What Makes it Pizza?

Many of you may have been eating pizza a lot longer than I have, relatively speaking. It wasn’t until towards the end of my senior year in high school that those of us students who worked on performing the school play decided after our performance to drive to the nearest big town and get some pizza. Before that, I had no idea what pizza was. I wondered if I would like it, as we waited for it to be delivered to our tables.

I think it was a round pizza, but it was cut into squares. I can’t say it was love at first bite, but it had a lot of tastes. It had 2 or 3 types of meat on it, and a tomato sauce, and probably onions and green peppers. I wasn’t too happy with the onions, but I didn’t make a fuss over them. I didn’t want anybody to think I was weird. Everybody else thought it was great.

I’ve had a lot of pizza since then. Mostly, it’s been round pizzas, cut into slices, with tomato sauce and cheese. Various meats, vegetables and occasionally even fruit would be on it. (I love a good ham and pineapple pizza.)

About 2 decades ago, I started noticing a new pizza in the grocery store freezers. It was called chicken margarita pizza, or something like that. Instead of tomato sauce, it had some sort of white sauce. I couldn’t tell if it had any cheese at all. The meat was chicken, and there may have been a few vegetables and herbs on it. It didn’t look like pizza to me at all.

All this comes up because I just read a brief article in Archeology magazine. The on-going excavation of Pompeii had unearthed another fresco, one of a still-life on a table. There was a large tray on the table, with a slab of focaccia bread on it. There also was a variety of fruit in the picture. The question asked by the article was, is this a picture of the forerunner of pizza? Of course, back then, they didn’t have access to anything resembling tomatoes, so it wouldn’t have had a tomato sauce. But the scientists thought it looked like focaccia bread covered in various fruits.

Would they have called it pizza? I doubt it; languages change over time. But I rather like the sound of it. A slab of bread covered in fruit. Maybe with a drizzle of olive oil and some appropriate herbs and spices.

I don’t think I’ve seen focaccia bread available in the grocery store since we moved to Florida. To me, it always looked a bit like an extra large slab of fried bread dough. Maybe next time I make that delicacy, I’ll try making a ‘fruit pizza’ out of some of it. What do you think, would you try making a fruit pizza? Would you taste one?

Alas, I am not supposed to have bread, fried or not, so it could take me a while to get to that food experiment. 

When Did Humans Reach the Americas?

This question has been simmering in the back of my mind for decades. I’ve given panels on it at science fiction conventions, and I’ve written blogs on the subject before, too. I believe the last blog I wrote about it theorized that an ice-free channel through the North American glaciers of the last ice age opened up about 14,000 years ago. And therefore people who had crossed the Bering landbridge sometime before that were finally able to leave Alaska and find their way south to the plains of central North America. And from there, they could have gone on to populate all the rest of North America, Central America and South America.

But even that might not be right.

The other night, we watched a documentary about fossilized footprints in the White Sands National Park in New Mexico. Although the area is a desert now, during the last ice age, it housed a large lake. The fossilized footprints recorded the presence of Columbian mammoths, great ground sloths, North American camels and horses. And among all those footprints, it is not at all unusual to find lots of human footprints.

Scientists have to work fast to learn all they can from these footprints, because as soon as they are revealed by the wind blowing the sand away, the blowing sand starts to erode the footprints away. For these are not the usual fossils that have been turned into stone. Some of the footprints are impressions in the sand, that had been filled with silt that was finer than the sand around them. Others are outlined with bulging sand indicating the weight of the animal. All of them dried out when the lake dried up, and little has happened to the area to disturb them. Except the blowing wind.

A number of scientists work the site each year, and I was left with the impression that each year presents a new batch of footprints, at a slightly lower level than the year before.

One year—and it didn’t say what year it was—a pair of scientists who are experts at radio-carbon dating dug a trench in the sand, going down through several layers of human footprints. But you can’t radio-carbon date sand; you can only radio-carbon date organic material, like plants or animals. By examining the layers between the human footprints, they were able to find organic material, such as seeds or pollen. They packaged up a number of these samples and took them back to their lab in Denver to date them.

Two years later, the narrator visited them in their lab to ask what kind of dates they had gotten from their samples. They said they had gotten dates between 21,000 and 23,000 years ago! That would have been long before the ice-free trail through the glaciers had opened up!

At the very end of the show, the narrator was talking to another scientist, and wondered how humans could have gotten so far south before the glaciers had started to melt. The anthropologist said they had probably followed the Pacific coastline, starting in Alaska and working their way south. But, he pointed out, the sea level was much lower at that time (as much as 400 feet lower), with so much water tied up in the glaciers, so any settlements they might have established would be underwater now. He suggested we should be doing more diving along the coastline to find them.

Okay. Who still thinks that ancient alien visitors brought a herd of humans to the Americas? (This was the last suggestion I made when I gave this talk at conventions.)

Life Goes On

Every once in a while – I’m sure you’ve all experienced it – life decides to kick you, just to see how you react. And there are times when life decides to repeat the experiment (ad nauseum) for an extended period of time. It’s a real bummer, and the longer it goes on, the bummier it gets. (I know, ‘bummier’ is not a real word. Blame the creative artiste within me. I think it gets the thought across.)

Well, for the past 8-9 months, that’s what this household has been going through; one of the bummiest rough patches I think I’ve been through that didn’t involve people dying. Lots of illness in the house, some of which we are still working our way through, a treasure trove of doctor’s appointments to schedule and then get to. Sometimes as many as 3 appointments in one day. A car accident that killed one of our cars, 2 air conditioners going out (one in our remaining car) and computer equipment dying.

There’s an old saying I’m familiar with, about insanity being to repeat the same action, expecting a different outcome. And it occurs to me that in a way, that’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been getting up every morning, doing what I had to do, and expecting things to get better.

Maybe insanity wins, because I’m beginning to believe things might be getting better. I don’t want to jinx it or anything, but I’ve now had 2 weeks where I did not call the doctor’s office to schedule an appointment for one of us. No urgent care or emergency room visits. Just working our way through a number of appointments that I set up when I was ‘doing what I had to do’.

It’s kind of been the same in my endeavors to market our books. For a lot of those same months, I worked diligently at marketing, but nothing seemed to make any difference. This past couple of weeks, I started looking at a different angle on my marketing. It involved laying out a bit of money, but hey, it takes money to grow money, right? (At least that’s what the rich people say.) But about a week ago, it occurred to me that I could do the exact same thing by making use of the outlets I already have established. Without putting out any large sum of money. So the last few days, I’ve been designing new business cards and coupons to hand out at the next science fiction convention I go to. Which happens to be in September. Wish me luck, okay?

Life can be a bummer for a while. But at the same time, life goes on. One has to be ready for the bummerness to go away, which it eventually will. Then you can reach up for the goodness, take a deep breath, and move on in relief.

Getting Home

Sunday, 4/30 - We arrived at LA, and had to find out where our gate was. We only had about 1/2 hr to get there. Turned out it was down this big hallway, turn right, down the escalator to a smaller hallway, take the elevator up to another small hallway, then through a doorway to a small room that had 2 gates in it. I nearly missed it because I saw 'Gate 41B' before I noticed 'Gate 41A'. We needed 41A. We sat down in the cramped quarters to wait, and I got my sweater out of the carry-on suitcase and put it in my carry-on bag. In case the next plane was also cold. The boarding ramp to the plane was extra long and convoluted, but eventually, we got to the plane. We didn't get to sit together here, either. I shoved my cpap and bag under the seat in front of me, buckled my seat belt, and tried to get some sleep. This was another 5-hr trip, to Orlando. Shortly after take-off, the staff came around with cookies and drinks. Since I hadn't had any breakfast, I made the most of it. I think I managed to doze some of the time. Shortly before landing, staff came around again to offer coffee or water. I should have taken the water; my sinuses felt completely parched, but I passed.

We claimed our baggage and went to find our shuttle for our parking lot. It took some doing, but we finally connected with it. The shuttle driver was not the most pleasant person in the world. Our car had been sitting in the hot sun for over a week, and the remote clicker wouldn't work; we had to open all the doors with the key. Then as we drove home, we kept hearing the locking mechanisms going off and on. John finally got it to stop by hitting the 'lock' button on his door handle. Our first place for stopping to eat was super busy, so we went to our 2nd choice and got something to take home with us. Watched an hour of tv while we ate and went to bed about 9 pm.

PS. Monday, 5/1 - we discovered we had both come home with covid.

Pearl Harbor & Getting on Our Plane

 

Pearl Harbor

Saturday, 4/29 - John got up about 5:45, having had a miserable night. Went for breakfast at the buffet, then gathered our carry-ons and made our way to the disembarkment station. Around 8, we were sent off the ship to claim our luggage and find our tour bus. John nearly had a panic attack because he couldn't find our car keys. We were given a short tour of some sights in Honolulu, then given about 4 hrs to explore the Pearl Harbor Memorial. We saw 2 short movies and took a boat over to the USS Arizona Memorial, where we spent about 15 or 20 minutes. We didn't know if there would be a place to eat at the airport, so we got a sandwich apiece at the snack shop and finished with a look through the gift shop, where I bought a tote bag. By then, John was getting tired, so we slowly walked back to the bus and waited for the rest of the people to show up. The tour bus dropped us off at the airport at about 1:30. Our plane was scheduled to take off at 10:59 pm, so we had a long wait before we could check our luggage and go through TSA. There was no place to eat outside the TSA, so we were extra happy we'd had sandwiches to get us through.

Getting on Our Plane

John searched every one of our suitcases and the carry-on bag for the car keys, which we finally found. We discovered we could get our suitcases checked in 6 hours before the plane took off, so about 5 pm, we hopped up and got started on that. TSA was its usual nightmare for John, or more so, because the x-ray machine claimed he had metal somewhere, and they had to pat him down. Happens to me all the time, but I think it's the first time for him. Then we started walking to our gate. It was a long walk, made even longer by the number of stores that were already closed. We finally came across a restaurant that was open, so we stopped and had burgers and sodas. $50! Just before we got to our gate, we came across a news stand that was still open, though we had passed a couple that had already closed. We sat down and waited. Eventually, I went to that news stand and bought a bottle of water. When I got back, John asked, "Couldn't you just use the water fountain right over there?" My reply was, "The airplane doesn't have water fountains."

There were more people trying to get on the plane than they had seats, including a pair of parents and their 3 young girls. The clerk was looking for volunteers to be bumped so these extra people could get on. As we were checking in to board the plane, this family apparently figured out they wouldn't be sitting together, so they had to go back to the clerk to get something done about that. John and I didn't get to sit together, either. We had a 5-hour flight to LA, and I thought the plane was cold, so I didn't manage to get any sleep. John tried to get some sleep, I could see him from where I was, but I don't know if he managed it.