>From Mike Yates:
Why in the f***k would you buy Gallo wine? That's like buying Coors beer. When you know that a supplier is an outright union-busting swine, why support it?
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Well,
first of all, I forgot--it had been so long since I bought Gallo--maybe student days or early seventies, whenever it was that they became well known among the student community here as 'union-busting swine'--when was that, maybe right after the first table grape boycotts? Then second of all, the supermarket in Penn State (that's the name of the town as well as the school) didn't exactly note which wine was pro or anti-union. Which reminds me to ask if anybody can list the Cal wineries that are unionize or at least not pro-actively anti-union. Hopefully Louis Martini and BV are among them.
But to keep this in a little lighter mood--at least for today--here is a funny post I got from a friend on eating habits in the Midwest.
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Our subject today is lighting charcoal grills. One of our favorite charcoal grill lighters is a guy named George Goble (really!!), a computer person in the Purdue University engineering department.
Each year, Goble and a bunch of other engineers hold a picnic in West Lafayette, Indiana, at which they cook hamburgers on a big grill. Being engineers, they began looking for practical ways to speed up the charcoal-lighting process.
"We started by blowing the charcoal with a hair dryer," Goble told me
in a telephone interview. "Then we figured out that it would light
faster if we used a vacuum cleaner."
If you know anything about (1) engineers and (2) guys in general, you know what happened: The purpose of the charcoal-lighting shifted from cooking hamburgers to seeing how fast they could light the charcoal.
>From the vacuum cleaner, they escalated to using a propane torch, then
an
acetylene torch. Then Goble started using compressed pure oxygen, which
caused the charcoal to burn much faster, because as you recall from
chemistry class, fire is essentially the rapid combination of oxygen
with a
reducing agent (the charcoal). We discovered that a long time ago,
somewhere in the valley between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers (or
something along those lines).
By this point, Goble was getting pretty good times. But in the world of competitive charcoal-lighting, "pretty good" does not cut the Thus, Goble hit upon the idea of using - get ready - liquid oxygen. This is the form of oxygen used in rocket engines; it's 295 degrees below zero and 600 times as dense as regular oxygen. In terms of releasing energy, pouring liquid oxygen on charcoal is the equivalent of throwing a live squirrel into a room containing 50 million Labrador retrievers.
On Gobel's World Wide Web page (the address is http://ghg.ecn.purdue.edu/), you can see actual photographs and a video of Goble using a bucket attached to a 10-foot-long wooden handle to dump 3 gallons of liquid oxygen (not sold in stores) onto a grill containing 60 pounds of charcoal and a lit cigarette for ignition.
What follows is the most impressive charcoal-lighting I have ever seen, featuring a large fireball that according to Goble, reach 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. The charcoal was ready for cooking in - this has to be a world record - 3 seconds.
There's also a photo of what happened when Goble used the same technique on a flimsy $2.88 discount-store grill. All that's left is a circle of charcoal with a few shreds of metal in it. "Basically, the grill vaporized," said Goble. "We were thinking of returning it to the store for a refund."
Looking at Goble's video and photos, I became, as an American, all choked up with gratitude, first at the fact that I do not live anywhere near the engineers' picnic site. But also, I was proud of my country for producing guys who can be ready to barbecue in less time than it take for guys in less-advanced nations, such as France, to spit.
Will the 3-second barrier ever be broken? Will engineers come up with a new, more powerful charcoal-lighting technology? It's something for all of us to ponder this summer as we sit outside, chewing our hamburgers, every now and then glancing in the direction of West Lafayette, Indiana, lookin' for a mushroom cloud.
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Chuck Grimes