What to put on door when the Xmas wreathes come down.
And yes I finished the second part of TRINITY PINES, utilizing an idea I had, a tragic idea.
But all tragic thoughts do not lead to tragedies, right, Joe?
He died a couple of years ago. A great local historian!!!
I had two big chunks of DELICIOUS APPLES but didn't wanna walk to the compost, so I buried them in the lamppost garden in the front yard.
When taking my morning walk, my foot was hurting but I thought, I CAN DO IT, WALK AROUND THE BLOCK.
When I got to the SANDERS House a big black Chevy Equinox was in the drive.
Hello, nice to meet you.
Remember how we loved our cars when they were new?
When I walked around block this morning I found a DOO DAD.
Then I misplaced it. Turned out my pockets on my coat and there it was.
C H E E S E. from the Smithsonian Magazine
Some cheeses are mild and soft like mozzarella, others are salty-hard
like Parmesan. And some smell pungent like Époisses, a funky orange
cheese from the Burgundy region in France.
There are cheeses with fuzzy rinds such as Camembert, and ones
marbled with blue veins such as Cabrales, which ripens for months in
mountain caves in northern Spain.
Yet almost all of the world’s thousand-odd kinds of cheese start the same, as a white, rubbery lump of curd.
How do we get from that uniform blandness to this cornucopia? The answer revolves around microbes.
Cheese teems with bacteria, yeasts and molds. “More than 100 different
microbial species can easily be found in a single cheese type,” says
Baltasar Mayo, a senior researcher at the Dairy Research Institute of
Asturias in Spain. In other words: Cheese isn’t just a snack, it’s an
ecosystem. Every slice contains billions of microbes — and they are what
makes cheeses distinctive and delicious.
People have made cheese since the late Stone Age,
but only recently have scientists begun to study its microbial nature
and learn about the deadly skirmishes, peaceful alliances and beneficial
collaborations that happen between the organisms that call cheese home.
To find out what bacteria and fungi are present in cheese and where they come from, scientists sample cheeses
from all over the world and extract the DNA they contain. By matching
the DNA to genes in existing databases, they can identify which
organisms are present in the cheese. “The way we do that is sort of like
microbial CSI, you know, when they go out to a crime scene
investigation, but in this case we are looking at what microbes are
there,” Ben Wolfe, a microbial ecologist at Tufts University, likes to
say.
Early on, that search yielded surprises. For example, cheesemakers
often add starter cultures of beneficial bacteria to freshly formed
curds to help a cheese on its way. Yet when Wolfe’s group and others
examined ripened cheeses, they found that the microbial mixes —
microbiomes — of the cheeses showed only a passing resemblance to those
cultures. Often, more than half of the bacteria present were microbial
“strangers” that had not been in the starter culture. Where did they
come from?
Many of these microbes turned out to be old acquaintances, but ones we usually know from places other than cheese. Take Brachybacterium,
a microbe present in Gruyère, which is more commonly found in soil,
seawater and chicken litter (and perhaps even an Etruscan tomb). Or
bacteria of the genus Halomonas, which are usually associated with salt ponds and marine environments.
Then there’s Brevibacterium linens, a bacterium that has
been identified as a central contributor to the stinkiness of Limburger.
When not on cheese, it can often be found in damp areas of our skin
such as between our toes. B. linens also adds characteristic
notes to the odor of sweat. So when we say that dirty feet smell
“cheesy,” there’s truth to it: The same organisms are involved. In fact,
as Wolfe once pointed out,
the bacteria and fungi on feet and cheese “look pretty much the same.”
(An artist in Ireland demonstrated this some years ago by culturing
cheeses with organisms plucked from people’s bodies.)
Initially, researchers were dumbfounded by how some of these microbes
ended up on and in cheese. Yet, as they sampled the environment of
cheesemaking facilities, a picture began to emerge. The milk of cows (or
goats or sheep) contains some microbes from the get-go. But many more
are picked up during the milking and cheesemaking process. Soil bacteria
lurking in a stable’s straw bedding might attach themselves to the
teats of a cow and end up in the milking pail, for example. Skin
bacteria fall into the milk from the hand of the milker or get
transferred by the knife that cuts the curd. Other microbes enter the
milk from the storage tank or simply drift down off the walls of the
dairy facility.
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