| Jul. 16th, 2009 @ 04:54 pm Public Transportation |
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Current Mood:  curious
The guy next to me on the bus this morning was reading a boring programming text, and my only curiosity revolved around wondering why, if you are going to use a bright yellow highlighter, you would choose to highlight every single sentence of the text rather than just making a mental note that this is important text, pay attention! But I soon lost myself in Beckett and forgot about my seatmate.
This afternoon on the way home I sat beside a brown gentleman who was reading a book called The Complete Idiot's Guide to English Grammar and Usage. It appeared to me that he might be Middle Eastern or from the sub-continent, somewhere such as that, and he obviously desired to improve his English, which one wishes more native speakers would emulate. In any case, I did not wish to appear to be reading over his shoulder so I just darted my eyes toward the page occasionally and picked up the odd sentence here and there, sentences that were clearly designed to show off some feature of the English language that the authors thought a reader could use. And then my eye happened upon this sentence: "The milk of a camel does not curdle."
Well! In the first place, I thought this was quite funny because let's face it, "curdle" is just a funny word in and of itself. Next, I thought that the authors were being very politically correct since it was likely that the average reader of the book would be slightly more at home around camels in general than the average native English-speaker. Maybe. But then I thought "HOLY SHIT! Is this true?" First, I wondered if it was one of those "duck's quack does not echo" factoids but after giving it some thought and searching my brain for any scrap of evidence for camel cheese I concluded it must be true.
What are the implications of this stunning fact? And I'd appreciate it if smarty pantses named Ian or Matilda could keep it down for the rest of us and not act like show-offs at this point. First, what magical property is it that prevents camel's milk from curdling? Is it a lactose or lactase thing? If so, might this be of benefit to humanity, because maybe you could inject some of the camel milk juju into other milk and make it more potable for the milk-challenged? Then again, when I think about camels I don't think of a big swinging bag like a cow has. Perhaps the poor babies just get a few sips and then they have to learn to store it in the hump, I don't know. Finally, I really began to think abouit the implications of an entire culture, a desert, nomad culture, that has had to subsist on a cuisine entirely devoid of cheese. I can imagine that this might make people pretty damn cranky, which would explain a lot, I won't go into more detail lest I appear intolerant. But you know who you are.
So --- public transportation! Never a dull moment.
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