August 2008 Archives

I came across this YouTube of a guy making Kung Po chicken. An instructional video on how to make it "better than any Chinese restaurant." Based on the quality of that soupy mess he boiled up, I'd say he doesn't get out to many good restaurants. But his delusional assumption that 

1-he makes great Kung Po 

and 

2-that he should be sharing his knowledge with the world

got me thinking about something MLEIV has obsessed over for years: what makes a person a genius? 

We seem to give priority to the "Rock and Roll" style genius who struggles in his/her late teens, gets discovered in his/her 20's, takes the world by storm, and then flames out in a spectacular show of self-destruction (think Kurt Cobain or Janice Joplin). Mr. Kung Po here probably things he is that genius but just hasn't been discovered yet. Other people, like MLEIV, think they are complete failures because they see lucky, teenage one-shot wonders and compare themselves to that ideal.

But let's consider the other kind of genius, the Albert Einstein kind. This kind spends years building up foundational skills, works to understand themselves, their medium, and how to use that as an expression. They may never get discovered, but what they produce is a much higher quality with a better lifespan than the flame-outs. We don't value the Einstein genius nearly as much, but when we do it is an enduring love. 

Take cooking (the only artistic expression I even remotely understand) for example. Any idiot can throw stuff in a pan and get lucky once or twice, but if you want to create true artistic expressions, you need to know how a wok is useful in the kitchen (again, just one example). You need to understand that it is a high-heat cooking surface that needs to have ingredients added one at a time, in small batches, so that they all get that contact with the searing hot outside of the wok. You do, in contrast to our friend Scott, have to know how to measure ingredients, prepare them beforehand, cut/clean them just right. These foundations allow you entry into the game. Only then can you start to do amazingly creative things: once you have built the foundation.

That doesn't mean you can't throw out all convention and blaze a new path, but make sure you know what you are throwing out and when you rebuild, make it better than before.

When I first moved to Seattle in 2003 I had never heard of dim sum. For those who don't know, dim sum is almost a ritualistic lunch in Chinese culture; it consists of small, bite-sized dumplings that are brought around on carts. You pick the ones you want, eat and talk and sip tea. It is a treasured cultural experience.

It is also terrible food.

I tried, really I did. Liking dim sum is, among we white folk in 2008, what liking sushi was in 1998: a sign of cultural sophistication, a way of saying "look at me, I'm a white guy who is culturally aware." As with sushi, in its native land dim sum started out as the leftover meal: take whatever you didn't eat the night before and cook it up and call it good.

Today they take mystery meat (pork, chicken, or if you are lucky, shrimp), and wrap it in some kind of rice or wheat dough. Then you steam or boil it until it is sticky and has the texture of wet paper. Then you serve this gristly, pasty concoction in a cute little bamboo steamer. The fried version of this can be good, depending on what's inside, but the boiled/steamed ones are like eating a squish ball.

So you eat these little bite-sized carb/fat balls, one at a time as they come around on their little carts, and never quite feel like you've had a meal, then suddenly you are full. A massive insulin spike hits until, two hours later, it drops and you are starving again. There have been studies done showing that dim sum is incredibly high in calories, mostly from sugar and white flour. There have been calls in Hong Kong to reduce this lunch ritual to aid in fighting the obesity epidemic.

Don't get me wrong: give me a pizza or macaroni and cheese and I'll eat to excess. But at least with those I feel satiated. And you don't get gristly mystery meat on your cheese pizza. There's nothing worse than biting into a dim sum ball only to find you can't chew what's inside.

So no offense to my dim sum loving friends, but I can't pretend anymore: I hate dim sum!

The "kids" question came up *again* the other day. This time it was in response to my getting a 2-door sports coupe instead of a 4-door family sedan.

"But what will you do when you have kids? Where will you put them?"

<omit sarcastic and over-the-top reply about kids and trunks>

"oh, I think with 6.5 billion people the planet doesn't need another one from me"

"but you have to have some so that you can raise the intelligence level!"

Ok, what's wrong with this argument? Can you spot the breakdown points?

Let's start (as always) with the Romans. Augustus saw such a problem with low birth rate among the aristocracy that he instituted laws to try to get the upper classes to have more babies. It didn't work: the Christians took over anyway.

History is consistent on this point: the educated and rich don't want babies. Has this led to the dumbing down of society? Ask the people whose average lifespan is double what it was 500 years ago because of science. Sure we can chart that American kids can't find their own country on a map, but at least they know what a map is! And that map doesn't have pictures of dragons and "Beware of the Lions" written on the edges.

Its the Humanist variation of the Muslim/Catholic/Mormon argument: world domination through breeding!

The problem, as illustrated very well by 5th-generation-Mormon, 10th-of-11-kids, ex-Mormon MLEIV is that those darn kids grow up and develop minds of their own and don't always stay the course. Sure, some do. The golden oldest child, the wild youngest who repents. But by and large the religious behavior gets less and less fanatical with every generation who are exposed to the thoughts/cultures/beliefs of others. This is a good thing and whether or not I breed has nothing to do with it.

In the end, its an odd kind of peer pressure: "what's wrong with you that you are intelligent, middle-class, 37, can afford a nice car, have been with the same woman for 14 years, and don't have babies? Everyone else does..."

Somehow the "everyone is doing it" argument is not supposed to work for drugs but is supposed to work for babies?