Linking Janice

Tonight I deleted two old blog links of people who've never visited here and who I have not visited in a while. Then, I added a new blog. Some of you already know Janice and admire Her gift of painting a vivid image with just a few words. To the rest of you, I say, visit Her blogworld and enjoy!

Pie on my mind

Supposedly, people with lame blogs resort to writing about their dinner. I don't know who thought up that rule, because I like reading about adventures in gastronomy -- and there wouldn't be an entire television channel and a dozen magazines devoted to the subject if others didn't feel as I do.

Today I got a craving to make a pie -- a steamy, savory chicken pie. I thought about it all afternoon -- and then I did it.

I diced up a couple potatoes and a chicken breast, some celery, peas, garlic and onion and then simmered it in chicken stock with pepper and a little dried thyme from the garden. I was afraid that if I just poured the raw ingredients into the pie shell, it would be done long before they were. I thickened the mixture with a little corn starch and water, then spooned it into a pie shell and baked it about 1/2 hour at 400 degrees.

The crust was just browned and the filling not too dry, not too soupy.

My grandfather

"Your grandpa thinks he is on his way out," my Mother said last night on the phone. "He's had the flu and he's just very down."

It sucks to be old, so old that all one's friends have passed away, so old that one can no longer drive, so old that one can hardly hear and barely see.

My grandfather has always been a sweet-tempered, hard-working, humorous man. And it is hard to watch such a good man suffer so.

He is now the age that his brother was when he died, and he has taken it as an omen.

The Society of Science, modern Olympus

While we mere mortals go about our daily business of tending children, answering phones, or assembling corporate projects and such, a society of Great Minds is at work, all over the world, scarcely noticed until breakthroughs are made.

They are scientists. "Science," literally, means "knowledge." So they are "knowers."

I blogged yesterday about a mysterious ingredient in my potato chips: disodium guanylate.

Today I was reading through a webpage about bacterial toxicity. I'd be a damnable liar if I said I understood half the terms on that page, but still, it fascinated me. How things work fascinates me. How they affect other things fascinates me. For example, we know that poison ivy makes you itch. Well, why, when the leaf of a bean plant does not? And then you get into a whole discussion about the oil urushiol and how humans are allergic to it but birds and other animals are not; and the whole mechanism of allergenic response, and you could talk for hours.

For example, I recently finished reading a book about syphilis, which did not answer one basic question that I had about the disease: what exactly does T. pallidium, the syphilis germ, do to cause the host of problems that it creates in the body?

According to this webpage, if I understood it correctly, some bacteria actually secrete enzymes and such that cause our cells, which are just tiny balloons full of vital goo, to leak and thus die. Maybe t. pallidium does that. And how, specifically, these enzymes bind to cells and then break in -- microbial burglars as it were -- is the provenance of those Very Smart People in the lab coats.

It also noted that e.coli, which has been in the news so much lately, secretes a toxin that not only flushes electrolytes and water from your intestinal tract -- i.e., keeps you on the pot in pain -- but also stimulates guanylate cyclase.

There's that g-word again. The additive in my potato chips. Or rather, some chemical combo that includes it.

G.C. regulates cellular proteins. The plot thickens.

Here's the page, for your reference and mine: http://www.textbookofbacteriology.net/proteintoxins.html

Blogging woes

How long will this blog last?

I have several webfriends, once fanatic bloggers, who have not posted to their sites in months. I miss them. I wonder if they have tired of the work that is required in keeping a blog going, if they have lost the passion.

Sometimes days, even weeks, go by, when I don't update my blog either.

It's not as if I don't have ideas. I have folders full of clippings and downloads that I find interesting and about which I would like to comment. Things happen everyday that are bloggable.

I suppose I am just lazy.

I have kept a written journal since 1986 -- sometimes writing daily, sometimes slacking off for weeks. I suppose my blog will follow this pattern.

I'm not going to pull the plug. I do enjoy this outlet, very much. And I especially enjoy the responses that you all provide to me, even if I am sometimes negligent or slow in replying.

Odd ingredients

Inscribed on the ingredient list for the bag of chips I munched this morning was this oddity:

Disodium guanylate.

Since guany- sounds disturbingly close to the word for the stinky stuff that bird colonies deposit on tropical nesting grounds, I felt compelled to do some research.

No connection.

DG is the disodium salt of guanosine monophosphate.

Wikipedia informs me that it: Is also known as 5'-guanidylic acid or guanylic acid and abbreviated GMP, is a nucleotide that is found in RNA. It is an ester of phosphoric acid with the nucleoside guanosine.

GMP consists of the phosphate group, the pentose sugar ribose, and the nucleobase guanine. Guanosine monophosphate is produced from dried fish or dried seaweed.[citation needed]

Guanosine monophosphate in the form of its sodium salt disodium guanylate (E627) is a food additive used as a flavor enhancer to provide the umami [savory] taste.

I wonder how "they" discover stuff like this. Do scientists in gleaming labs boil bits of fish and seaweed down to the bare molecules and then taste the distillates?