ON DOUGH

I made banana bread this afternoon, something I’ve been doing fairly regularly since moving out here. I always seem to buy a surplus of bananas, and warm baked goodness is hard to resist. I caught myself licking the batter when I realized that we have no cookie sheet. That is not to say cookie dough is never made, but it is never baked. The apartment-mates look askance when I sheepishly suggest that maybe this time, we should try and bake them for a change. But no. They like it in the raw. I’m not entirely opposed to the idea of eating straight up dough and batter, but making a whole batch for the express purpose of direct consumption seems . . . gross. Like eating pre-made frosting out of its tub, or peanut butter out of the jar, in big heaping spoonfuls. My apartment mates do these sorts of things too. Scarcity was a distinct and immediate aspect of my banana bread batter consumption. Scooping up the last gooey remnants from the side of the mixing bowl beats shoveling it down with a spoon any day.

NASA’s second rover, Opportunity, landed without a hitch this morning, and Spirit’s technical woes seem to be on the mend. I also encountered some space elevator sites today, which made me wish that NASA could focus on that before being pushed into new Moon and Mars missions. Then I remembered that time I tried to explain the space elevator idea to Em and Jess, and they laughed and laughed. It’s not funny, people! A space elevator would really open the doors to space. I would make some apt analogy to advances in sea ship building and the European diaspora if not for my terrible ignorance of history (I miss my encyclopedic OED). One of those site states that the only major hurdle to full scale construction is terrorist threat, which once again brought home the increasingly obvious fact that technological advances are meaningless in the face of daunting social and political complexity. The technical aspects of most problems are easy, but getting people to go along is arduous and time consuming. World hunger? A problem of distribution, not of inferior crop breeds. Space exploration? Technically feasible, but very much lacking in political support. Ugh. At leas I live in a world of Jerusalem crickets.