The Missing Tooth #2: Desperate housewives, poached eggs, and teaching children.
Good morning,
Here’s the second Missing Tooth.
This week’s collection has an unintentional domestic vibe featuring poached eggs, soap operas, lemon meringue pie, teaching children, and a poet whose work is a response to the crushing weight of modernity’s unrelenting cynicism.
You know, domestic stuff.
All best,
N.
PS Good-natured comments and corrections—particularly of my spelling and grammar—are always welcome.
A couple of bad eggs
My friend Sarah was railing against eggs recently. Not all eggs, the target of her vitriol was poached eggs cooked in vinegar.
She’s right too.
The acid in the vinegar helps the whites solidify quicker, but it also makes them grainy and sour. Vinegar-poached eggs are like a bad marriage: sure, you’re holding it together, but at what cost?
At least they’re not poached in plastic wrap. To prevent wastage, the cook drops the egg into a little plastic wrap baggy then ties a knot in the top like a dog owner dealing with their pet’s shit in the park.
The egg taking the shape of the knotted plastic, ending up looking like a single, pale testicle.
Apparently, the ideal way to poach eggs is to crack a very fresh, very cold egg into a ladle, then carefully tip it into the centre of a saucepan filled with no less than four inches of simmering water.
I say "'apparently” because I’ve never successfully poached an egg using this or any technique.
I’ve tried the frying pan method, the vortex variation, and the strainer strategy. I’ve even attempted Julia Child’s trick of pricking a hole in the shell and pre-boiling the egg for ten seconds before poaching.
No matter what I try, my poached eggs end up looking like misshapen jellyfish: all tendrils and semi-transparent globules.
There is a bottle of vinegar in the cupboard though…
The Feynman Technique
The Feynman Technique is a brilliant method for learning new ideas inspired by a 1966 lecture by physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman said:
I finally figured out a way to test whether you have taught an idea or you have only taught a definition…You say, 'Without using the new word which you have just learned, try to rephrase what you have just learned in your own language.
Striped of jargon and terminology, it quickly becomes clear what you actually understand and what you’ve just memorised.
Here’s how to put the technique into practice:
1) Write down everything you know about a topic.
2) Teach what you’ve learned to a child.
3) Identify the gaps in your knowledge.
4) Go back to your source material.
If you don’t have access to a child, you can try explaining the concept using the XKCD Simple Writer, a writing app that limits you to just the 1000 most common words in the English language.
I thought I understood gravity until I tired to explain it without words like mass, energy and relativity. (It also turns out I don’t really understand the words mass, energy and relativity either.)
The Feynman Technique is also an excellent way of detecting bullshit. If someone is incapable of explaining an idea without resorting to big words and unwieldy language, there is a very good chance they might be talking bullshit.
Desperate Housewives
I watched five minutes of Desperate Housewives at the gym the other day. I wasn’t sure who anyone was and the sound was muted but I was still captivated.
The glamorous Bree was attempting to extricate a recipe for Lemon Meringue Pie from her new neighbour: the unflappable Katherine. Katherine wasn’t prepared to hand the recipe over.
A smile never left either woman’s face as they thrusted and parried their way through the short confrontation.
While the subject was pie, the subtext was clear: Bree was the queen of the neighbourhood, holding power by the strength of her domestic skills. Katherine was the usurper: a better cook and more cunning operator.
It was a masterclass in character, motivation, intention
, and all the other stuff I never think about when I’m writing fiction.
As Bree left Katherine’s house empty-handed, the pair had this exchange:
Katherine: I'm sure if you put your mind to it, you can come up with an even better lemon meringue pie than mine. The trick is finding that perfect blend of sweet and sour.
Bree: Well, you've certainly mastered that, dear.
*pastry chef kiss*
Weldon Kees
On July 18, 1955, poet Weldon Kees called his friend, film critic Pauline Kael, and sighed:
“What keeps you going?”
Kael didn’t have an answer. The next day, Kees’s empty car was found on the Golden Gate Bridge.
He was never seen again.
Born in 1905, Kees was a poet, photographer, screenwriter, film critic, and jazz pianist. His work was “a rickety fusion of post-twenties burlesque and pre-sixties art happening.”
Kees’s poems are filled with weary introspection punctuated by celebrities, brand names and pop culture. He comes across as both tired of the modern world while being equally cornered by it.
CRIME CLUB
No butler, no second maid, no blood upon the stair.
No eccentric aunt, no gardener, no family friend
Smiling among the bric-a-brac and murder.
Only a suburban house with the front door open
And a dog barking at a squirrel, and the cars
Passing. The corpse quite dead. The wife in Florida.
Consider the clues: the potato masher in a vase,
The torn photograph of a Wesleyan basketball team,
Scattered with check-stubs in the hall; The unsent fan letter to Shirley Temple,
The Hoover button on the lapel of the deceased,
The note: "To be killed this way is quite all right with me."
Small wonder that the case remains unsolved,
Or that the sleuth, LeRoux, is now incurably insane,
And sits alone in a white room in a white gown,
Screaming that all the world is mad, that clues
Lead nowhere, or to walls so high their tops cannot be seen;
Screaming all day of war, screaming that nothing can be solved.
Today, Weldon Kees has a small but evangelical following and his work has inspired a new generation of artists searching for authenticity in the rising tide of cynicism.
What I’m Reading
Vera by Elizabeth von Arnim
Deal Souls by Gogol
James and the Giant Peach by Roald Dahl (audio)