translated,

I was walking to my laboratory and it began to rain. I felt a big drop fall on my back and I didn’t pay attention because I was running to the bathroom. in the bathroom I felt something strange between my legs and it dropped into the commode. it was a small green frog but it swam away into the plumbing. I noticed something on myself, a tiny red egg which I recognized as a frogs egg. It was on me.

narrator’s voice
Yvalisse is a professor of vertebrate biology. She placed the egg in a controlled environment. She had a hunch that thus was no ordinary tree frog. the egg was kept in a moist environment at 98.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Yvalisse translated
The feeling of a raindrop on my back that day did not feel like the rain we were getting at that moment. I suspected that it was the frog that landed on my back. I found the frog as I was wiping myself. I incubated the egg in the conditions found in a vaginal canal and it hatched a very strange looking tadpole that didn’t survive long.

pan to picture of tadpole with no visible eyes, row of very sharp teeth.

narrator
Dr. Sondag thought she was onto something -a parasitic vertebrate. She postulated that the frog is a short lived adult form whose purpose is to mate, and then jump onto the backs of females and deposit the egg in the vagina. on hatching, the tadpole swims up the canal and bites down and forms vascular attachments to the host, deriving it’s nutrients. When the time came it would complete it’s development and exit to lay eggs on other hosts.

Dr. Sondag, translated
The key was finding the host. There are native tapirs in the forests around the university and we captured several. for a long time, we came up with nothing but last year we found a young female.

narrator
A fiberoptic camera was inserted and revealed a clutch of tadpoles attached to the cervix. Serial images show the deveopment of these into a small green frog with small orange spots. It is the first instance of parasitism involving vertebrates as host and parasite.

Dr. Sondag, translated
we have discovered the frog secretes a topical anesthetic – that’s why it felt like a rain drop. We’re developing the chemical it secretes as a pharmaceutical.

Okay. So I’m off key -I was suppose to sing Proud Mary which is my song, but the crowd at Universal Studios responded.

the docpark OR shoe

As the winter drags on, I find myself now dabbling in fashion design. I have decided to release a line of lifestyle related sneakers. Actually, you too can launch your own blingy shoe line at www.zazzle.com.

And why not. Why is it that celebrity athletes get to get on cereal boxes. Why do they get the shoes? Why aren’t we supporting the mail carrier, the school teacher, the soccer mom, and the hospital nurse in the same way? Where are our priorities?

This guy will no longer wear other people’s labels. You are welcome to buy mine.

In daily life, we have many such circles of certitude where results are likely to occur. It may be only as far as the arm’s reach, or the driveway. Careful cultivation of friends and communication skills brings this circle out to across town, state, nation, and globe.

Cast your circle of certitude wide. Live with no doubt.

Today, I released Ramen 1.1. The ramen noodles area easy to make with the Atlas pasta press. In 1976, my folks purchased this from Macy’s for $45, which was quite a sum back then. Using an inflation calculator (link), this comes out to 167.72 today. The quality of this machine is astounding -I could stand on it and it wouldn’t break. The graphics are very funny -straight out of disco era Italy. Food has always been central in our home, and I learned how to crank out fettucini which we used in kal guksu at age 8. I was very proud of the ability to make especially long noodles. I decided to try to make a large batch to freeze some noodles for later.

Making the dough is again so basic and simple that it is meditative. Flour, egg, baking soda (homage to the alkaline salts of Central Asia’s deserts), and water, mixed to a tough ball, this time the size of one of those Vietnamese grapefruits. I remember thinking I should add another egg to get the yellowish hue, but am too lazy. The noodles come easily after an hour of kneading, an hour of rest, and an hour of pressing.

The soup was another issue. I have come across what seems to be a reasonable donkotsu recipe. The only problem was I bought only 2 ham hocks -no long bones were available at the local butchers. I boiled these with some ginger, garlic, leek, and onions, for 8 hours yesterday and got a pot of nearly pure protein. The flavor was okay, but not quite the full donkotsu taste. I experimented with flavoring with salt, soy, miso, miso+bonito, and found the last to give the best flavor.

Char Siu

The pork from the hocks was pulled and set aside, flavored with salt and pepper -it’s delicious and I’ll be eating this separately with rice. I added some to the final ramen dish. One of the recipes calls for purchasing char siu from a Chinese restaurant. Char siu is commonly seen as the reddish pork barbecue hanging from hooks in Chinese restaurants in NYC, but you just can’t get it around here.

Today, I released Ramen 1.1. The ramen noodles area easy to make with the Atlas pasta press. In 1976, my folks purchased this from Macy’s for $45, which was quite a sum back then. Using an inflation calculator (link), this comes out to 167.72 today. The quality of this machine is astounding -I could stand on it and it wouldn’t break. The graphics are very funny -straight out of disco era Italy. Food has always been central in our home, and I learned how to crank out fettucini which we used in kal guksu at age 8. I was very proud of the ability to make especially long noodles. I decided to try to make a large batch to freeze some noodles for later.  Making the dough is again so basic and simple that it is meditative. Flour, egg, baking soda (homage to the alkaline salts of Central Asia’s deserts), and water, mixed to a tough ball, this time the size of one of those Vietnamese grapefruits. I remember thinking I should add another egg to get the yellowish hue, but am too lazy. The noodles come easily after an hour of kneading, an hour of rest, and an hour of pressing.  The soup was another issue. I have come across what seems to be a reasonable donkotsu recipe. The only problem was I bought only 2 ham hocks -no long bones were available at the local butchers. I boiled these with some ginger, garlic, leek, and onions, for 8 hours yesterday and got a pot of nearly pure protein. The flavor was okay, but not quite the full donkotsu taste. I experimented with flavoring with salt, soy, miso, miso+bonito, and found the last to give the best flavor. The pork from the hocks was pulled and set aside, flavored with salt and pepper -it’s delicious and I’ll be eating this separately with rice. I added some to the final ramen dish. One of the recipes calls for purchasing char siu from a Chinese restaurant. Char siu is commonly seen as the reddish pork barbecue hanging from hooks in Chinese restaurants in NYC, but you just can’t get it around here.  I called my friend who recommended using some off the shelf sauce and making it at home. I purchased a pork rib roast (with tenderloin on) for the purpose of cutting off the tenderloin for use with the ramen and eating the ribs for dinner. The char siu sauce (Hawaiian brand) was easily found at our local Asian grocery, and cooking was very easy in our convection oven. Our secondary convection oven is essentially an upright rotisserie, and roasts come out perfectly. The tenderloin provided a nice cut, but was not the same as the flavored Japanese-style roast pork.  The soup, now flavored as a miso soup, provided a mellow base for the ramen noodles which came out nice and springy, but definitely bland without the extra egg -it’s a lesson I’ll take to the next batch. The soup was garnished with char siu tenderloin slices, blanched spinach and flavored eggs. The marinaded eggs are soft boiled eggs left to sit in a marinade of Memmi sauce (a light sweet soy sauce that is used for creating a soup base), dash of sake, and chili peppers (my touch). These eggs were kept in a plastic bag overnight and cut in half with a string -creates a more elegant cut than a knife.  It was okay but not great. The soup has to be saltier and stronger prior to adding the noodles which dilutes the soup with some water. I am going to back off the donkotsu for a while and just get regular Yakibuta style ramen soup right. As a second effort, it is clearly an incremental improvement, and I learned how to make char siu. The ramen is not just noodles in a salty soup, but rather a kind of perfect kingdom of noodles, soup, and fixings. You want to get balance -the texture of chewing noodles and the intense flavor of the soup, the surprising pleasures of the fixings.

This made the rounds a few weeks ago, including a nice article on The New Yorker. Watching it, I had to smile. As a Harvard Alum, I can tell you there is no amount of glee at 86 Brattle Street that can match this gleeful video. You either get it or you don’t. They want to select for an even creamier crème de la crème. This goes beyond being able to understand and appreciate pink polo shirts, munching on pistachios, grapes, and brie with a Gewurztraminer, or liking to sing show tunes in the shower while being completely heterosexual.

If you don’t get it, you will snigger at this video and apply to Princeton. If you really don’t get it, you’ll stop watching when the singing starts and you’ll apply to a Big Ten School. If you get it, but don’t get in, you’ll be perfectly happy at Amherst. And so on.

This inspires me to hark back to college, to the time when I hijacked the microphone at Naples Pizza in New Haven and proclaimed, “Yale Sucks!” And now, we have proof.

Homemade hand milled ramen noodles

After a few years of mental preparation, I have decided to go for it.My life goal for the next 10 years is among other things, to create a perfect bowl of ramen from scratch. Not the instant stuff that college students eat dry. No, not even the fast-food stuff that people slurp down in train stations in Tokyo. This is the real deal -stuff made from the heart and soul. I am Ramen Man -and this is my first try.

The noodles have been a riddle for a while because reports on the internet are that the package ramen noodles are fried before they are cooked. I created a basic egg noodle dough ball of flour, eggs, and water with the addition of an ingredient taken from the KBS documentary Noodle Road. Turns out, the Central Asian heartland from when ramen (lo-mein, laghman) came had very alkaline water. This and the arrival of wheat cultivation created the noodle over five millenia ago.

Though the water here in Iowa is already pretty hard, I added some baking soda to raise the pH. This causes the gluten proteins to bond into long, tenacious strands.

The noodles were pressed out using an old Atlas pasta maker from Italy. I had grown up making kal-guk-soo from the age of 10, so getting the noodles out on the finer setting was no big deal. The picture above shows the work -a softball sized dough ball makes enough for 4 people.

The noodles are boiled then quickly rinsed in cold water, and over this the broth is added.

Ahh -the broth. This is where the journey begins. My first effort is with a basic da-shi-ma (seaweed and dried anchovy broth) added 2:1 to pork/ginger broth. Some pork cutlet was added, as was thin cut green onions, but for this effort, I wanted just naked noodles and broth.

The noodles were in fact perfect. The baking soda -a reflection of the hard desert spring water of Central Asia, allowed the noodles to have a perfect springiness.

Naked ramen

The broth itself was without distinction and this is where all the hard work will go -it was clear and clean, but better suited for a mushroom soup or a fish soup than for ramen. And the ramen I am stalking is hakata ramen -the clear white broth the result of days of boiling pork (could it be the head?).

I did get a thumbs up from my critics.

You can make two, attach to string and hang if from your rear view mirror! My gift to you. A great way to spend time with your kids…and ME!

Neolithic hunter-gatherers, when they figured out how to shape stone into figurines, created an industry around figures of women with curves.

Breast augmentation is a large industry driven by not only popular tastes but probably something innate in our psyche. When I was an intern, the plastic surgery clinic was an eye opener, with perfectly healthy patients willing to undergo an operation at some risk to their health to sculpt themselves.

It was a time of transition away from silicone implants which were popularly (and erroneously) believed to cause autoimmune disease, to saline implants, and the quintessential moment for me was in filling what were plastic bags to the “correct” volume which was a subjective process. The whole OR got to voice their opinion with the surgeon having veto power.

With the recent red carpet productions, Christina Hendricks came up and it hit me that she looked different from when she was on Firefly, my favorite cancelled science fiction series. In it, she is incredible as an interplanetary highway robber and grifter. Five years later, she presents an entirely different profile.

At first, I thought she achieved her transformation with girdles and a few extra doughnuts a day, but the picture at the very top convinced me that some augmentation has occurred. When I mentioned this among my Facebook friends, TW, an old buddy from high school and a physician, categorically felt that these were real.

After intensive research, I would have to disagree. The tipoff are the bald men hiding in her dress. The placement of prosthetics causes a lifting of the skin and sometimes muscle which changes the profile from the “natural” which in profile looks like a nice sledding hill to the “augmented” which looks like a bald pate. This convexity is a giveaway, and with the lift and separate presentation bras, this convexity is enhanced. Gravity flattens this top area with time and no convexity is seen in latter day images of the all natural Sophia Loren who looks like she underwent some reduction.

That said, Hendricks is amazing in bringing her character to life, a Sad Woman among Mad Men.