A Foraging We Will Go

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Fungi. Beautiful fungi. Search them out in the woods or in the grocery store and make some incredible dishes. A few starter recipes below.

 

The other day I was out for one of my morning runs and was taken by the soft breath of Fall – quiet, dew covered grounds, leaves slowly changing, animals foraging for food and the colors of summer hanging on.  As I passed a favorite turn, a deer ran by and then stopped in the woods.  I stopped as well, and we had a stare off (remember those in grade school – I did my best, but the deer won!).  All around the deer I noticed a huge patch of brightly colored mushrooms glistening on the forest floor.  Of course, when I got back to the office, I just had to google fall mushrooms, and wow, a great article came up from Mother Earth News.  Here are segments I thought you’d enjoy.  My suggestion – lace up your boots and take a hike this weekend and take pictures of any of these amazing mushrooms you may find. I also included some fun recipes – can’t wait to try them.  Thx Mother Earth News for the info.

Autumn is a time of change in the woodlands when the vivid green hues of summer fade into the auburn shades of fall as plant life in the great outdoors prepares for a long winter’s sleep.

During this period of transition, many who enjoy harvesting Mother Nature’s abundant vintages miss one of nature’s finest bounties — the fall mushrooms.  Understanding the dos and don’ts of fall mushroom foraging is key to enjoying the rewards of harvesting the mushrooms.

The first and foremost rule when mushroom foraging is to get to know just a few species — and get to know them well. To achieve this, purchase a field guide to North American mushrooms. Most bookstores stock one or can quickly order it. Though local libraries typically stock several, buying your own copy is a wise investment. Pocket-size editions with color photos are easily carried and help assure positive identification. A quality guide should contain the following species subheadings: description, edibility, season, habitat, range and look-alikes.

Fall mushrooms have many different flavors and textures. The majority of edible varieties have nicknames that mimic their characteristics, much like the spring morel, which is dubbed the “sponge” mushroom. Its colors can blend with the drab shades of dead bark or stand out like the colors of Christmas. Harvesting mushrooms for the dinner table while hiking the woodlands enhances the appreciation of forest ecology. See how many you can find:

Pear-Shaped and Giant Puffball (Puffball Family)
Puffball mushrooms are among the most recognizable of fall fungi. They are round in appearance and range in size from the pear-shaped puffball (Lycoperdon pyriforme), of approximately one inch, to the giant puffball (Calvatia gigantea), which may reach diameters larger than a basketball. Most are rated “choice” for eating. The few that are not won’t affect your health and can easily be distinguished by their rank odor. The fruiting body of a puffball grows directly from its root system. If you find one with a stalk or stem, discard it; it’s not a puffball and may very well be an unsuitable look-alike, again characterized by a rank odor.
Members of the puffball family grow from July through November in most North American softwood and hardwood forests. Their outer coloration is typically white to olive brown, and should always be white inside for use at the dinner table. As puffballs age, their centers turn yellowish-brown and eventually dry, producing spores (microscopic seeds). A single giant puffball produces up to 7 trillion spores. To understand how the puffball got its name, step on the dried shell after a puffball is spent, and watch it “puff” smoke — in the form of millions of dried spores.  Pear-shaped puffballs grow in scattered-to-dense clusters on decaying logs and debris. The giants grow in open timber, pastured ground and even some urban areas. During prime conditions, giant puffballs decorate the forest like a woodland volleyball court.

RECIPE: To prepare a giant puffball, cut or peel the outer shell. For a pear-shaped puffball, just wash the outer core. Do not wash or soak the meat unless insects have laid first claim. The sweet smell and savory flavor of the puffball makes an excellent addition to a saute of onions, bell peppers and other favorite garden vegetables. The most popular method of preparation, however, is frying. Fry the pear-shaped puffball whole, but slice its big brother thin like a fish fillet. Coat with a chicken or fish batter before frying. Use your fresh puffballs promptly, though, as they can’t be feasibly canned, frozen or dried for long-term storage.

Hen of the Woods (Polypore Family)
Catch a glimpse of this fungi in the fall and you may easily mistake it for a hen pheasant or prairie chicken pruning its plumage.  The hen of the woods (Grifola frondosa) has a grayish brown cap growing from a white stalk, which branches from a compound base.  This handsome mushroom appears in wet Septembers through mild, moist Novembers. It can be found from Canada to Louisiana, throughout the Midwest and in coastal woodlands. Hunt for the hen near deciduous trees and stumps. They’re also known to grow around some coniferous trees. Hens often appear in the same location year after year. They blend well with fallen leaves, but their size gives them away. A single mushroom of this variety can reach 20 inches in diameter and weigh 100 pounds. Hunt them with a big bag, or take along a friend with a strong back.

RECIPE: The firm texture of the hen lends itself to a variety of cooking techniques. Slice it thin and roast it, cut into steaks or coat in a batter and fry. You can’t ruin it. Diced bits used in stir-fry recipes give chicken and bean sprouts a taste that captures the attention of even picky eaters. Unlike puffballs, minimal flavor is lost by canning or freezing.

Chicken Mushroom (Polypore Family)
In autumn, chicken mushrooms (Laetiporus sulphureus) decorate the stumps, trunks and logs of deciduous and coniferous trees in blazing orange-red or orange-yellow colors. Pay careful attention here, as the chicken mushroom bears a close resemblance to many nonedible types.
Be careful not to succumb to the addictive smell. It’s tempting to eat them raw — but don’t. Uncooked, this variety causes indigestion. Among veteran hunters, the chicken is one of the most prized mushrooms. The reasons are simple: It’s anything but plentiful, and when fried, a tasty chicken dinner is the finder’s reward. Mushroom hunters can search for these great-eating members of the polypore family from May through November. Although scarce, their range extends from Canada to Florida and into some coastal regions. If the humidity is right and daytime temperatures are moderate, the chicken may be nestled somewhere in your favorite fall haunt.

Fried-Chicken Mushroom (Tricholoma Family) 
While similar in name to the chicken mushroom, the fried-chicken mushroom (Lyophyllum decastes) is very different. Its cap is gray- to yellow-brown with white gills and a stalk. Growths are typically found in dense clusters on the ground near decaying deciduous trees or in grassy areas throughout most of North America. Their numbers dominate June through October — and even later if the weather is mild. Edibility is rated “good, with caution.” The “with caution” part is meant to give respect to the poisonous sulfur tuft, a close look-alike. Novice hunters can’t tell these two apart until they smell the tuft’s flat odor or partake of its bitter tang. Digesting the tuft invokes mild to severe gastric distress, and in rare cases has caused death. The odds of death from mushroom poisoning are about as likely as being hit by lightning — but odds mean little if you’re the unlucky soul.

RECIPE: Quite a few people are quick to disagree with the fried chicken’s “good” rating. This author concurs that its flavor might better be described as “delicious.” After a thorough washing, tear these mushrooms along the gill lines into bite-size strips. Fry them like chicken or saute them for a spaghetti dish. They are also wonderful in casseroles.

Oyster Mushroom (Tricholoma Family) 
Don’t head for the woods just yet, seafood mavens. “Oyster” (Pleurotus ostreatus) refers to the mushroom’s shape, not taste. The cap of the Oyster can be white, gray or brown. The gills are whitish or yellow-tinged and are usually attached to the wood of deciduous trees. Occasionally the oyster grows from a stublike stalk. It is widely dispersed throughout North America. Dry river and creek bottoms with willow or other softwood trees are prime places to search for the oyster fungi.  This mushroom is prolific in the fall, but under favorable conditions can appear year-round. The hearty oysters that grow in mild winter weather and freeze before aging can even be chopped free from dead wood and thawed.

RECIPE: The oyster’s pleasant smell distinguishes it from nonedible look-alikes that either lack odor or smell like tree bark. Check aging oysters for white grubs; then wash and tear into smaller strips. Roll the damp pieces in a dry mixture of pancake batter and seasoning salt and fry in peanut oil.

Honey Mushroom (Tricholoma Family) 
The honey mushroom (Armillariella mellea), also nicknamed “button mushroom,” has a one- to four-inch yellow-brown cap and stalk with a whitish ring directly under the cap. It’s similar in shape and taste to many commercially raised mushrooms.  Like the spring morel, it’s hunted by many who believe dangerous look-alikes don’t exist. Unfortunately, the honey mushroom has more fearsome twins than Minnesota has — the Omphalotus olearius, Gymnopilus spectabilis and Galerina autmnalis are just a few. All have either a rank odor, nonwhite gill colors or other recognizable features pinpointed in field guides.  Honey mushrooms appear in hardwood forests August through November: Logged-out timbers are the best places to find these delectable fungi by the bushel basket.

RECIPE: Honey mushrooms are exceptional when prepared using morel recipes. Their distinctive taste comes through best when deep-fried in egg-and-cracker batter or sauteed in butter.

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Safety First
Follow this list of precautions and your mushrooming days will be memorable events:

  • If on-the-spot identification of a harvested mushroom is not possible, separate it from the rest of your find. After the hunt, enlist the services of a resident expert or field guide to verify the edibility of the suspect fungi.
  • Do not consume wild mushrooms raw. They are indigestible when uncooked.
  • Soak and rinse your mushrooms thoroughly to remove any residue that may have drifted from agricultural spraying.
  • It’s always best to have a veteran mushroomer inspect the find of a novice hunter before allowing preparation.
  • If health problems follow the consumption of mushrooms, contact a doctor immediately. Don’t wait until complications set in.
  • When hunting alone, tell someone when you’re going out and when you plan to return.
  • Those susceptible to poison ivy, oak, or sumac should pay special attention to its presence and, if applicable, use preventive medication. Wear long pants, a long-sleeved shirt, and a hat to prevent scratched legs and discourage ticks.
  • Don’t push your luck by walking through heavily wooded terrain after dark.

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Preserving Your Bounty
Fortunate hunters who find more mushrooms than can be eaten fresh or given away have three options for preserving the excess. Each has pros and cons. You be the judge.

  • To freeze mushrooms, cut them into bite-size chunks and soak in water for a minimum of one hour. This will remove any insects from the meat. Rinse thoroughly and place the mushrooms in a Ziplock freezer bag, seal tightly and freeze. Though this is the most common practice for long-term storage, it causes appreciable loss of flavor and texture.
  •  Drying mushrooms (which is not possible with all varieties) first entails cutting them into large chunks and thoroughly rinsing them. Then sew the pieces together with string and allow to dry in an attic or other warm, dry area. Soaking the dried pieces in water will bring them back to a state of use. The texture is not as rigid as when fresh, but most of the flavor is restored.
  • The least used is canning mushrooms, The U.S. Department of Agriculture suggests this method in their Home and Gardening Bulletin. To can mushrooms: Trim stems and the discolored parts of the mushrooms. Soak mushrooms in cold water for 10 minutes to remove adhering soil. Wash in clean water. Leave small mushrooms whole; cut larger ones in halves or quarters. Steam four minutes or beat gently for 15 minutes in a covered saucepan without added liquid.  Pack hot mushrooms in glass jars, to within a half inch of the top. Add ¼ teaspoon salt to half-pints; ½ teaspoon to pints. For better color, add crystalline ascorbic acid: 1/16 teaspoon to half-pints; 1/8 teaspoon to pints. Add boiling-hot cooking liquid or boiling water to cover mushrooms, leaving a ½-inch space at the top of the jar. Adjust jar lids. Process in pressure canner at 10 pounds of pressure (240°F) for 30 minutes.  Before use, check the seals to ensure a vacuum — and protection from bacterial growth. Canning makes a midwinter meal of mushrooms worth the added effort.

 

 

 

Searching for Answers

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It used to be that finding answers meant going to the library. No more, my friend! Even a seven year old at can find the answers to anything.  A-N-Y-T-H-I-N-G. For better or worse, we can all find answers to our questions in an instant. (bottom two rows)  There are the kids, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, at their garage office in Palo Alto where they moved the company from their Stanford dorm room. The boys today. Google headquarters sign in Mountain View, CA.

 

Over the weekend I was on the laptop, digging around for some information to help me on a project. It’s was so easy to type in my questions, or just words to “search”, and BOOM, tons of options appear instantly on the screen.  It got me to thinking about search and the history of Google, and I found out that Google is celebrating twenty years in existence (how can that be??).  Google of course was an outcome of great research and experimentation by scientists and programmers who came before them.  For fun, “google” the term “inventor of search” and the world’s most popular search engine will, unexpectedly, fail you. Nowhere among the algorithmically organized results will you find the names of the two men who, in the fall of 1963, sent the first known long-distance computer query (six years before Arpanet) and long before the launch of the world-changing Google.  Here’s some fun facts, surprising trivia and a bit of history.  Thanks Smithsonian, Wikipedia and Google for your amazing products.  Enjoy!

 

Here’s a fun site Goggle has set up where you can venture back in time and see the most popular search topics by year (and more).

  1. The story starts when Doug Engelbart began the Augmented Human Intellect Program at Stanford Research Institute, Menlo Park, California. In June 1962 Charlie Bourne, who had been a student of Engelbart’s at the University of California Berkeley in 1957, joined the AHI team. In 1963 Bourne started work on a project funded by US Air Force Electronic Systems Division to investigate remote online computer access to databases. The total funding was $39,000, which was quite a sizeable project in 1963.
  2. Charles Bourne (a research engineer) and Leonard Chaitlin (a computer programmer) built the first online search engine, then referred to as automated information retrieval. At the time, retrieval was physical, capturing data stored on punch cards.  Bourne’s vision was a user could search for any word in the files, much the same way Google works today, using a Q-32 computer developed by Systems Development Corporation. The Q-32 was one of the first computers to support online remote access and computer-to-computer communication.
  3. The database consisted of seven memos typed onto punched paper tapes and then converted to magnetic tape.  Chaitlin drove to Santa Monica, some 350 miles away, and input the files onto a massive military computer.  From a bulky computer terminal with a screen just 32 characters wide, they sent a “search” query (the precise question is lost to history).  The data lurched over a telephone line and after some time, the answer popped up, proving that online search was possible.
  4. Despite the success, the project was shut down.  The inventors later said, “We just didn’t know what it would become. You really couldn’t imagine, at that time, doing a lot of things with a computer.”
  5. Google, worth hundreds of billions, took two men with a big dream to turn a small idea into a reality and has made a significant contribution to how the world uses the internet. Larry Page and Sergey Brin were both PhD candidates when they met in 1996 at Stanford and came up with the concept for a search engine that they named BackRub.  One year later, in 1997, they renamed it Google.com and officially registered as a domain name. A man named Milton Sirotta was responsible for coming up with the term from which Google was derived (googol – refers to the number 1 with 100 zeros following it).
  6. The main aim of both men was to organize all of the information that could possibly be gathered around the world and present it in the form of an index.  When the team received its first $100,000 check, Page and Brin moved the operation to a garage in Palo Alto.
  7. Over the years millions of webmasters have tried their best to obtain a high PageRank, which is one of many indicators of the ‘authority’ and ‘link weight’ of any given website, however the term itself was only patented in September 2001 by the Google team. PageRank was an integral part of the core algorithm upon which the Google search engine operated, enabling it to ‘rank’ sites according to authority. It was in the same year that Larry Page, the namesake of PageRank, stepped down as CEO and Eric Schmidt took his place.
  8. The web-based email service that is now commonplace to Gmail fans was launched in 2004 and it quickly began to outrank the services being offered by companies such as Microsoft and Yahoo. The storage capabilities were set at 1 GB – a storage capacity that was unheard of at the time. 2004 was also the year that Google Earth was launched which allowed the earth to be mapped to the desktop using satellite imagery.
  9. In 2005, Google joined up with NASA to produce Google Moon and Google Mars in which two applications allowed individuals to navigate both entities from the comfort of their own computers. The project was brought to fruition after a 1 million sq ft development center was built within the Ames Research Centre.
  10. In 2006, Google Video was introduced to the public, and users were able to search for videos, rather than be restricted to content, through the search engine. This is the same year that the company acquired YouTube, which has in a very real sense become a massively popular ‘alternative’ search engine in its own right. In addition, the very popular Google Docs service was launched.
  11. Today, Google is estimated to have around well over 50% of the market share for search engines with Yahoo! as its closest rival. The search engine gets more than 1 billion search requests each day, and with the incorporation of Google Ads, every click makes the company money. The business is now a household name, and there is no telling where or how they plan on expanding in the future; after all, for Google, the sky is no longer the limit.

 

 

TEST YOUR USER EXPERIENCE AND MEMORY

Before Google, came a host of web crawling “engines” – see how many you remember.

WebCrawler (1994). Of all still-surviving search engines, WebCrawler is the oldest. Today, it aggregates results from Google and Yahoo.
Lycos (1994). Born out of Carnegie Mellon University and still alive today. Also owns several other nostalgic Internet brands, including Angelfire, Tripod, and Gamesville.
AltaVista (1995). This was one of the most popular search engines in the 1990s, but was acquired by Yahoo in 2003 and subsequently shut down in 2013.
Excite (1995). One of the most recognizable brands back in the 1990s, but has since fallen out of the spotlight.
Yahoo (1995). Definitely one of the strongest pre-Google brands to still exist today. In fact, according to Alexa, Yahoo was the 4th most globally-visited website in June 2015. Impressive!
Dogpile (1996). It has a terrible brand name, but maybe that’s what made it memorable. Today, Dogpile aggregates results from Google, Yahoo, and the Russian search engine, Yandex (which is also older than Google!).
Ask Jeeves (1996). This engine was unique due to its question-and-answer format, plus it had a memorable mascot in Jeeves the Butler. Sadly, Jeeves was eventually phased out and the site rebranded to Ask.com. (Not to be confused with AskBoth.)

 

SEARCH ENGINE EVOLUTION TIMELINE

1990
Pre-web search engine           
The Archie search engine, created by Alan Emtage, Bill Heelan and J. Peter Deutsch, computer science students at McGill University in Montreal, goes live. The program downloads the directory listings of all the files located on public anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) sites, creates a searchable database of a lot of file names.

1991
Pre-web search engine         
The rise of Gopher (created in 1991 by Mark McCahill at the University of Minnesota) leads to two new search programs, Veronica and Jughead. Like Archie, they search the file names and titles stored in Gopher index systems. Veronica (Very Easy Rodent-Oriented Net-wide Index to Computerized Archives) provides a keyword search of most Gopher menu titles in the entire Gopher listings. Jughead (Jonzy’s Universal Gopher Hierarchy Excavation And Display) is a tool for obtaining menu information from specific Gopher servers.

1992
Virtual library of the web     
Tim Berners-Lee sets up the Virtual Library (VLib), a loose confederation of topical experts maintaining relevant topical link lists.

1993
June
First web robot                       
Matthew Gray produces the first known web robot, the Perl-based World Wide Web Wanderer, and uses it to generate an index of the web called the Wandex.  However, the World Wide Web Wanderer is intended only to measure the size of the web rather than to facilitate search.

1993
Sept.
First web search engine          
W3Catalog, written by Oscar Nierstrasz at the University of Geneva, is released to the world. It is the world’s first web search engine. It does not rely on a crawler and indexer but rather on already existing high-quality lists of websites. One of its main drawbacks is that the bot accesses each page hundreds of times each day, causing performance degradation.

1993
Oct.
Second web search engine     
Aliweb, a web search engine created by Martijn Koster, is announced. It does not use a web robot, but instead depends on being notified by website administrators of the existence at each site of an index file in a particular format. The absence of a bot means that less bandwidth is used; however, most website administrators are not aware of the need to submit their data.

1993
Dec.
First crawler and indexer 
JumpStation, created by Jonathon Fletcher, is released. It is the first WWW resource-discovery tool to combine the three essential features of a web search engine (crawling, indexing, and searching).

1994
Jan.
New web search engine 
Infoseek is launched.

1994
Mar.
New web search engine
The World-Wide Web Worm is released. It is claimed to have been created in September 1993, at which time there did not exist any crawler-based search engine, but it is not the earliest at the time of its actual release. It supports Perl-based regular expressions.

1994
April
New web search engine         
The WebCrawler search engine, created by Brian Pinkerton at the University of Washington, is released. Unlike its predecessors, it allows users to search for any word in any webpage, which has become the standard for all major search engines since.

1994
April
New web directory                 
Yahoo! launches its web directory.  Yahoo! would not build its own web search engine until 2002, relying until then on outsourcing the search function to other companies.

1994
July
New web search engine         
Lycos, a web search engine, is released. It began as a research project by Michael Loren Mauldin of Carnegie Mellon University’s main Pittsburgh campus.

1995
New web directory                
LookSmart is released. It competes with Yahoo! as a web directory, and the competition makes both directories more inclusive.

1995
Dec.
Natural language queries       
Altavista is launched. This is a first among web search engines in many ways: it has unlimited bandwidth, allows natural language queries, has search tips, and allows people to add or delete their domains in 24 hours.

1996    
Jan.
New web search engine      
Larry Page and Sergey Brin begin working on BackRub, the predecessor to Google Search. The crawler begins activity in March.

1996
May
New web search engine         
Inktomi releases its HotBot search engine.

1996    
Oct.
New web search engine         
Gary Culliss and Steven Yang begin work at MIT on the popularity engine, a version of the Direct Hit Technologies search engine that ranks results across users according to the selections made during previous searches.

1997
April
Natural language search         
Ask Jeeves, a natural language web search engine, that aims to rank links by popularity, is released. It would later become Ask.com.

1997
Sept
New web search                     
The domain Google.com is registered. Soon, Google Search is available to the public from this domain (around 1998).

1997
Sept
New search(non-English)        
Arkady Volozh and Ilya Segalovich launch their Russian web search engine yandex.ru and publicly present it at the Softool exhibition in Moscow. The initial development is by Comptek; Yandex would become a separate company in 2000.

1998
June
New web directory                 
Gnuhoo, a web directory project by Rich Skrenta and Bob Truel, both employees of Sun Microsystems, launches.  It would later be renamed the Open Directory Project.

1998    
July
New web search portal          
MSN launches a search portal called MSN Search, using search results from Inktomi. After many changes to the backend search engine, MSN would start developing in-house search technology in 2005, and later change its name to Bing in June 2009.

1998
Aug.
New web search engine         
Direct Hit Technologies releases their popularity search engine in partnership with HotBot, providing more relevant results based on prior user search activity.

1999
May
New web search engine         
AlltheWeb, based on the Ph.D. thesis of Tor Egge at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, titled FTP Search, launches. The engine is launched by Egge’s company Fast Search & Transfer, established on July 16, 1997.

2000
Jan.
New web search portal          
Baidu, a Chinese company that would grow to provide many search-related services, launches.

2002-2003             
Web search consolidation      
Yahoo! buys Inktomi (2002) and then Overture Services Inc. (2003) which has already bought AlltheWeb and Altavista. Starting 2003, Yahoo! starts using its own Yahoo Slurp web crawler to power Yahoo! Search. Yahoo! Search combines the technologies of all Yahoo!’s acquisitions (until 2002, Yahoo! had been using Google to power its search).

2004
Nov
Backend providers                  
Microsoft starts using its own indexer and crawler for MSN Search rather than using blended results from LookSmart and Inktomi.

2004
Dec.
New User experience            
Google Suggest is introduced as a Google Labs feature.

2005
Jan.
Webmaster tools                    
To combat link spam, Google, Yahoo! and Microsoft collectively introduce the nofollow attribute.

2005
Oct.
New web search engine         
Overture Services Inc. owner Bill Gross launches the Snap search engine, with many features such as display of search volumes and other information, as well as sophisticated auto-completion and related terms display. It is unable to get traction and soon goes out of business.

2006-2009      
New human-curated search   
Wikia launches Wikia Search, a search engine based on human curation, but then shuts it down.

2008
Jan.
New web search engine         
Cuil, a web search engine created by ex-Googlers that uses picture thumbnails to display search results, launches.  It would later shut down on September 17, 2010.

2009
July
Search consolidation              
Microsoft and Yahoo! announce that they have made a ten-year deal in which the Yahoo! search engine would be replaced by Bing. Yahoo! will get to keep 88% of the revenue from all search ad sales on its site for the first five years of the deal, and have the right to sell adverts on some Microsoft sites. Yahoo! Search will still maintain its own user interface, but will eventually feature “Powered by Bing™” branding.  All Yahoo! Search global customers and partners are expected to be transitioned by early 2012.

2009
Aug.
Search algorithm update        
Named Caffeine, this update is announced on August 10, 2009. It promises faster crawling, expansion of the index, and a near-real-time integration of indexing and ranking. The rollout is made live on June 8, 2010.

2010
Sept.
New User experience            
Google launches Google Instant, described as a search-before-you-type feature: as users are typing, Google predicts the user’s whole search query (using the same technology as in Google Suggest, later called the autocomplete feature) and instantaneously shows results for the top prediction.  Google claims that this is estimated to save 2–5 seconds per search query.  SEO commentators initially believe that this will have a major effect on search engine optimization, but soon revise downward their estimate of the impact.

2010
Nov
New web search engine         
Blekko, a search engine that uses slashtags to allow people to search in more targeted categories, launches.

2011
June
Webmaster tools                    
Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft announce Schema.org, a joint initiative that supports a richer range of tags that websites can use to convey better information.

2011
Feb.
Search algorithm update        
Google launches Google Panda, a major update affecting 12% of search queries. The update continues with the earlier work of cracking down on spam, content farms, scrapers, and websites with a high ad-to-content ratio. The rollout is gradual over several months, and Panda will see many further updates.

2012
Jan.
Search algorithm update        
Google launches Search Plus Your World, a deep integration of one’s social data into search.  SEO commentators are critical of how the search results favor Google+ and push it to users, compared to more widely used social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

2012
April
Search algorithm update        
Google launches its “Webspam update” which would soon become known as Google Penguin.

2012
May
Sidebar User experience         
Microsoft announces a redesign of its Bing search engine that includes “Sidebar”, a social feature that searches users’ social networks for information relevant to the search query.

2012
May
Search algorithm update        
Google starts rolling out Knowledge Graph, used by Google internally to store semantic relationships between objects. Google now begins displaying supplemental information about objects related to search queries on the side.

2013
Aug.
Search algorithm update        
Google releases Google Hummingbird, a core algorithm update that may enable more semantic search and more effective use of the Knowledge Graph in the future.

 

 

 

 

Beginnings

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(top) From the documentary “Elvis Presley: The Searcher” (2018). Watch the trailer HERE  (row two)Presley performing live at the Mississippi-Alabama Fairgrounds in Tupelo, September 26, 1956. (row three) Presley’s birthplace in Tupelo, Mississippi; Elvis, about three years old, posed with mom Gladys and dad Vernon; Ten-year-old Elvis, second from right and wearing glasses, with talent show winners. Elvis came in fifth. (row four) Promo photos for “Jail House Rock” (row five) Young man Elvis. (Row six)some of his many album covers. (row seven) Signing autographs. (bottom) And this famous photo. Elvis, 21, and his mystery blonde caught in “The Kiss”—one of 48 shots taken by freelance photographer Alfred Wertheimer (assigned by RCA Records to follow Elvis on his first tour) in a stairwell at the Mosque Theatre in Richmond, Virginia, minutes before a concert, June 1956. 

Check out these videos with the sound as high as you can possibly crank it:
WATCH Elvis at his peak. This is GREAT!!!!!!
Goofing around having fun. Elvis Presley Heartbreak Hotel (1968)
WATCH Elvis Presley – Return To Sender [Video]
WATCH Elvis Presley – Hound Dog 1956 LIVE
WATCH Elvis Presley – Blue Suede Shoes 1956 (COLOR and STEREO)
Most of us remember our “firsts”.  Our first time playing a sport and scoring a goal/run/basket, our first friendships, our first kiss, our first breakup, our first time away from home, and our first job. My first job outside of KHT was “THE BAGEL SHOP” in Oxford, Ohio.  Imagine,  me and food! Don’t worry this will be for another post!  Getting back to my first job,  I was 13 with my brothers and sisters helping Dad as he started KHT. I can still remember my first day of work here at KHT. Growing up in a family business I was lucky to be “allowed” to do all sorts of jobs – welding, driving forklifts (lots of fun when you’re little!), packaging parts, although I was always in trouble because I would read the newspaper that we used to wrap parts in, which slowed things down! I even helped Dad with the processing.  . Something clicked for me, and I knew then I was destined to be a “heat treating” man. At the time, little did I know that one day  I’d be sitting on top of the organization, running five thermal processing divisions, supervising 6 plants and dozens of employees, juggling millions of investment dollars into new technology and infrastructure, solving thousands of PIA (Pain in the @%$) Jobs! and forever looking to the future with my team  for better ways to delight our customers. In celebration of my “firsts” I looked to an American icon.  Over 70 years ago this week, in his “first” known public musical performance Elvis Presley appeared in a talent show in Tupelo, Mississippi on October 3, 1945. He was just ten years old. Here’s a little history on how he got started, some “random” trivia, and fun links to video and songs.  Crank up the sound and shake it!  And thanks to Wikipedia, You Tube and onthisday.com.

  1. As the story goes, standing on a chair at a microphone, Elvis first public appearance was when he sang “Old Shep” at the Mississippi-Alabama Fair and Dairy Show. The show was broadcast over WELO Radio, though no recording of it now exists. Some reports say that he came in second and won a prize of five dollars in fair-ride tickets. Interviewed years later, however, Elvis recalled that he actually came in fifth and his most vivid memory of the day was receiving “a whipping from my Mama” for misbehaving.  (A photograph taken of some of the contestants seems to bear out his recollection of the result. Wearing glasses, Elvis is standing empty-handed next to two other youngsters, both proudly clutching a trophy).
  2. Elvis purchased his first guitar when he was just 11 years old. He wanted a rifle, but his mama convinced him to get a guitar instead.  At age 12, a local radio show offered a young Elvis a chance to sing live on air, but he was too shy to go on.
  3. His next known public performance was on November 6, 1948 when he played guitar and sang “Leaf On A Tree” as a farewell to his fellow students at Milam Junior School in Tupelo. The poverty-stricken Presleys then packed their belongings into a trunk, strapped it to the roof of their 1939 Plymouth car, and headed for Memphis, Tennessee, in search of a better life.
  4. Notoriously shy, Elvis could still be persuaded to perform and in 1953 he nervously sang in a student talent show at Humes High School in Memphis – his next step on the educational ladder. Much to his own amazement, he received more applause than anyone else and won.  Pleased, he then performed an encore.
  5. Soon after, wanting to hear what his voice sounded like on a record, he called the Memphis Recording Service, home of the Sun label and made a private demo acetate of “My Happiness” and “That’s When Your Heartaches Begin” at a cost of about four dollars. Excited, he took the acetate home and gave it to his mother as a birthday present.
  6. When Sam Phillips, owner of the studio, heard the recording, he called the boy in to hear more. And the rest, as they say, is a part of our history.
  7. One of the most significant cultural icons of the 20th century, Elvis helped establish the emerging Rock and Roll sound, incorporating blues and gospel influences. He was also a leader in popularizing both the rockabilly sound and the four-man band line-up which would later dominate the music industry.
  8. His first single, “Heartbreak Hotel” (1956), a song inspired by a newspaper article about a local suicide, began a string of number-ones that radically reshaped American music and put Presley at the forefront of rock and roll.
  9. When performing on TV in 1956, host Milton Berle advised Elvis to perform without his guitar, reportedly saying, “Let ’em see you, son.”  Elvis’ gyrating hips caused outrage across the U.S. and within days he was nicknamed Elvis the Pelvis.  A Florida judge called Elvis “a savage” that same year because he said that his music was “undermining the youth.”  He was subsequently forbidden from shaking his body at a gig, so he waggled his finger instead in protest.
  10. In 1958, he was drafted into the army and served in West Germany, earning $78 per month, unable to access his musical fortune back home. Following this he began a much-derided acting career and did not perform live for seven years.  In 1968 he returned to the stage with the acclaimed “Elvis” special, and then took up an extended Las Vegas residency which became iconic in its own right.
  11. In 1959, while serving overseas in Germany, Elvis (then 24 years old) met his future wife, 14 year-old Priscilla Beaulieu.  They were married 8 years later.
  12. Elvis’ 1960 hit “It’s Now or Never” so inspired a prisoner who heard it in jail that he vowed to pursue a career in music upon his release.  The artist, Barry White, was then serving a 4-month sentence for stealing tires.
  13. A series of successful concert tours followed, as did the 1973 live concert special “Aloha from Hawaii”, which was a technological first.
  14. Elvis and Priscilla’s only daughter, Lisa Marie Presley, was born in 1968.  Lisa Marie later married Michael Jackson and actor (and Elvis obsessive) Nicholas Cage.  Mr. Cage is reportedly the only person outside of Presley’s immediate family to have ever seen Elvis’ Graceland bedroom.
  15. Elvis’ popularity faded in the 1960’s with the rise of the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, and others.  He successfully relaunched his career with a 1968 television special that came about because Elvis had walked down a busy Los Angeles street and had no one recognize or approach him.
  16. Elvis Presley died on August 16, 1977 of a heart attack at his Graceland estate in Memphis, often considered to be the result of an accidental prescription drug overdose. He is buried in the Meditation Garden at Graceland mansion at 3764 Elvis Presley Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee. It receives more than 600,000 visitors from around the world each year, making it one of the top attractions in the city and one of the most-visited private homes in the world.
  17. Presley is one of the best-selling artists in music history, recording over 600 songs (none of which he wrote) and sales of over 600 million units.

 

 

 

Marvel “ous”

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(Top) One of the proposed 747 designs in the Kowalski fleet. We’ve named this one Rudolph. (row 2) Yes, you do need to be a rocket scientist to fly one of these babies. (row 3) Artist depiction of the comfortable and roomy passenger seating. (row 4) The actual passenger area without seats and with seats. (row 5) The passenger seating areas. (row 6) This cargo version landing in Hong Kong. (row 7) The Hindenburg vs the Boeing 747-400. (row 8) The 747 has starred in more movies than Harrison Ford, Bruce Willis, Kurt Russell, Jack Lemmon, George Kennedy and Efrem Zimbalist, Jr combined.

 

Ever since I can remember, I’ve been fascinated by airplanes.  I love watching them take off, and land, and glide in the air with ridiculous ease – giant, massive structures just floating along.  I can remember as a kid going out to the airport and crouching down  when the planes flew over the car, thinking they were almost close enough to touch. As our heat treating aerospace business has grown, and now complimented with our latest NADCAP heat treating accreditation, I just love it when customers call with their aerospace PIA (Pain in the @%$ Jobs)!  My guys jump at the chance to solve customer’s problems, and deliver consistent, “reliable” (ever think how important that is for aircraft) parts, that end up in components, and then on aircraft.  Seeing planes in the air still makes me smile, because I know part of KHT is also riding along.  50 years ago this month, a marvel was introduced to the world, that changed the aviation landscape – the introduction of the Boeing 747.  Bigger and better than anything at its time, it took the industry by storm, but more importantly, has been a global workhorse for airlines and a delight for passengers.  I found a fun article in Smithsonian magazine, and also pulled some facts and history from Wikipedia to share.  Hats off to Boeing, and all the designers, engineers, pilots, employees and maintenance crews who built over 1,500 planes, and have kept her flying all these years – Enjoy!

  1. The Boeing 747 is an American wide-body commercial jet airliner and cargo aircraft, often referred to by its original nickname, “Jumbo Jet”. Its distinctive hump upper deck along the forward part of the aircraft has made it one of the most recognizable aircraft and the first wide-body airplane produced.
  2. Rolled from the hangar in Everett, Washington 50 years ago this weekend, onlookers were stunned.The aircraft before them was more than double the size and weight of any existing airliner.  Its instant fame came with its size – two aisles, two floors, four massive engines and a six-story tail fin, allowing millions of passengers to travel the globe, it changed aviation forever.
  3. The four-engine 747 uses a double-deck configuration for part of its length and is available in passenger, freighter and other versions. Boeing designed the 747’s hump-like upper deck to serve as a first–class lounge or extra seating, and to allow the aircraft to be easily converted to a cargo carrier by removing seats and installing a front cargo door. Boeing expected supersonic airliners—the development of which was announced in the early 1960s—to render the 747 and other subsonic airliners obsolete, while the demand for subsonic cargo aircraft would remain robust well into the future. Though the 747 was expected to become obsolete after 400 were sold, it exceeded critics’ expectations with production surpassing expectations.  By July 2018, 1,546 aircraft had been built, with 22 of the 747-8 variants remaining on order.
  4. The 747-400, the most common variant in service, has a high-subsonic cruise speed of Mach 0.85–0.855 (up to 570 mph or 920 km/h) with an intercontinental range of 7,260 nautical miles (8,350 statute miles or 13,450 km).[14] The 747-400 can accommodate 416 passengers in a typical three-class layout, 524 passengers in a typical two-class layout, or 660 passengers in a high–density one-class configuration
  5. In 1963, the United States Air Force started a series of study projects on a very large strategic transport aircraft. Although the C-141 Starlifter was being introduced, they believed that a much larger and more capable aircraft was needed, especially the capability to carry outsized cargo that would not fit in any existing aircraft. These studies led to initial requirements for the CX-Heavy Logistics System (CX-HLS) in March 1964 for an aircraft with a load capacity of 180,000 pounds (81,600 kg) and a speed of Mach 0.75 (500 mph or 800 km/h), and an unrefueled range of 5,000 nautical miles (9,300 km) with a payload of 115,000 pounds.
  6. Featuring only four engines, the design also required new engine designs with greatly increased power and better fuel economy. In May 1964, airframe proposals arrived from Boeing, Douglas, General Dynamics, Lockheed, and Martin Marietta; engine proposals were submitted by General Electric, Curtiss-Wright, and Pratt & Whitney. After review, Boeing, Douglas, and Lockheed were given additional study contracts for the airframe, along with General Electric and Pratt & Whitney for the engines.
  7. All three of the airframe proposals shared a number of features. As the CX-HLS needed to be able to be loaded from the front, a door had to be included where the cockpit usually was. All of the companies solved this problem by moving the cockpit above the cargo area; Douglas had a small “pod” just forward and above the wing, Lockheed used a long “spine” running the length of the aircraft with the wing spar passing through it, while Boeing blended the two, with a longer pod that ran from just behind the nose to just behind the wing. In 1965 Lockheed’s aircraft design and General Electric’s engine design were selected for the new C-5 Galaxy transport, which was the largest military aircraft in the world at the time.  The nose door and raised cockpit concepts would be carried over to the design of the 747.
  8. The 747 was conceived while air travel was increasing in the 1960s. The era of commercial jet transportation, led by the enormous popularity of the Boeing 707 and Douglas DC-8, had revolutionized long-distance travel.  Boeing was asked by Juan Trippe, president of Pan American World Airways (Pan Am), one of their most important airline customers, to build a passenger aircraft more than twice the size of the 707. During this time, airport congestion, worsened by increasing numbers of passengers carried on relatively small aircraft, became a problem that Trippe thought could be addressed by a larger new aircraft.
  9. In April 1966, Pan Am ordered 25 747-100 aircraft for US $525 million. During the ceremonial 747 contract-signing banquet in Seattle on Boeing’s 50th Anniversary, Juan Trippe predicted that the 747 would be “… a great weapon for peace, competing with intercontinental missiles for mankind’s destiny”. As the first customer, and because of its early involvement before placing a formal order, Pan Am was able to influence the design and development of the 747 to an extent unmatched by a single airline before or since.
  10. The original design included a full-length double-deck fuselage with eight-across seating and two aisles on the lower deck and seven-across seating and two aisles on the upper deck. Concern over safety, evacuation routes and limited cargo-carrying capability caused this idea to be scrapped in early 1966 in favor of a wider single deck design.  The cockpit was, therefore, placed on a shortened upper deck so that a freight-loading door could be included in the nose cone; this design feature produced the 747’s distinctive “bulge”.  In the early models it was not clear what to do with the small space in the pod behind the cockpit, so it was initially specified as a “lounge” area with no permanent seating
  11. One of the principal technologies that enabled an aircraft as large as the 747 to be drawn up was the high-bypass turbofan engine by Pratt & Whiney. The engine technology was thought to be capable of delivering double the power of the earlier turbojets while consuming a third less fuel. General Electric had pioneered the concept but was committed to developing the engine for the C-5 Galaxy and did not enter the commercial market until later
  12. Boeing agreed to deliver the first 747 to Pan Am by the end of 1969. The delivery date left 28 months to design the aircraft, which was two-thirds of the normal time. The schedule was so fast-paced that the people who worked on it were given the nickname “The Incredibles”.  Developing the aircraft was such a technical and financial challenge that management was said to have “bet the company” when it started the project.
  13. As Boeing did not have a plant large enough to assemble the giant airliner, they chose to build a new plant. The company considered locations in about 50 cities, and eventually decided to build the new plant some 30 miles north of Seattle on a site adjoining a military base at Paine Field near Everett, Washington.
  14. To level the site, more than four million cubic yards (talk about a PIA Job!) of earth had to be moved. Time was so short that the 747’s full-scale mock-up was built before the factory roof above it was finished. The plant is the largest building by volume ever built, and has been substantially expanded several times to permit construction of other models of Boeing wide-body commercial jets.
  15. The prototype 747 was first displayed to the public on September 30, 1968. Before the first 747 was fully assembled, testing began on many components and systems. One important test involved the evacuation of 560 volunteers from a cabin mock-up via the aircraft’s emergency chutes. The first full-scale evacuation took two and a half minutes instead of the maximum of 90 seconds mandated by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), and several volunteers were injured. Subsequent test evacuations achieved the 90-second goal but caused more injuries. Most problematic was evacuation from the aircraft’s upper deck; instead of using a conventional slide, volunteer passengers escaped by using a harness attached to a reel.  Tests also involved taxiing such a large aircraft. Boeing built an unusual training device known as “Waddell’s Wagon” (named for a 747 test pilot, Jack Waddell) that consisted of a mock-up cockpit mounted on the roof of a truck. While the first 747s were still being built, the device allowed pilots to practice taxi maneuvers from a high upper-deck position.
  16. On September 30, 1968, the first 747 was rolled out of the Everett assembly building before the world’s press and representatives of the 26 airlines that had ordered the airliner. Over the following months, preparations were made for the first flight, which took place on February 9, 1969, with test pilots Jack Waddell and Brien Wygle at the controls and Jess Wallick at the flight engineer’s station. Despite a minor problem with one of the flaps, the flight confirmed that the 747 handled extremely well. The 747 was found to be largely immune to “Dutch roll”, a phenomenon that had been a major hazard to the early swept-wing jets.
  17. First Lady Pat Nixon ushered in the era of jumbo jets by christening the first commercial 747 at a ceremony at Dulles International Airport on January 15, 1970 and the First Lady then climbed aboard and visited the cockpit.
  18. The huge cost of developing the 747 and building the Everett factory meant that Boeing had to borrow heavily from a banking syndicate. The firm’s debt exceeded $2 billion, with the $1.2 billion owed to the banks setting a record for all companies. Allen later said, “It was really too large a project for us.” Ultimately, the gamble succeeded, and Boeing held a monopoly in very large passenger aircraft production for many years.
  19. Following its debut, the 747 rapidly achieved iconic status, appearing in numerous film productions such as Airport 1975 and Airport ’77 disaster films, Air Force One, Die Hard 2, and Executive Decision. Appearing in over 300 film productions the 747 is one of the most widely depicted civilian aircraft and is considered by many as one of the most iconic in film history. The aircraft entered the cultural lexicon as the original Jumbo Jet, a term coined by the aviation media to describe its size and was also nicknamed Queen of the Skies.

Design Specifications based on age and size of aircraft:

Models:              747SP,747-100, 747-200B, 747-300,747-400ER, 747-8
Typical seats:  276 – 467
Cargo:                 3,900 cubic feet – 6,345 cubic feet
Length:               184 ft 9 in to 250 ft 2 in
Cabin width:    239.5 in to 241 in
Wingspan:        195 ft 8 in to 224 ft 7 in
Wing area:        5,500 ft² to 5,960 sq ft
Wing sweep:    37.5°
Tail height:       65 ft 5 in
Fuel capacity:  50,359 US gal to 63,034 US gal – (that’s over $200,000 at the pump!)
Turbofan ×4:   Pratt & Whitney JT9D-7 or Rolls-Royce RB211-524 or GE CF6
Thrust ×4:         46,300–56,900 lbf
Cruise:                econ. 907 km/h (490 kt), max. 939km/h (507kt), Mach 0.855 (504 kn; 933 km/h)
Range:                5,830 nmi to 14,320 nmi
Takeoff:             9,250 ft  to 10,200 ft

 

Crank up the sound and WATCH THIS! Maho beach St. Maarten, KLM Boeing 747 landing.

 

DOWNLOAD and read this spread from The Big Book of Airplanes. You’ll learn things like the exterior paint adds about 595 lbs. to the plane’s weight and find out what happens to toilet waste.   🙂

 

(top left) The cargo nose on this Nippon 747 gives it a nice smile. “Feed me!” (top right) “Open wide and say ahhh.” (bottom left) TIME LAPSE VIDEO Two GoPro views of a 60-ton riser package for oil and gas operations in Asia being loaded aboard a Cathay Pacific Cargo 747-8F at George H. W. Bush Intercontinental Airport on 05 July 2013. (bottom right) TIME LAPSE VIDEO of Panalpina air freight cargo loading of Atlas Air 747-400 first flight from Huntsville, Alabama to Viracopos, São Paulo, Brazil.

 

For more info, visit BOEING or SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE

 

 

 

Homecoming

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(top) If you were at the first official Homecoming football game watching the Kansas vs. Missouri rivalry, besides being 117 years old, you saw it end in a 3-3 tie. Look! There’s the tying kick in the air. That kicked-off (pun intended) what was to become “Homecoming Week” with all of the fun events at colleges and high schools all across America.

 

One of my favorite events in the small town I live in is homecoming weekend – this year scheduled for tonight.  It takes me back to memories of when the girls and Jackie would march in the parade. Where we live, homecoming includes a parade down the center of town – and it seems like everyone comes out, including the police dept, fire dept., HS marching band and cheerleaders, scouts, dignitaries, and numerous volunteer organizations.  Participants in the parade have a tradition of tossing candy to the kids and adults lining the streets. On more than one occasion I have had the opportunity to be one of those folks throwing the candy. It’s amazing how far you can throw a Tootsie Roll or Jolly Rancher especially at people you know! Our service department has the PIA (Pain in the @%$) Job of cleaning up afterwards.  Floats are handmade and include some really fun ideas.  I hope you can attend the homecoming events in your town – here’s some fun trivia I came across in Wikipedia – Enjoy!

  1. Homecoming is an annual tradition in the United States. People, towns, high schools, and colleges come together, usually in late September or early October, to welcome back alumni and former residents. It is built around a central event, such as a banquet or dance and, most often, a game of football, or, on occasion, basketball, ice hockey, or soccer.
  2. When celebrated by schools, the activities vary widely. They usually consist of a football game played on a school’s home football field, activities for students and alumni, a parade featuring the school’s choir, marching band, and sports teams, and the coronation of a homecoming queen (and at many schools, a homecoming king and queen). A dance often follows the game or the day following the game. The game itself, whether it be football or another sport, will typically feature the home team playing a considerably weaker opponent to be an “easy win” and thus weaker schools will sometimes play lower division schools.
  3. The origin of homecoming dates back to the 1911 Kansas vs. Missouri football game, one of several claimed to be the first college football homecoming game.  Of course, many schools including Baylor, Southwestern, Illinois, and Missouri have made claims that they held the first modern homecoming. The NCAA, Trivial Pursuit, Jeopardy!, and references from the American TV drama NCIS give the title to the University of Missouri’s 1911 football game during which alumni were encouraged to attend.
  4. In 1891, the Missouri Tigers first faced off against the Kansas Jayhawks in the first installment of the Border War, which was also the oldest college football rivalry west of the Mississippi River. The intense rivalry originally took place at neutral sites, usually in Kansas City, Missouri, until a new conference regulation was announced that required intercollegiate football games to be played on collegiate campuses. To renew excitement in the rivalry, ensure adequate attendance at the new location, and celebrate the first meeting of the two teams on the Mizzou campus, Mizzou Athletic Director Chester Brewer invited all alumni to “come home” for the game in 1911. Along with the football game, the celebration included a parade and spirit rally with bonfire. The event was a success, with nearly 10,000 alumni coming home to take part in the celebration and watch the Tigers and Jayhawks play to a scintillating 3–3 tie.
  5. Baylor’s homecoming history dates back to November 1909 and included a parade, reunion parties, and an afternoon football game (the final game of the 1909 season), a tradition that continued and celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2009.
  6. The event usually includes a homecoming court, a representative group of students that, in a coeducational institution, consists of a king and queen, and possibly prince(s) and princess(es). In a single-sex institution, the homecoming court will usually consist of only a king and a prince (for an all-male school) or a queen and a princess (for an all-female school), although some schools often choose to join with single-gender schools of the other gender to elect the homecoming court jointly.  Generally, the king and queen are students completing their final years of study at their school (also called “seniors”), while the prince and princess are underclassmen, often with a prince/princess for each grade.
  7. Many homecoming celebrations include a parade. Students often select the grand marshal based on a history of service and support to the school and community. The parade includes the school’s marching band and different school organizations’ floats created by the classes and organizations and most of the sports get a chance to be in the parade. Every class is expected to prepare a float which corresponds with the homecoming theme or related theme of school spirit as assign by school administrators. In addition, the homecoming court takes part in the parade, often riding together in one or more convertibles as part of the parade. Community civic organizations and businesses, area fire departments, and alumni groups often participate as well. The parade is often part of a series of activities scheduled for that specific day, which can also include a pep rally, bonfire, snake dance, and other activities for students and alumni.
  8. At most major colleges and universities, the football game and preceding tailgate party are the most widely recognized and heavily attended events of the week. Alumni gather from all around the world to return to their alma mater, reconnect with one another, and take part in the festivities. Students, alumni, businesses, and members of the community set up tents in parking lots, fields, and streets near the stadium to cook food, play games, socialize, and even enjoy live music in many instances. These celebrations often last straight through the game for those who do not have tickets but still come to take part in the socializing and excitement of the homecoming atmosphere. Most tents even include television or radio feeds of the game for those without tickets.
  9. Many schools hold a rally during homecoming week, often one or more nights before the game. The events vary, but may include skits, games, introduction of the homecoming court (and coronation of the king and queen if that is the school’s tradition), and comments from the football players or coach about the upcoming game.

Some homecoming bonfires are better than other homecoming bonfires. This 2016 Texas A&M, Aggie Student Homecoming Bonfire is some homecoming bonfire.

  1. At some schools, the homecoming rally ends with a bonfire (in which old wood structures, the rival school’s memorabilia and other items are burned in a controlled fire.) Students are encouraged to come together, share in songs and cheering for the teams.  Many schools include the marching band for music and fun.
  2. The alumni band consists of former college and university band members who return for homecoming to perform with the current marching band (usually made up from recent graduates to members who graduated years or decades before) either during halftime as a full band or a featured section, e.g. the trumpet section or the tubas and drumline squads, as well as performing with the current band during the post-game concert.
  3. High schools in the south of the United States, especially in Texas, often have a tradition of the girls wearing “mums” and boys wearing “garters” to the Homecoming football game. Mums usually consist of artificial chrysanthemums (real chrysanthemums were originally used) surrounded by decorated floor-length ribbon and little trinkets. The tradition is that the boys create a personalized mum in their school colors, making white and silver for seniors only, for their date. Girls make garters for their date which are similar to mums but shorter and worn on the boy’s arm. The size of the mums and garters tend to grow in proportion to the grade that the receiver is in. Depending on the school, mums can get quite competitive, expensive, and drastically bigger than they previously were intended to be. Different items are also placed on mums than there previously were, such as LEDs, bubble containers, cow bells, feather boas, stuffed animals of all sizes, etc. The tradition is to make the mum and garter after the couple is asked to homecoming, and exchange them on the night of the homecoming game and wear it throughout tailgating and the game. Couples often take group pictures with their mums and garters the evening of or the evening before the homecoming game to showcase them.
  4. The homecoming dance—usually the culminating event of the week (for high schools)—is a formal or informal event, either at the school or an off-campus location. The venue is decorated, and either a disc jockey or band is hired to play music. In many ways, it is a fall prom. Homecoming dances could be informal as well just like standard school dances. At high schools, the homecoming dances are sometimes held in the high school gymnasium or outside in a large field. Homecoming dance attire is less formal than prom.

 

 

Remember

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Chips ‘n dip, hot dogs and ice cream, oh my! Remember what was so great to eat when you were a kid?

Over the weekend I was chatting with one of my brothers (I have 17 siblings in my family…), and we got reminiscing about old friends, kids from the neighborhood, crazy games we played, and of course some of the memorable foods we grew up on.  Being a “foodie”, I naturally had a whole list of favorites that came crashing to mind, like Lawson’s French Onion Dip, and Dairyman’s lemon and red drink in the big gallon jugs, along with staples like chocolate milk and ice cream in the small cardboard cups and wooden spoon they served at school. For fun, I thought I’d list a bunch here, and add in a little KHT trivia so you know more of the backstory. If a favorite of yours comes to mind, please shoot me an email – love to share the stories and memories (fireballs, fish sticks, fried liver (with ketchup of course!)  Enjoy!

Remember Lawson’s stores? Their chip dip can still be found, but you’ll have to go to Japan to visit a store.

Lawson’s Chip Dip:  many thanks to Lawson’s for helping me get through the long nights, homework, breakups, sports watching and hours waiting for dinner to be served – your contribution to our creamy onion-y snacking it tops on our list.  Tip:  Although the Lawson’s stores we were familiar with are gone, thankfully the company is owned by Circle K and they kept Lawson’s products on the shelves. (Whew.)

These were sooooooooo GREAT!!

Dixie Cup Ice Cream:the exact origins of the paper cup seem to be unknown, therefore the inventor of the handy disposable beverage and ice cream holder may never be known, although there is evidence that they were used as far back as Imperial China. Around the beginning of the 1900’s, paper cups gained popularity when people began to realize that sharing the same tin or ladle, to drink from water barrels, also meant sharing germs.  In 1907, a Boston lawyer named Lawrence Luellen, developed the “Health Kup” (which later became known as the Dixie Cup in 1919) to help improve public health and hygiene.  During the great American flu epidemic of 1918 paper cups rapidly grew in popularity as a way of avoiding infection. In the century since, the paper cup has evolved from a simple health solution to an everyday convenience object. Chocolate or vanilla?

Ok, I’m getting hungry.

Hot Dog Day at School:  what a simple idea.  Boil hot dogs, slap them in buns, and watch the kids lap them up.  Made famous in the US at the 1893 Chicago World’s Colombian Exposition, Germany served hordes of visitors who consumed large quantities of “sausages”. People liked this food that was easy to eat, convenient and inexpensive -perfect for mass production school cafeterias. The Hot Dog Council estimates Americans consume 20 billion hot dogs a year – that works out to about 70 hot dogs per person each year. Hot dogs are served in 95 percent of homes in the United States. Are you mustard or ketchup, or both?  Pickle or relish?

Remember the Charles Chips trucks?

Charles Chips:  In 1942:Effie Musser was making a batch of her delicious potato chips in her small rural Pennsylvania kitchen and had a great idea. Si, her husband and farmer by trade, was having difficulties raising enough money to keep them afloat, so she thought of a way to create some additional income, by taking her chips to the famous Central Market located in Penn Square in historic Lancaster, Pennsylvania and maybe sell a few bags. After great success, a snack distributor from Baltimore, MD contracted Effie for her to deliver her chips in bulk to him.  He repacked the bulk chips into his branded tin can and renamed them Charles Chips (after Charles St in downtown Baltimore).  Production grew, and by the late 50’s, Si and Effie expanded the brand to include Charles Pretzels, Cookies and a Christmas Holiday Gift program.  Home delivery was the key in the 70’s, distribution reached California and by 1990’s the company wholesale revenue reached $45M.  In 1991, Effie and Si sold Charles Chips to some Philadelphia investors; however, within 18 months the new company went bankrupt.  (Don’t fret, you can still buy them from another manufacturer).

On the left is the sign that poured milk. And milkmen dropped your weekly supply at your door step.

Dairyman’s:  Anyone remember the Diarymans bottle sign? It was an electric sign of a milk bottle tipped filling up a giant glass. Not sure how many light bulbs this thing had. But the bottle would be lighted up and the bulbs would go off to show the bottle being emptied as the glass was filled. We would look for it both going to and coming from the car, even looking out the back window for a prolonged look as we came home.  Diarymans chocolate milk … heaven!  And those big gallon jugs of red and lemon drink, made hot days of summer melt away.

MMMmmmMMMmmmm, Steak-umms!!

Steak-umm’s:According to inventor Gene Gagliardi, Steak-umm was created after putting beef through a grinder multiple times, mixing and molding it, freezing it, softening it, then ultimately slicing it paper thin.  In a 2012 lawsuit, Judge Lawrence Stengel described the product as “chopped and formed emulsified meat product that is comprised of beef trimmings left over after an animal is slaughtered and all of the primary cuts, such as tenderloin, filet, and rib eye, are removed.  The emulsified meat is pressed into a loaf and sliced, frozen and packaged.  So that’s why I liked them … I could go through a box in no time, white bread with a little butter to hold back the grease.

These were so much fun. Still are!

Candy Dots:(Candy Buttons or Pox):  “dots” are small rounded pegs of candy that are attached to a strip of paper. This classic sugar candy was originally introduced by the Cumberland Valley company and J Sudak and Son of Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Each strip of the candy includes three flavors: cherry (pink), lime (blue), and lemon (yellow). Candy Buttons came in two strip sizes: long and short. In 1977, Sudak, changed the name to Uncle Nibbles Candy Factory, and sold to a re-packager in Manhattan named CeeDee Candy, they then sold to Necco, who makes 750 million candy buttons in the course of a year. PIA Award -engineer and inventor George Theofiel Dib, credited with the invention of the candy button machine.

The first convenience popcorn. Always fun to make it blow-up.

Jiffy Pop:  What was a “babysitter night” without Jiffy Pop (and the mystery of heat treating!). Frederick C. Mennen of LaPorte, Indiana, a chemist, inventor and industrialist, is credited with developing the product in 1958. Purchased by American Home Products in ‘59, within one year the product had reached the national U.S. market, spurred by stage magician Harry Blackstone Jr. endorsing what the television-commercial jingle called “the magic treat — as much fun to make as it is to eat.” Original Jiffy Pop packages used a plain, bright aluminum pan, eventually replaced by an aluminum pan with a black treatment on the outside to improve heat transfer (I love heat transfer!!). Jiffy Pop is still around today, offered in only one stovetop version, Butter Flavor Popcorn.

Remember Wonder Bread “Builds Strong Bodies 12 Ways”? Not sure what ways those were but it was fun packaging. And makes for a really fun Halloween costume.

Wonder Bread:  Wonder Bread was originally produced by the Taggart Baking Company of Indianapolis, Indiana, and debuted on May 21, 1921, after a promotion with ads that only stated a “Wonder” was coming. Named by VP Elmer Cline, who was inspired by the International Balloon Race at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, featuring hundreds of balloons creating a kaleidoscope of color resulting in the iconic red, yellow and blue balloons on the Wonder Bread wrapper.  Continental Baking began shipping Wonder Bread in sliced form, one of the first companies to do so; a significant milestone for the industry and for American consumers, who, at first, needed reassurance that “wonder-cut” bread would not dry out.  Unsliced bread returned for a while during World War II due to a steel shortage that led to an industry-wide slicing suspension in 1943. Bread slicers returned two years later when Continental Baking began adding vitamins and minerals to Wonder Bread as part of a government-sponsored program of enriching white bread. The company sponsored Howdy Doody with host Buffalo Bob Smith telling the audience, “Wonder Bread builds strong bodies 8 ways. Look for the red, yellow and blue balloons printed on the wrapper.” By the 1960s, Wonder Bread was advertised with the slogan “Helps build strong bodies 12 ways,” referring to the number of added nutrients.  To this day, peanut butter and jelly on Wonder bread is still amazing!

 

 

Celebrating My Team

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No matter what you do or aspire to do, this day was dedicated in honor of your labors. Enjoy!!

Kowalski Heat Treating has always been a fairly “simple” business – have a vision, hire great people, give them the tools, training and right equipment, along with the freedom and responsibility to make good decisions. Then work like the dickens to do great work for our customers. Of course, like all businesses, it’s the “labor” that makes it happen.  So, for this upcoming LABOR DAY weekend, I want to salute my amazing team, and thank them for their commitment to excellence, while working on all of those PIA jobs!  Without my team there really would be no Kowalski Heat Treating.

Here’s a bit about the history of Labor Day and a request to all – enjoy YOUR labor, your families, friends and thank those working on this traditional holiday weekend.

  1. Labor Day is a public holiday in the United States and falls on the first Monday in September. This holiday honors the contributions of workers in the American labor movement to the well-being of the United States.
  2. In the U.S it is known as the “unofficial last day of summer.” Canada also has a Labour Day and that falls on the first Monday in September as well. All throughout the rest of the world, over 80 countries celebrate Labour Day, also known as May Day and International Workers’ Day, on the first day of May.
  3. Prior to the beginning of the Labor movement, conditions in American factories and mines were often deplorable during the 18th and 19th centuries. While some states had passed laws that prevented children from working, in some states children as young as 5 years old were working. For many workers, conditions were also extremely unsafe and there were very few laws that limited how long a workday should be. The labor movement began as a way to address these issues, fighting for better wages, safer working conditions, an end to child labor and providing health benefits for workers.
  4. In the United States, Labor Day was first proposed as a September holiday between 1880 and 1890. The idea was borrowed from Canada after American labor leader Peter McGuire witnessed labor festivals that had occurred in Toronto to fight for the rights of printers. He took the idea back to the United States and organized an American version of Labor Day. On September 5, 1882, the first official Labor Day Parade was held in New York City and was attended by over 10,000 workers.
  5. The labor movement in Europe began during the industrial revolution. At the time, the idea of an organized labor movement was met with quite a bit of resistance. In fact, sometimes there were grave consequences for workers organizing. For instance, Tolpuddle Martyrs of Dorset were charged with forming a secret society when they formed their union. However, that didn’t prevent the movement from moving forward, and groups such as The International Workingmen’s Association began to gain power and give the labor movement more of an international voice.
  6. In the U.S., Labor Day is an official federal holiday. This means that all government offices and schools, as well as many businesses, are closed on this day. In some parts of the country, public parades, firework displays and barbecues are organized. It is considered by many to be the unofficial end of summer – a time to have some fun before school resumes or before summer vacations end.
  7. There are often many unrelated fairs and festivals that occur around this time. Some of these include the Festival of Iowa Beers in Amana, Iowa; The KC Irish Fest in Kansas City, Missouri; Big River Steampunk Festival in Hannibal, Missouri; and, the Cleveland Oktoberfest in our local city Berea, Ohio.
  8. In Canada, most of the celebrations aren’t much different from how Americans celebrate their Labor Day. Many people all across the country see it as a good time to go on one last summer trip; to have a BBQ with friends and family; or attend a picnic or some kind of festival. Some Canadians will celebrate the day with fireworks. Canadian football fans usually spend the day watching the Labour Day Classic.
  9. As you can imagine, Labour Day is celebrated in different countries in different ways. In the U.K., this day is still celebrated in many small towns and shires with the crowning of the May Queen and it’s still celebrated by some people as Beltane Day. Usually, there are a number of parades and protests which take place on this day to promote and protect the rights of workers.

And for some very interesting information….

  1. In Bulgaria, the day involves snakes and other reptiles, which have prompted many people to devise rituals to drive away these creatures and keep them from biting people. People all over Bulgaria light fires and make lots of noise to scare these snakes away. In Germany, Walpurgisnacht is celebrated and in Finland, Walpurgis Night is celebrated.

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Oh So Good!

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The tomato. Grow them or eat them. There’s nothing quite like them. Read on and check out some fabulous recipes at the link below.

It’s tomato time! That wonderful time of year when our summer gardens finally give up their fresh, ripe, glorious tomatoes. For me, I can’t get enough. Right out of the garden, or a basket-full from the farmer’s stand down the road, I’m in tomato heaven.  For breakfast, we’ll devour them drizzled with a little olive oil alongside scrambled eggs.  Lunch means magnificent BLTs of course, or just cut up alongside a sandwich or in a salad. At snack time, you can’t beat a perfectly ripe tomato simply sliced into wedges and sprinkled with a little sea salt (and a dash of pepper – no one can eat a tomato without pepper!). And when dinner rolls around, we consult the recipes.

Thanks to Wikipedia for the insights and history and allrecipies.com for the amazing recipes – I think Jackie and I will try every single one before the harvest season is over. (tomato/cucumber salad with onions … stop the bus!!)  Here are some of our must-have recipes when tomatoes are at their peak. And remember, keep those garden-fresh tomatoes out of the fridge — Cold dulls flavor. Enjoy!  (and if you have an abundance from the garden, just drop them off at KHT headquarters – I’ll be sure to lap them up and share with the crew).

  1. The word “tomato” comes from the Spanish tomate, which in turn comes from the Nahuatl word tomatl meaning “the swelling fruit. The native Mexican tomatillo is tomate meaning “fat water” or “fat thing”.  When the Aztecs started to cultivate the Andean fruit to be larger, sweeter, and red, they called the new species xitomatl (or jitomates) (pronounced [ʃiːˈtomatɬ]) “plump with navel” or “fat water with navel”).
  2. The usual pronunciations of “tomato” are /təˈmeɪtoʊ/ (usual in American English) and /təˈmɑːtoʊ/ (usual in British English).  The word’s dual pronunciations were immortalized in Ira and George Gershwin’s 1937 song “Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off”.
  3. Botanically, a tomato is a fruit, a berry, consisting of the ovary, together with its seeds, of a flowering plant. However, the tomato is also considered a “culinary vegetable” because it has a much lower sugar content than culinary fruits, typically served as part of a salad or main course of a meal, rather than as a dessert. Tomatoes are not the only food source with this ambiguity; bell peppers, cucumbers, green beans, eggplants, avocados, and squashes of all kinds (such as zucchini and pumpkins) are all botanically fruits, yet cooked as vegetables.
  4. Of course, this confusion led to legal dispute in the United States. In 1887, U.S. tariff laws that imposed a duty on vegetables, but not on fruits, caused the tomato’s status to become a matter of legal importance. The U.S. Supreme Court settled this controversy on May 10, 1893, by declaring that the tomato is a vegetable, based on the popular definition that classifies vegetables by use, as they are generally served with dinner and not dessert (Nix v. Hedden (149 U.S. 304)).
  5. Tomato plants are dicots, and grow as a series of branching stems, with a terminal bud at the tip that does the actual growing. When that tip eventually stops growing, whether because of pruning or flowering, lateral buds take over and grow into other, fully functional, vines. Tomato vines are also typically pubescent, meaning covered with fine short hairs. These hairs facilitate the vining process, turning into roots wherever the plant is in contact with the ground and moisture, especially if the vine’s connection to its original root has been damaged or severed.
  6. As a true fruit, tomatoes develop from the ovary of the plant after fertilization, its flesh comprising the pericarp walls. The fruit contains hollow spaces full of seeds and moisture, called locular cavities. These vary, among cultivated species, according to type. Some smaller varieties have two cavities, globe-shaped varieties typically have three to five, beefsteak tomatoes have a great number of smaller cavities, while paste tomatoes have very few, very small cavities.
  7. The first commercially available genetically modified food was a variety of tomato named the Flavr Savr, which was engineered to have a longer shelf life.  Scientists continue to develop tomatoes with new traits not found in natural crops, such as increased resistance to pests or environmental stresses. Other projects aim to enrich tomatoes with substances that may offer health benefits or provide better nutrition.
  8. An international consortium of researchers from 10 countries began sequencing the tomato genome in 2004, and is creating a database of genomic sequences and information on the tomato and related plants. The Tomato Genetic Resource Center, Germplasm Resources Information Network, AVRDC, and numerous seed banks around the world store seed representing genetic variations of value to modern agriculture.
  9. While individual breeding efforts can produce useful results, the bulk of tomato breeding work is at universities and major agriculture-related corporations, resulting in significant regionally adapted breeding lines and hybrids. Corporations including Heinz, Monsanto, BHNSeed, and Bejoseed have breeding programs that attempt to improve production, size, shape, color, flavor, disease tolerance, pest tolerance, nutritional value, and numerous other traits.
  10. The tomato is native to western South America.  Wild versions were small, like cherry tomatoes, and most likely yellow rather than red.  A member of the deadly nightshade family, tomatoes were erroneously thought to be poisonous by Europeans who were suspicious of their bright, shiny fruit.
  11. Aztecs and other peoples in Mesoamerica used the fruit in their cooking. The exact date of domestication is unknown; by 500 BC, it was already being cultivated in southern Mexico and probably other areas.  The Pueblo people are thought to have believed that those who witnessed the ingestion of tomato seeds were blessed with powers of divination. (hence the expression – “God, this is good” – ha.)
  12. Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés may have been the first to transfer the small yellow tomato to Europe after he captured the Aztec city of Tenochtitlan, now Mexico City, in 1521, although Christopher Columbus may have taken them back as early as 1493. The earliest discussion of the tomato in European literature appeared in an herbal written in 1544 by Pietro Andrea Mattioli, an Italian physician and botanist, who suggested that a new type of eggplant had been brought to Italy that was blood red or golden color when mature and could be divided into segments and eaten like an eggplant—that is, cooked and seasoned with salt, black pepper, and oil.
  13. After the Spanish colonization of the Americas, the Spanish distributed the tomato throughout their colonies in the Caribbean. They also took it to the Philippines, from where it spread to southeast Asia and then the entire Asian continent. The Spanish also brought the tomato to Europe. It grew easily in Mediterranean climates, and cultivation began in the 1540s. It was probably eaten shortly after it was introduced, and was certainly being used as food by the early 17th century in Spain.
  14. The recorded history of tomatoes in Italy dates back to at least 1548, when the house steward of Cosimo de’ Medici, the grand duke of Tuscany, wrote to the Medici private secretary informing him that the basket of tomatoes sent from the grand duke’s Florentine estate at Torre del Gallo “had arrived safely”.
  15. Tomatoes were grown mainly as ornamentals early on after their arrival in Italy. The earliest discovered cookbook with tomato recipes was published in Naples in 1692, though the author had apparently obtained these recipes from Spanish sources. Unique varieties were developed over the next several hundred years for uses such as dried tomatoes, sauce tomatoes, pizza tomatoes, and tomatoes for long-term storage.  Most often the names corresponded to the place or origin.
  16. In America, the earliest reference to tomatoes being grown is from 1710, when herbalist William Salmon reported seeing them in the South Carolina area, possibly introduced from the Caribbean. By the mid-18th century, they were cultivated on some Carolina plantations, and probably in other parts of the Southeast as well.
  17. Alexander W. Livingston receives much credit for transforming the tomato from its natural state in which it produced small, sour fruits, and for developing numerous other varieties of tomato for both home and commercial gardeners.  When Livingston began his attempts to develop the tomato as a commercial crop, his aim had been to grow tomatoes smooth in contour, uniform in size, and sweet in flavor. In 1870, Livingston introduced the Paragon, and tomato culture soon became a great enterprise in the county. He eventually developed over seventeen different varieties of the tomato plant.
  18. In 2014, world production of tomatoes was 170.8 million tons, with China accounting for 31% of the total, followed by India, the United States and Turkey as the major producers. In 2014, tomatoes accounted for 23% of the total fresh vegetable output of the European Union, with more than half of this total coming from Spain, Italy and Poland.
  19. Tomato varieties can be divided into categories based on shape and size:
    • Beefsteak tomatoes are 10 cm (4 in) or more in diameter, often used for sandwiches and similar applications. Their kidney-bean shape, thinner skin, and shorter shelf life makes commercial use impractical.
    • Plum tomatoes, or paste tomatoes (including pear tomatoes), are bred with a lower water /higher solids content for use in tomato sauce and paste, for canningand sauces and are usually oblong 7–9 cm (3–4 in) long and 4–5 cm (1.6–2.0 in) diameter; like the Roma-type tomatoes.
    • Cherry tomatoes are small and round, often sweet tomatoes, about the same 1–2 cm (0.4–0.8 in) size as the wild tomato.
    • Grape tomatoes are smaller and oblong, a variation on plum tomatoes.
    • Campari tomatoes are sweet and noted for their juiciness, low acidity, and lack of mealiness, bigger than cherry tomatoes, and smaller than plum tomatoes.
    • Tomberries, tiny tomatoes, about 5 mm in diameter
    • Oxheart tomatoes can range in size up to beefsteaks, and are shaped like large strawberries.
    • Pear tomatoes are pear-shaped and can be based upon the San Marzano types for a richer gourmet paste.[citation needed]
    • “Slicing” or “globe” tomatoes are the usual tomatoes of commerce, used for a wide variety of processing and fresh eating.  The most widely grown commercialtomatoes tend to be in the 5–6 cm (2.0–2.4 in) diameter range.
  20. To facilitate transportation and storage, tomatoes are often picked unripe (green) and ripened in storage with ethylene, a hydrocarbon gas that many fruits produce, which acts as the molecular cue to begin the ripening process. Unripe tomatoes are firm. As they ripen they soften until reaching the ripe state where they are red or orange in color and slightly soft to the touch. Tomatoes ripened in this way tend to keep longer, but have poorer flavor and a mealier, starchier texture than tomatoes ripened on the plant.
  21. A machine-harvestable variety of tomato (the “square tomato”) was developed in the 1950s by University of California, Davis’s Gordie C. Hanna, which, in combination with the development of a suitable harvester, revolutionized the tomato-growing industry. This type of tomato is grown commercially near plants that process and can tomatoes, tomato sauce, and tomato paste. They are harvested when ripe and are flavorful when picked. They are harvested 24 hours a day, seven days a week during a 12- to 14-week season, and immediately transported to packing plants, which operate on the same schedule.
  22. A massive “tomato tree” growing inside the Walt Disney World Resort’s experimental greenhouses in Lake Buena Vista, Florida may have been the largest single tomato plant in the world. The plant has been recognized as a Guinness World Record Holder, with a harvest of more than 32,000 tomatoes.  The vine grew golf ball-sized tomatoes, which were served at Walt Disney World restaurants.  Unfortunately, the tree developed a disease and was removed in April 2010 after about 13 months of life.
  23. Tomatoes keep best unwashed at room temperature and out of direct sunlight. It is not recommended to refrigerate them as this can harm the flavor. Tomatoes stored cold tend to lose their flavor permanently.  Storing stem down can prolong shelf life, t may keep from rotting too quickly.
  24. The US city of Reynoldsburg, Ohio calls itself “The Birthplace of the Tomato”, claiming the first commercial variety of tomato was bred there in the 19th century.

MMMM-mmmm-MMMM-mmm-mm…

Go to Allrecipes.com now! They have some great, great recipes for your tomatoes…

 

 

 

Buzzzzzzzzzz

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The periodic Cicada. Read on…  And check out the videos below.

It’s the “dog days” of summer here in NE Ohio and I’m lovin’ it.  (bonus trivia:  the ancient Romans called the hottest, most humid days of summer “diēs caniculārēs” or “dog days.” The name came about because they associated the hottest days of summer with the star Sirius, known as the “Dog Star” because it was the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major (Large Dog).  When I was a kid, I tried to get everything in these last few weeks before school started.  Football practice (two-a-days) was a rite of hubris passage.  The days are sticky, and the nights are starting to cool down with just the slightest dew on the lawns in the morning.  This time of year, one of my favorite things to do is kick back in a lounge chair and listen to the songs of the cicadas.  I love the way their piercing sound cuts through the daytime air, reminding me to stay outside and enjoy the weather as long as possible. Now Jackie on the other hand can’t fall asleep to their “beautiful” music! I realized I really don’t know much about the cicadas (other than they buzz and are pretty ugly looking), so I went to my favorite Wikipedia to learn more.  Enjoy the info, and the next time someone remarks about them, you can be the “cliff klavin” in the group who says …. “did you know, the cicadas…”

  1. The cicadas are a superfamily, the Cicadoidea of insects in the order Hemiptera (true bugs). They are in a suborder with smaller jumping bugs such as leafhoppers and froghoppers, with more than 3,000 species described from around the world.
  2. Cicadas have prominent eyes set wide apart, short antennae, and membranous front wings. They also have three small ocelli located on the top of the head in a triangle between the two large eyes, with mouthparts that form a long sharp rostrum that they insert into plants to feed.
  3. The “singing” of male cicadas is not stridulation such as many familiar species of insects produce, crickets, for example.  They have an exceptionally loud song, produced by vibrating drum like tymbals rapidly. Comparatively large insects, they are conspicuous by the courtship calls of the males. The male abdomen is largely hollow, and acts as a sound box. By rapidly vibrating these membranes, a cicada combines the clicks into apparently continuous notes, and enlarged chambers derived from the tracheae serve as resonance chambers with which it amplifies the sound. The cicada also modulates the song by positioning its abdomen toward or away from the substrate. Partly by the pattern in which it combines the clicks, each species produces its own distinctive mating songs and acoustic signals, ensuring that the song attracts only appropriate mates.
  4. The adult insect, known as an imago, is 1-2 inches in total length in most species, with a wingspan of about 3-4 inches.  The largest species is the Malaysian emperor cicada with a wingspan of up to about 8 inches (yikes!).
  5. The surface of the forewing is super-hydrophobic; it is covered with minute waxy cones, blunt spikes that create a water-repellent film. Rain rolls across the surface, removing dirt in the process. In the absence of rain, dew condenses on the wings. When the droplets coalesce, they leap several millimetres into the air, which also serves to clean the wings.
  6. Cicadas typically live in trees, feeding on watery sap from xylem tissue and laying their eggs in a slit in the bark. Most cicadas are cryptic, singing at night to avoid predators. The annual cicadas are species that emerge every year. Though they have life cycles that can vary from one to nine or more years as underground larvae, their emergence above ground as adults is not synchronized so some appear every year.  The periodic cicadas spend most of their lives as underground nymphs, emerging only after 13 or 17 years, which may reduce losses by starving their predators and eventually emerging in huge numbers that overwhelm and satiate any remaining predators.
  7. In some species of cicada, the males remain in one location and call to attract females. Sometimes several males aggregate and call in chorus. In other species, the males move from place to place, usually with quieter calls while searching for females.
  8. For the human ear, it is often difficult to tell precisely where a cicada song originates. The pitch is nearly constant, the sound is continuous to the human ear, and cicadas sing in scattered groups. In addition to the mating song, many species have a distinct distress call, usually a broken and erratic sound emitted by the insect when seized or panicked. Some species also have courtship songs, generally quieter, and produced after a female has been drawn to the calling song. Males also produce encounter calls, whether in courtship or to maintain personal space within choruses.
  9. Cicadas have been featured in literature since the time of Homer’s Iliad, and as motifs in art from the Chinese Shang dynasty. They have been used in myths and folklore to represent carefree living and immortality. Cicadas are eaten in various countries, including China, where the nymphs are served deep-fried in Shandong cuisine.
  10. Cicadas are commonly eaten by birds and sometimes by squirrels, as well as bats, wasps, mantises, spiders and robber flies. In times of mass emergence of cicadas, various amphibians, fish, reptiles, mammals and birds change their foraging habits so as to benefit from the glut. Newly hatched nymphs may be eaten by ants, and nymphs living underground are preyed on by burrowing mammals like moles.
  11. Cicadas have been featured in literature since the time of Homer’s Iliad, and as motifs in decorative art from the Chinese Shang dynasty (1766–1122 BC.).  They are described by Aristotle in his History of Animals and by Pliny the Elder in his Natural History; their mechanism of sound production is mentioned by Hesiod in his poem Works and Days “when the Skolymus flowers, and the tuneful Tettix sitting on his tree in the weary summer season pours forth from under his wings his shrill song”.
  12. Cicadas have been used as money, in folk medicine, to forecast the weather, to provide song (in China), and in folklore and myths around the world.  In France, the cicada represents the folklore of Provence and the Mediterranean cities.
  13. In the Chinese tradition, the cicada symbolizes rebirth and immortality. In Japan, the cicada is associated with the summer season; the song of Meimuna opalifera, called “tsuku-tsuku boshi”, is said to indicate the end of summer, and it is called so because of its particular call.
  14. In the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, the goddess Aphrodite retells the legend of how Eos, the goddess of the dawn, requested Zeus to let her lover Tithonus live forever as an immortal.  Zeus granted her request, but, because Eos forgot to ask him to also make Tithonus ageless, Tithonus never died, but he did grow old. Eventually, he became so tiny and shriveled that he turned into the first cicada.
  15. Cicadas were eaten in Ancient Greece, and are consumed today in China, both as adults and (more often) as nymphs, in Malaysia, Burma, Latin America, North America, and central Africa female cicadas are prized for being meatier.  Shells of cicadas are employed in traditional Chinese medicines, and some are fried and eaten as a protein source (crunch, eeeewww).
  16. Cicadas are not major agricultural pests but in some outbreak years, trees may be overwhelmed by the sheer numbers of females laying their eggs in the shoots. Small trees may wilt, and larger trees may lose small branches.  Cicadas sometimes cause damage to amenity shrubs and trees, mainly in the form of scarring left on tree branches where the females laid their eggs. Branches of young trees may die as a result.

INTERESTING CICADA VIDEOS                               

(left) A great BBC four minute Cicada docudrama.
(right) A close-up of a summer cicada making some noise by a guy in Franconia, PA. One minute.

COOL CICADA MUSIC VIDEOS                                

(left) Cicada Serenade by The Pheromones. A really fun music video.
(center) Hannah Gansen sings about a love affair seventeen years in the making.
(right) “I Ate A Cicada Today” An excerpt from a CD by the author, illustrator, songwriter, Jeff Crossan.

 

 

 

Cruisin’

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(row one l) Ralph Teetor, in shirtsleeves, showing an unidentified man his invention. (row one r) Teetor’s patent drawing. (row two l) The 1958 Chrysler ad featuring Teetor’s “Auto Pilot”. (row two r top) Close-up of the “Auto Pilot”. (row two r bottom) Close-up of modern  “Adaptive Cruise Control”. (rows three & four) Adaptive Cruise Control promises to help avoid massive traffic problems due to accidents. (bottom) A whole different kind of cruise.  The Caribbean Princess at sea has nothing to do with the topic at hand but isn’t that a gorgeous shot??

 

The other day I was visiting a customer, something that I really love to do, to check in on our delivery and performance and to once again thank him for the business.  On my way down, almost without thinking much about it, I used the cruise control on the heat mobile.  Zipping along the freeway, it got me to thinking about how amazing our automobiles have become, the thousands of engineers who were able to overcome the problems, and all of the PIA Jobs we take for granted that have been solved over the years.  Amazing gas mileage, high performance engines, super resistant paints, clear glass curved windows, struts and springs that react to the road, and of course , the ease of which the transmission and engines work (I’m a bit partial to transmission and engine parts…).  Back at the plant, I fired up the computer and found a great story for this week’s blog post, a really fun article from 99% Invisible written by Kurt Kohlstedt about Ralph Teeter, a blind engineer who brought cruise control to modern cars. Enjoy, and thanks to all our reengineer friends we work with in or blogosphere – you remain amazing!

 

  1. Born in 1890, young Ralph Teetor was a perpetual tinkerer. He was blinded by an accident at the age of five but didn’t like to talk about his disability growing up. His father recognized his aptitude for building things and created a workshop for him when he was just ten years old, populating it with a variety of materials and tools. Then, as a young adult (at a time when many colleges rejected his application out of hand), Teetor pushed hard to get accepted at the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering.
  2. After university, Teetor worked to dynamically balance steam turbines for U.S. Navy vessels. He was aided in part by his highly developed sense of touch — “His hands were his eyes,” recalls his biographer. Ever innovating, he also invented an early version of the powered lawn mower as well as creative locking mechanisms and other devices.
  3. Teetor eventually returned to his hometown in Indiana, where he went to work in the family’s vehicular manufacturing and supply business — one with a long history of working on bicycles, trains and cars. Over the years, Teetor rose up through the ranks of Perfect Circle, (a Teeter family business, originally a bicycle company founded in the 1800’s that went on to perfect the piston ring). He went on to become the president of this growing company, overseeing nearly 3,000 employees. Along the way, though, he continued to work on his own designs, and had an idea that would take vehicles in a new direction.
  4. As the story goes, Teetor was riding around one day in a car with his patent attorney, who often drove him places, when the discomfort of speeding up and slowing down gave him the idea for cruise control. Teetor noticed that his driver would accelerate when listening and decelerate while talking. Nauseated by these shifts, he began tinkering with a device to manage speed, receiving a patent in 1945. Over the course of its development, he variously called his invention things like Controlmatic, Touchomatic and Pressomatic before settling on Speedostat.
  5. This wasn’t the first time a speed-controlling technology had been developed — other limited examples were used in early automobiles, and even earlier to manage steam engines. Still, it was Teetor’s design that would lead car companies to adopt cruise control.
  6. 1950 patent for a “Speed Control Device For Resisting Operation of the Accelerator”. His first prototype featured a dashboard speed selector with a governor mechanism that pushed back on the gas pedal, pressing a speeding driver to slow down. To test it, Teetor got down on the floor to depress the pedal while a sighted person sat and steered. Still, this version only helped slow a car, not keep it at a constant speed. He later added “speed lock” functionality (using an electromagnetic motor) to keep a car at one steady pace until the brake pedal was tapped.
  7. In 1958, Chrysler began putting “auto-pilot” devices in luxury cars as an optional add-on before rolling out the Speedostat more broadly. General Motors coined the name “cruise control,” which stuck. In the 1970s, with spiking gas prices driven by oil embargos, this novel feature became an essential component for American automobiles. The technology helped save over 150,000 barrels of oil a day at the time.
  8. The company had been sold by that point, but Teetor’s influential efforts did not go unnoticed. During his lifetime, he served as president of the Society of Automotive Engineers (SAE) and received two honorary degrees: Doctor of Engineering at the Indiana Institute of Technology and Doctor of Laws at Earlham College. In 1988, six years after his death, he was inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame.
  9. Today, Teetor’s legacy lives on — his inventions paved the way for other technological advances, and started the automotive industry on a road toward automation that will shape driving for decades to come.