Food, wonderful food.

I was reading about a modern day Epicurean. He bills himself as the Chow Hound.

Imagine having a job that entails thinking about food, searching for food, ordering food, eating food, and then writing about all the proceedings.

One has to love food to stay with a job like that. Not just like food, but love food. One would have to think about food most of the time and be ready and willing and able to eat food at all times. There might be a sick day from time to time as there is in all employment.

After reading a description about what must be a typical day for the Chow Hound, I was sure I could not do his job.

When I plan to try some particularly good food, I want to be hungry. I want to have a ferocious appetite and be able to savor every molecule as it passes over my trembling palette. So to speak.

Wine tasters only taste the wine. Then they spit it out. Otherwise, they'd be drunk on the job.

Think about the number of four letter words in this post: food, chow, like, love, stay, most, time, sure, good, want, able, wine, over, plan, only, spit, well, many, grab.

This man is said to invite you to taste some extremely tempting and well-crafted food, but on the way, he stops at so many other places that grab his fancy that he never actually takes you to the place you were expecting to go.

I guess you could put "How Can That Be Possible?" on my tombstone. It's like the word Free. How could that be possible?

It's not that I am as simple as people think. It's more that I am constantly amazed and awed by everything on this planet.

Aliens coming from a bleak and colorless world could not be more amused and delighted with this planet like a big blue marble, spinning there in space. If it is very quiet for a long time and a bird tweets, I sometimes laugh.

I must not have all my marbles.

Would it be so bad if every waking day everyone was surprised and in wonder because we took the time to notice?

I'm hoping for a Tompten-like snow this winter, maybe just a couple of days' worth. We haven't had a really good snow for about seven years now. That could be blamed on global warming for want of any other reason.


The beauty of each individual snow flake is like the beauty of each individual fingerprint.
How can it be possible that there are no two alike?

I have a fact sheet about fingerprints from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, United States Department of Justice, CJIS division, Clarksburg, WV 26306.

Whew! The information is overwhelming.

There are three boxes with the whorls of somebody's fingerprints. They must be some actual person's, right? I don't think I would like mine to be paraded out there as an example to the public, but a case of a dirty job, right?

There are loops and deltas and arches in each fingerprint.

"The lines between center of loop and delta must show."
"These lines running between deltas must be clear."
"Arches have no deltas."

Snow, at least in theory, is pure as it falls from the sky, or it used to be thought so. Not anymore, of course. We now know that it is undoubtedly polluted.

Fingerprints are made from the oil on the ever so slightly raised grooves on your fingertips. A lot of fingerprints all over your glass surfaces means a lot of grease, not elbow grease but oil exuded by the fingers. Remind me to ask a scientist about the evolutionary reason for this.

Only in the most abstract way could you metaphorically imagine fingerprints to be like snowflakes, no matter how softly they might touch the glass.

That would be like imagining a myriad of moths beating frantically against a light bulb or like the blur of snow trying to break through window glass in a snow storm. Or the glub glub of a fetal heartbeat on a monitor.


The touch of a velvet hand "like a lizard on a window pane" are words from a Beatles song.