Raining Cats and Dogma

A few months ago, I wrote an entry on the curious and powerful connection between scent and memory.

Well, that connection's been at it again. I stopped by the Logan Circle Whole Foods this afternoon to pick up some fancy cheese. I was on the way home from campus, where I have beenm assembling readings for my syllabus, particularly for a day on using concrete language when writing about food. So I had in my mind, for example, an article on the aroma wheel for describing wines, a very famous short snippet of Proust, and some Jeffrey Steingarten on why ripe fruit tastes better, and why it's harder and harder to find.

And so I was particularly attuned to scent as I stepped into the whole foods elevator, and inhaled that heady, but somehow thin blend of wood-fired pizza crust, peat-and-water infused vegetables, expensive rennets and just a hint of institutional cleaning fluids.

I am transported to 1996. I am working at Thyme Square Cafe, a new creation then, featuring organic foods, fresh juices, and a trendy decor. Laura Chenel goat cheeses were famous, but just hitting menus en masse. Here it was featured on the whole-wheat-crusted Get Shorty Pizza (does that date it?), and I was a burgeoning foodie.

I reasoned, as I was just about to start grad school, that if it was a restaurant I wanted to eat at, it must be a good restaurant to work for, and for a short, strange summer, it was.

Here I found my still-favorite white wine (Caymus Conundrum, a white table wine whose best years seem to have been in the mid-'90s until a delicious 2002 vintage hit shelves), I learned the virtues of really good balsamic vinegar, and began to form an impression that salmon was hardly the end-all-be-all of seafood.

I learned that whole grain can mean a variety of things to a variety of people, and I learned fancy ingredients can taste just as bad as cheap ingredients when not prepared with a certain modicum of affection.

And I learned how to be among a group of people and not be of that group of people, but that's another story entirely.

Posted by at 3:13 PM | Permalink

A recent Gallup poll revealed that Kerry's gotten no post-convention bounce, which seems to spell trouble for the donkeys. Explanations abound: already polarized voters, too-early polling numbers, lower TV ratings etc.

What I think is interesting is a stat that isn't getting much play. Among registered voters (916 in this survey) 50% would vote Kerry, and 47% would vote Bush, while likely voters (only 762 voters in the survey) give half their votes to Bush and only 47% to Kerry.

The percentage that I haven't seen getting much play is that subset of people who are registered but are not likely to vote. In this sample (I did the math, which for me was a big deal), there were 152 of those folks, 99 of whom would vote for Kerry, a 2-to-1 advantage over Bush.

So why is the difference so large in this group? Who are these folks, and why are they not voting, if this poll suggests that they are overwhelmingly in favor of a change at 1600?

Posted by at 1:04 PM | Permalink