From Olives to Football

LATELY I have found university a trifle boring, though this perception may be influenced by a heavy streak of truancy, so I have plunged into all kinds of projects at home. Lately these have taken a scientific turn.

Inspired by a Guardian article about a new generation of fastidious child-size gourmands, I decided to read scientific literature about the reasons why children are picky about food (with an interesting side tangent on propylthiouracil and phenylthiocarbamide, which I may have misspelled). As a child I didn't think it was because adults are more polite, heroic, or self-sacrificing, and as an adult this skepticism is borne out. One obvious example: grapefruit tasted like pure poison when I was little except under a mountain of sugar, but now I can tolerate the acidity perfectly; and olives tasted awful and now I can gobble them up easily though from an aesthetic perspective I find the pallid green ones with the sad mush of lemon creme or even cubic pimento bits in them somewhat disturbing. I can eat strawberries without sugar and still taste something besides acridity, and drink Cointreau without being overwhelmed by the alcohol fumes. This early aversion to acidity must not be universal, however. When one of my brothers was little we would pile all the lemon quarters which garnished our fish-and-chips in restaurants onto his plate, and he would eat the insides of each one after the other and with great enjoyment.

Anyway, old-fashioned or not, the trick that worked best for me is to eat lousy-tasting food one spoonful or forkful at a time and to pretend that each spoonful is a kind of toast to a different relative or friend of the family. But the older I get the more ridiculous I think it is to eat food which one really can't enjoy, so if I am ever a host to children, I would have pretzels or other food which is familiar and practically impossible to dislike. (Based on what I've read, statistically speaking, starchy foods tend to be liked by most people.) As for changes in attitudes over time, I must admit to mentally snickering when children in 19th-century fiction suffer under the delusion that apples are candy.

Before that, I watched roughly half of the Venus transit and idly listened to the commentary from a NASA team at Mauna Kea, which may in retrospect have kicked off the scientific interest.

The other thing is that I am rewriting a lousy thriller and one of the figures is a postgraduate oceanography or marine biology student, so I have begun a crash course of reading in a textbook each on biology and limnology (which I hope to tie into oceanography). Since my characterization and plotting and so on are still hopelessly terrible, though improving very slowly over time, I figure that it's best to do what I can already do well now — namely, research. Thereby I can not only grow my brain but also find more fuel for the imagination as well as better habits of observation and mental pigeonholing. Besides, our field of work does play a role in our lives, though maybe not the role which is likeliest to land up in a Hollywood biopic, so the better I know the careers of protagonists the better I can render their aforementioned lives.

Then I remembered that MIT has free online courses, so I began the biology course for that. This led me to a YouTube video wherein a professor gives a biology student's introduction to chemistry, and I highly recommend it (though not so much for its cinematographic quality). What helps is, of course, that I took and liked Biology in high school. In Grade 11 we went through the kingdoms one by one, which had a nice sweeping quality in terms of the organisms and the progression of time from the emergence of the simplest organisms from the primordial soup to the emergence of the simplest human from his stony retreats. In Grade 12 we did biochemistry and human biology in general. In our all-purpose Science class in Grade 10, we had learned about cell organelles; and in Grade 9 we had learned the very basics of human biology and nutrition, which insofar as explaining to us e.g. that amino acids are the building blocks of protein, did lay a biochemical foundation.

Besides the sister had a special tutorial session today, which I attended. Since I didn't understand much of it, I worked on my artistic marginalia as well as on my information-technological notes, but it was still enlightening. It's a bit like pinning-the-tail-on-the-donkey, where a piece of solid comprehension is a tail, and its context remains vague.

Departing from the scientific realm, I went to a Greek class which never happened (more about that fiasco, perhaps, at another time) in the morning and in the evening went to Latin. I admit that I was inclined to wonder at Cornelius Nepos's writing style when he wrote with an atypical precision of detail that Hannibal had snakes gathered into clay jars. The detail that these snakes were live and poisonous was easy to interpret, but the attribute 'of clay' less so. I was also wondering why one would put snakes into jars when crates or baskets containing figs (or, depending which Grimm fairy tale ending one is reading, barrels or pits full or empty of simmering oil and presumably cellar-temperature toads) seem so much more common and intuitive. As it turns out, these jars were catapulted onto an enemy ship, and the clay must have been brittle enough to unleash them once they made their impact.

In this same battle Nepos also tells of a mean stroke of genius in which Hannibal wanted his ships to attack the enemy king's at once. The question was, whose ship was the king's? To find it out, he sent a messenger on a little boat wielding a letter, and the enemies duly guided this messenger to the king's ship so that the king might inspect what they presumed to be a peaceful overture.

On the U-Bahn on the way to the university that third time, two passengers were excitedly retelling the Italy-Spain match of the Euro Cup, including Italy's 3-5-2 formation and a spectacular foul. On the way home, today's France-England match was apparently still taking place, so at the beer garden at Dahlem Dorf I caught a glimpse of the outdoor TV screen through the heavy leaf. Still exhausted from the World Cup two years ago, and inclined to curl into a protective ball at the revived notion of vuvuzelas, I have not been watching the 90-minute games. I have reduced them probably by half or more by reading the minute-by-minute reports on the Guardian, instead, and using my imagination. When Germany played Portugal, it was easy to determine the score based on the neighbourhood sound of firecrackers, etc., and divers triumphal tootery. I wouldn't recommend these oblique experiences for everyone but it is enough for me at present.