a yam in America to differentiate it from the white variety - but they are both sweet potatoes (genus Ipomoea - family Convolvulaceae; more in common with the morning glory flower than these other foodstuffs). 

However, a yam is a completely different beast (genus Dioscorea - family Dioscoreaceae) and most traditional eaters in the US have probably never eaten one.  

A potato is a Solanum tuberosum of the Solanaceae family (more in common with a tomato or eggplant than either of the other two).

All three may hang together in our consciousness as starchy tubers we like to eat, but that does not make them all hang from the same evolutionary vine.  But being good to eat probably helped make them as populous as they are on the planet.  Being tasty to humans can sometimes be a good survival strategy even if we humans then get them confused with each other.

(pics from wikipedia: top: sweet potato; middle left: yam,  Bottom right: potato)