An Expedition to Remember

Aunty Sarah’s scooter zipped in and out of traffic. An excited little girl held on tight around her middle. They were going shopping in the suburbs of Taipei! The girl banqueted on all the new sights and smells; Heat and pollution mingled with tropical fruit and rotten tofu…

They parked. Holding her Aunty’s hand, the little girl watched as hundreds of Asian faces moved up the street. The faces all wondered what a small blonde child was doing there. She wondered at the candy stores. How there could be so many different bright wrappers all in one place?

Soon the pair stopped at a small café for a drink. While the older woman ordered iced coffee in rapid Mandarin, the girl got what looked like milkshake on the menu. But it didn’t taste like milkshake! It was mildly coffee flavored soymilk, quite sweet, which was strange enough, even without all the small black sago balls which filled the glass. Now the girl knew why they made the straws so wide!

Later they went into a little store, were the little girl chose a present for her aunty to buy her. With so many things to choose from, it took ages before the little girl chose two small packets of yellow and blue beads. Then they selected gifts for her sisters and brothers, like tin pencil cases and Ten-colours-in-one crayons. After that they rode home again.

The little girl left Taiwan a few days later, but she always remembered the afternoon she spent with her aunty, and the teeming, humid streets of that city. She had had an opportunity few tourists ever get; to particapate in day to day life in another country, with a local as her guide.

Atomic ancients

"In 1972, a French analyst named Bougzigues working at the Pierrelatte nuclear fuel processing plant detected a small but significant change in an important ratio between Uranium 235 and Uranium 238. The proper ratio is well known and well established in that field so that the change indicated that something way out of the ordinary was going on...."

Recently I have been looking up ooparts(out of place artefacts), and this is one of the more interesting tidbits that I have dredged up; Ancient nuclear reactors!

I didn't want to cut and paste the whole article, but here is the link below.

http://www.s8int.com/atomic2.html

Thought for Food

Michael Brown, a retired citizen who had done a lot of work for his community, had a warm heart and a beaming smile. Every fortnight he would have a cheesecake gathering, in which he and his whole family, sons, daughters, sons-in-law, daughters-in-law, grandchildren, brothers, sisters, nephews, nieces, grand nephews and grand nieces, would all gather to consume the several large cheesecakes he had made. As regular as clockwork, at 6:30 pm every Wednesday night his whole family would tumble into his house and sit around his table, with the several large cheesecakes on it. At 8 o'clock, after an hour and a half of merriment and cheesecake eating they would go out again, smiling and thanking him sincerely.
When asked about it, Michael would say in his soft Irish voice "It's all in the cheesecake, all in the cheesecake."
Then one Wednesday night his family came in as usual, only to find the man sitting on a chair by the empty table with unshed tears in his eyes.
" It's the price of cheese" He said, in an old, frail voice, "what used to cost five dollars now costs ten!"
His family tried to console him, but to no avail. The price of cheese was soaring higher that ever before. The cheesecake gatherings stopped and Michael brown died of a heart attack the next week.

Many thanks to my brother who contributed this post. May you ever have cheesecake available for you consumption...