THE MT VOID
Mt. Holz Science Fiction Society
06/25/04 -- Vol. 22, No. 52
El Presidente: Mark Leeper, mleeper@optonline.net
The Power Behind El Pres: Evelyn Leeper, eleeper@optonline.net
Back issues at http://www.geocities.com/evelynleeper
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Topics:
Movie Physics (URL)
Take Me Along, If You Love-A Me ... (comments
by Mark R. Leeper)
Letter of Comment (by Daphne Brinkerhoff)
This Week's Reading (Hugo-nominated novellas) (book
comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
===================================================================
TOPIC: Movie Physics (URL)
is of interest
to all those who love to check the physics in movies. Be sure to
check out all the reviews as well as the main page. [-ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Take Me Along, If You Love-A Me ... (comments by Mark
R. Leeper)
There seems to be a new trend in American cuisine that nobody
seems to be talking much about. Of course, that's what you have
me for. The trend I am talking about is that the nation's
refrigerators and freezers are filling up with Styrofoam,
cardboard, and plastic containers filled with restaurant food.
These are restaurant leftovers. They are meals that gave pleasure
in a restaurant and which will some day soon, it is hoped, be
resurrected from the dead to live again, however temporarily.
What is it that is actually happening here? Well, that is easy to
understand. Americans have worked all through the 20th century
making great strides in increasing food production. Those strides
are at the basis of this phenomenon. The people who did this work
no doubt did it in the hopes of making big profits by bringing
more food to market. And with more food coming to market, the
price of food has fallen. You may not think so when you pay the
bill at your grocery store, but food in the country is really
very, very cheap. Tevye says in "Fiddler on the Roof" that "when
a poor man eats a chicken, one of them is sick." Tevye rarely had
chicken. Tevye rarely had meat of any kind. In America even the
poor have chicken fairly often, perhaps often from KFC. And they
have beef, perhaps frequently from McDonalds or Burger King. Very
few people are limited to a vegetarian diet due to lack of funds.
Whatever kind of food me make, we generally have found the secret
of making a lot of it cheaply. Some of the ways we make meat are
lamentable, but that is another issue. The fact is that meat and
vegetables really are fairly cheap. There may be a growing gap
between the rich and the poor--and there is--but being poor is in
many ways a lot more comfortable than it we ever in the past and a
lot more comfortable than it is some other places in the world.
When Americans came out of the Great Depression and went into
World War II, food for the military was at least plentiful if not
always as tasty as it might have been. Soldiers who might not
have had a lot to eat a few years before were given more and got a
taste for larger portions. I remember in the 1950, when I was
quite young, going to smorgasbords where you could eat as much as
you wanted. That was certainly unheard of during the Great
Depression. During the 1950s people's appetites and waistbands
expanded. And that trend has continued. And it was, of course, a
rather unhealthy trend. But, some say, that evolution has made it
an instinct for humans and other animals to eat when food is
available and to store up nutrition for what may be lean days
ahead. That instinct continues even though society has managed to
remove the lean days.
Our image is that it is the rich businessman who has the bulbous
stomach. In the past only the rich could afford to over-indulge
and to bulge. These days food is so plentiful that even the poor
can avail themselves of that pleasure. The rich have a lot of
pleasures to compete with the gratification of eating, the poor
have fewer. These days the rich tend to be thin. However, if you
walk around a Walmart or a K-Mart you see a lot of people who are
seriously overweight. Overweight has become much more a disease
of the poor, and less one of the wealthy. That attests to the low
cost of food.
Restaurants increased the size of their portions because it was
one way to satisfy their customers that did not cost a lot. If
they were cooking the dish anyway, it cost very little more to add
the ingredients to make it a large portion. They then can give
this extra food to the customer free or at low cost. McDonalds
can offer those unhealthy "super-size" portions at bargain prices.
Some customers wanted the large portions; some found it made them
uncomfortable to eat that much. Why not save the food for a later
meal? For these people was created what was called the "Doggie
Bag." Restaurants and customers maintained the fiction that the
food that was going home to be eaten by the customer's dog. I
remember some Doggie Bags had poems where a cute dog was asking to
have the last bits brought home for him. My father told a story
about someone he knew who asked that half his expensive steak be
wrapped so that he might bring the food home for his dog. Hoping
for a good tip the waiter came back and said he had given the dog
some nice scraps from other tables too.
These days the containers for leftovers from restaurants say
nothing about dogs or anything else. But they are coming home
with more and more meals. The restaurants still make the large
portions since the additional investment is small, and health-
conscious people take what they don't want home. From personal
observation it seems that as many as half of dinner meals in
restaurants get some amount packaged and brought home. My in-laws
eat very small portions as a rule. I think they did that before
most people knew what a good idea was. They go to their favorite
Chinese restaurant frequently and it serves large portions. When
they are done with the meal frequently it is not obvious that the
meals have been touched. For each visit they get one meal in the
restaurant and what is probably three meals at home. A fair part
of their diet is restaurant leftovers.
When people do surveys of trends of what percentage of meals are
from a restaurant and what percentage are eaten at home, I hope
they know that for American families for an increasing number of
meals the answer is "both." [-mrl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: Letter of Comment (by Daphne Brinkerhoff)
Daphne Brinkerhoff writes about my reference two weeks ago to a
car dealership claiming to write deals with a sharp pencil:
I'm not sure if you've ever traveled in central or northern Maine,
but there is a very distinctive used auto sales place in Bangor
that has an ad with the following jingle (I moved away 5 years and
still I can sing it):
They've got the sharpest pencil in town
And they just sit around that showroom figuring deals,
And whittling that ol' pencil down
They know that if you buy once,
You're gonna be back
So instead of buyin' one
You're buyin' two and that's a fact
They've got the sharpest pencil in town
The place sold RV's, I think, and had a sign out front of their
lot with a giant pencil hanging from it.
So, I wonder if that's the one you were thinking of?
Note: here's a URL:
[I have been to Maine, but that was not where I heard the ad. I
am not sure where I heard it, but another car dealership used it
for a one-weekend sale. Then they went back to blunt, rounded
pencils, I guess. I heard the ad many years ago and just
remembered it because of what it told me about how advertising
works. -mrl]
[And not only have I been to Bangor, I lived there for five years.
But that was from 1954 to 1959, so I doubt I heard the jingle
then. -ecl]
===================================================================
TOPIC: This Week's Reading (book comments by Evelyn C. Leeper)
My comments on the Hugo-nominated novellas, in my voting order:
"The Cookie Monster" by Vernor Vinge is my first choice. However,
the appreciation of it is probably somewhat dependent on
understanding something about computers (it's not surprising this
was an "Analog" story). Still, Vinge's idea of a possible
direction for technological employment and how he develops it make
this the clear winner for me.
"The Empress of Mars" by Kage Baker is a good second choice, with
more emphasis on the social and political aspects of Martian
exploration and colonization than on the technological issues.
"Just Like the Ones We Used to Know" by Connie Willis is yet
another of Willis's Christmas fantasies, this time about what I'm
sure someone has called "the perfect storm." This one had a bit
more science fiction and a bit less overt religiosity, so I
enjoyed it more than some of her earlier ones. I have nothing
against religious content, per se, and Willis is certainly
entitled to include it if she wants. But since I don't share her
religious background, it is often hard for me to get into the
story in the way that I think she expects her readers to. So
maybe with a lot of her works, as with Madeleine L'Engle's A
WRINKLE IN TIME (which I discussed a while ago), I am just not the
target audience. In any case, there is starting to be a certain
repetitiveness to them, but I'll give this one a nod.
The other two, I have to say, were so uninvolving for me that they
rate below "no award".
I found "Walk in Silence" by Catherine Asaro a fairly standard
human-alien love story, competent but nothing special.
And I have to admit that I found "The Green Leopard Plague" by
Walter Jon Williams unreadable. By this I don't mean it was in
some strange stylistic mode, but that I couldn't manage to get
into the story enough to keep reading. [-ecl]
===================================================================
Mark Leeper
mleeper@optonline.net
cynic. A blackguard whose faulty vision
sees things as they are, not as they
ought to be.
--Ambrose Bierce
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