May 04, 2008
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CB monitoring pays off
I don't usually monitor the squawky CB but this afternoon I had it on for a while and I got lucky. As I was approaching Dayton OH eastbound on I-70 conversation began to center on a tie-up just east of the I-75 interchange. When it began to dawn on me I could spend the next hour or so creeping through the mess or I could spend it in my livingroom (ah, the joys of having a home on your back) with a cup of coffee I pulled off at the next exit.
A little Googling turned up a couple of traffic cameras that showed traffic backed up. Bleck! It might take a while for traffic to get moving again and at 4:30 in the afternoon the alternate routes don't much appeal to me. Generally I don't like to backtrack but it's only 3 miles back to the Wal-Mart in Englewood, OH. It's time to call it a day.
A meijer hypermarket
By chance when I exited I-70 I ended up at the meijer hypermarket in Englewood. Put Wal-Mart Superstores in a design competition with this meijer hypermarket and the meijer wins hands down. This is one good looking design. While cut from the same hypermarket cloth this is a nice fresh store with nice fresh produce in a larger grocery section than Wal-Mart's. These stores are so similar in concept one might wonder which came first - who's borrowing from whom here?
Night camp:
Wal-Mart parking lot, Englewood, Ohio
Teosinte and the Improbability of Maize
The ancestors of wheat, rice, millet, and barley look like their domesticated descendants; because they are both edible and highly productive, one can easily imagine how the idea of planting them for food came up. Maize can't reproduce itself, because its kernals are securely wrapped in the husk, so Indians must have developed it from some other species. But there are no wild species that resemble maize. Its closest genetic relative is a mountain grass called teosinte that looks strikingly different - for one thing, it "ears" are smaller than baby corn served in Chinese restaurants. No one eats teosinte, because it produces too little grain to be worth harvesting. In creating modern maize from this unpromising plant, Indians performed a feat so improbable that archaeologists and biologists have argued for decades over how it was achieved. Coupled with squash, beans, and avocados, maize provided Mesoamerica with a balanced diet, one arguably more nutritious than its Middle Eastern or Asian equivalent.