South Pole Home and Gardens

Our Chief Steward (aka "Boss Asian") is an incredibly creative and competitive person.  So when she saw that our wintering colleagues at McMurdo Station, the Big Bully on the Antarctic Block, had started their own magazine she made sure that we weren’t left out in the cold.  (Best polar pun ever).  She took their idea for “McMurdo Home and Garden” and made our own version.  Being a good and patient soul, with a certain tolerance for eccentric health care professionals, she was kind enough to ask me to submit something for the inaugural issue. 

(To be fair, she asked everybody.  I think the only ones who responded were myself, The Vampire Engineer Who Never Sees Daylight, and her boyfriend who was likely motivated to help by both love and fear.  At least that how it works in my house.)

My colleague is not just an editor, but a philosopher.  One needs no more proof of this than reviewing the final paragraph of her hard-hitting expose of the spores infesting our hydroponic greenhouse:

“I, on the other hand, took away from the afternoon that life is just like these bok choy.  I noticed that the spores were worse on the older vegetables, similar to how when you age you’re more susceptible to developing cancer and thus dying.  We are all bok choy.”

My efforts are considerably weaker.  This first piece started as a conversation over breakfast as our baker was noting how many more days I could have fresh hard-fried eggs as opposed to liquid egg materials. 

 

The mission of South Pole Home and Garden is to help us believe that our industrial cellblocks feel like a warm hug from home.  And what feels more like home than food you know and love?  It’s not like the galley staff isn’t excellent…they are, in every way except the sous chef’s incessant demands for ketamine…but there’s still nothing like a home-cooked meal in the style of your Mom to make your well up with tears of fond remembrance.  (Unless it’s my Mom, who for years served us not Colonel Sanders’ Kentucky Fried Chicken but Sargent Harriet’s Indiana Baked Chicken, which is probably why I moved 500 miles away for college so I wouldn’t be expected home for dinner anymore.)

What I’ve been missing lately is the Columbia Restaurant’s 1905 salad.  The Columbia is a Cuban restaurant that stared in the Ybor City district of Tampa, and has a few branches throughout Florida.  The one in St. Augustine is not only closest to my Jacksonville home, but also has a special place in memory as site of several key moments in the decade-long affair with my own beloved Dental Empress.  The Columbia’s menu has many delights, but chief amongst them is the 1905 salad, featuring iceberg lettuce, julienned strips of Iberian ham and Swiss cheese, and a special “secret recipe” vinaigrette-based dressing.

This is a salad that could be made here with little difficulty.  Our greenhouse can provide the produce (as long as those Hydroponic Powers that Be are willing to ditch kale…which is a bourgeois elitist green second only to asparagus as Satan’s vegetable…for patriotic bland non-nutritious middle-class American iceberg heads).  And we undoubtedly have reams of Swiss cheese and ham slices somewhere in the logistic arch…it’s just a matter of how close they are to the fuel and if, like the ice cream, we should only eat from the middle of the package.

But simply digging things out of storage this seems to miss an opportunity for using locally-sourced goods.  I’ve been thinking deeply about this, and have concluded that we should get some pigs to make our own ham, and while we’re at it we should have a few chickens so we can have fresh eggs throughout the cold and dark.

(I draw the line at having a cow on site, even though I still suffer withdrawal symptoms from not being able to have a Hostess Ho-Ho and a glass of fresh milk before bedtime.  I feel like I have to do my part to combat climate change, and there are more greenhouse gases produced by methane from cattle than any other source.  Humans make methane too, which is yet another reason to avoid beans in closed spaces.)

It should be easy enough to have a couple of piglets and coop full of chicks flown in by early February.  There’s the problem of that pesky treaty that prevents animals from being on continent, but nobody pays attention to international law, and the South Pole is kind of like the Las Vegas of geography.  What happens here, stays here.  (At least until the pics get out on Facebook.)

Of course, space is at a premium in the elevated station, and it’s impractical to put our livestock outdoors.  I’m thinking we might revamp the Quiet Reading Room.  Books are so last millennium, after all, and aside from the Antarctic Collection which we can move to the Large Conference Room with the other historical memorabilia, there’s nothing else there that you can’t get online.  Plus when we clear it out we can have a bonfire with the books, make s’mores, and pretend we’re still home in America where many of our state legislators would cheer our efforts at weeding out subversive texts such as Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Huckleberry Finn. 

On the other hand, if we still want to preserve the illusion of learning in the Quiet Reading Room, we could take the ramshackle Climbing Gym and convert it into our farm.  The front room could belong to the pigs, and the rear becomes the domain of the fowl.  Besides removing noises and odor from the elevated station, the outlying site provides opportunities for increased physical activity as our colleagues trek back and forth to provide care and pick up eggs on a daily basis.  And it may promote creativity as people use the Arts and Crafts Room to make things like pig and chicken sweaters and booties so they can be taken for 30-second free-range walks in the frigid Great Outdoors.

The pigs and the chickens would have a positive effect on morale as well.  Not only will we have access to fresh eggs and hand-raised pork, we get emotional support from the sensitive nature of these creatures.  Instead of losing your temper at an adversary, you could just sprinkle some seed over a picture of your foe and let the birds peck at it.  If we’re lucky, maybe we could get some of the chickens to do math like in the sideshow, and they could help the scientists do whatever it is they do.  Perhaps one of the pigs will be brilliant like Arnold Ziffle and become a shining star in our social milieu.  And with several roosters in our midst, maybe we could highlight out two day weekends with some cockfights.  Between bantams, I mean.  There’s a policy, people. 

(To answer the unasked question:  Yes, it can get lonely at the Pole, and yes, relocating the farm to the Climbing Gym does promote a certain level of privacy.  You should be ashamed of yourself for thinking about that, and wear a bell that rings before you enter a room to proclaim you “Unclean!  Unclean!”.)

The astute reader will have noticed that I have not put any thought whatsoever into cleaning up the effluents of neither the chickens nor the pigs; nor have I calculated the impact on the current Rodwell waste reserve.  This is an issue for Facilities.  I can’t be expected to think of everything.  Dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not a swineherd. 

The last part yet to be worked out is the emotional impact of having to slaughter our pigs in order to obtain their tasty goodness.  While I consider Kansas my home, I did not grow up on a farm but instead within the lily-white suburbs of Kansas City.  So I don’t have the ease which others might in eating someone I know.  I vividly recall a BBQ where the main course was a heifer named “Spanky.”  So perhaps when that time comes we either have to send them back out by plane, reassuring the pigs that they’re going to a better place; or just eat the prepackaged ham and enjoy the simple presence of porcine companionship until the end of their days. 

(The one exception to the rule of not eating someone you know would be if we had to eat Naweed or Matt, both of whom have graciously volunteered to be the first ones eaten should we run out of food.  To turn down their livers…with a side of fava beans…would be to disrespect their sacrifice.  Am I right, Clarice?)

Bon apetite!

 

I submitted this blurb to my erstwhile editor, who noted “This is Great!” because when you have only three contributors you take what you can get.  She then mentioned that it needed to be 300 words or less, and that she would feel better with chickens around because she didn’t know if she could subdue an errant swine.  This is the result.)

 

South Pole Home and Garden strives to help us believe that our industrial cellblocks feel like a warm hug from home.  And what feels more like home than food you know and love?  For me, that would be the Velveeta-doused scrambled eggs from Waffle House.  Sadly, the supply of fresh eggs at the Pole is finite, and I’ve learned that until the freshies descend upon us like manna from heaven we’ll have to make do with some sort of powdered egg substitute.  So why not join the suburbanites who dismantle the children’s swingset as too dangerous for modern life and instead erect a chicken coop?

It should be easy enough to have a prefabricated coop and a crate of chicks flown in by early February.  There’s the problem of that pesky treaty that prevents animals from being on continent, but the South Pole is kind of like the Las Vegas of geography.  What happens here, stays here. 

Of course, space is at a premium in the elevated station, and it’s impractical to put our parliament of fowls outdoors.  I’m thinking we might revamp the Quiet Reading Room.  Books are so last millennium, after all.  On the other hand, if we still want to preserve the illusion of learning, we could use the Climbing Gym instead, providing opportunities for increased physical activity as we trek daily to pick up the eggs.

There are other benefits as well.  Maybe we could get some of the chickens to do math like in the sideshow.  With roosters in our midst, two-day weekends could end with a cockfight.  (Between bantams, I mean.  There’s a policy.)  Finally, we could take comfort in knowing that, as my Editor states, in the event of an Animal Farm rebellion we could probably take down the chickens. 

We welcome your thoughts.

 

South Pole Home and Garden is not the first attempt in chronicling life at the bottom of the world.  Explorers have always published memoirs of their journeys to relate their experience to the home front and to raise public support for further work.  Some are well-written, spellbinding tales of heroism and derring-do; more often, they’re dry recitations of geography, copied journal entries, and weather data with the occasional plunge into an icy crevasse, encounter with a jolly penguin, or a dusky frostbitten toe thrown in as Easter eggs.  

(As I’m writing the first sentence of the prior paragraph, I realize that a woke antipodean would point out that I’m inherently Arctist, that the South Pole could equally be the top of the planet and the North Pole the bottom, and that there’s probably some pronouns there I’m missing as well.  Guilty as charged.)

The first periodical that attempted to chart the course of daily life in the southern extremes was the South Pole Times, a winter-over amusement for the men of the first Scott Discovery Expedition of 1901-04 that was renewed during the later 1910-13 Terra Nova voyage.  It was originally a typed manuscript with attached drawings and photographs bound together in a single copy to be passed from man to man and read aloud while on the ice.  Upon return to England, the magazine was reproduced for public consumption.  While written in a casual style…the contents include diary entries, tales of adventure and amusement (“April 6:  An Exciting Seal Chase”), cartoons, poems, and even puzzles, it includes scientific works as well.  Original copies are held by research libraries, and the entire series (twelve issues in four volumes) are periodically reissued. 

The first editor was Ernest Shackleton of Endurance fame; the third and final Chief Scribe was Apsley Cherry-Garrard, author of “The Worst Journey in the World.”  It’s hard to find much of the actual publication online, but I did run across a piece of doggerel that gives one a flavor for the effort.  It’s a lyric about Herbert Ponting (“Ponko”), the Terra Nova Expedition photographer, and his endless desire to have his fellows pose (“pont”) for pictures.  Here’s the first verse and the refrain:

I’ll sing a little song, about one among our throng,

Whose skill in making pictures is not wanting.

He takes pictures while you wait, “prices strictly moderate,”

I refer, of course, to our Professor Ponting.

 

Then pont, Ponko, pont, and long may Ponko pont,

With his finger on the trigger of his gadget.

For whenever he’s around, we’re sure to hear the sound,

Of his high-speed cinematographic ratchet.

Today the main periodical that covers events on the continent...at least within the USAP…is The Antarctic Sun, an in-house, irregular, online publication produced by whichever company happens to be the lead Antarctic Support Contractor at the time.  It’s not a newspaper as we think about it (certainly no editorials or investigative works); more of a newsletter, and clearly a product of its’ time.  As the Sun is a remote production, it lacks the intimacy with the people and environment that characterizes better journalism.  It’s also quite abrupt in style, especially compared with the writing of a century ago.  During the Edwardian era, British adventurers were “gentlemen” with a gentleman’s education in the liberal arts as well as sciences; and in the absence of calling, texting, radio, and Tweeting, writing was the only way to set the scene for descriptions of characters and events.  As a result, the skill of writing, and writing well, was practiced and prized.   In our era, where no information, picture, or video is more than a cellphone away and our attention spans have withered and died, brevity is prioritized over feeling and thought.  Personally, I would consider myself gifted if my way with words echoed even a shadow of that the early polar explorers.  Alas, I’m also a product of my times, which is why disco lives forever.

This next piece started as a beverage column, detailing our various drink options with dinner and what suitable pairings might be.  Again, I wrote long, knowing it would get cut, but unable to stop the verbal spillage once it began. FYI, the "Rodwell" is the name of our water supply.

 

A fine beverage can make or break an otherwise excellent repast.  While our wine cellar at the Pole is limited to whatever the Lord of Expired Consumable Idols grants us (and only available on Fridays from 6-7 PM), we have free access to many other fine beverages that can make an awesome pairing with any meal.

Say you’re having something with beef, such as steak or Sloppy Joes.  May I recommend a tumbler of New Zealand’s Hensell’s Vitafresh Fruit Cup ’23?  This year’s vintage features “25% less sugar” and the “same great taste.”  The color is that of Magen David, the taste that of Welch’s Grape, and the sugary intensity is reminiscent of a handful of Peeps.  After a healthy quaff of this fine beverage you can feel the beef residue on your teeth dissolve away, along with any remaining enamel on your teeth, rendering your palate clean for the next course and insuring your dentist at home can afford that new Mercedes.

(Can anyone between ages 30 and 60 eat a Sloppy Joe without thinking of Chris Farley?  Nope, I thought not.)

If you prefer a lighter pairing to go with chicken or fish, I’d suggest a beverage that will refresh but not compete with the flavors lingering on tongue.  My advice would be Rodwell ’23.  The Rodwell brand is unique in that harvest and consumption of the product often happens the same day.  No aging process here!  Like a diamond, clarity is the best way to describe it’s color and odorless it’s aroma; one would be well served to stay away from any glass with odor or color unless one is a participant in some sort of gastrointestinal experiment.  In taste, the finest Rodwell is fresh, clean, cold, and devoid of coliforms, with hints of sodium hydroxide and chlorine in a combination that makes for a delightfully aspetic refreshment.

(The Rodwell vintage has also been referred to as Jesus ’33…not 1933, but 33 CE.  This misnomer arises because the water extracted from the ice is reported to be nearly two millennia old.  While the idea that the Christian Savior is connected to our refreshment has a definite poetic appeal, we have no evidence that Jesus ever trod upon the South Pole.  And of he did, it’s hard to believe he wouldn’t have pulled off that water into wine trick in a much bigger way.)

Digestifs is where the South Pole menu truly shines.  For a light end to a heavy meal, we recommend Tropical Fruit Punch Raro ‘23 with Vitamin C Beverage Flavour.  The extra “u” in the English style is how you know it’s good, or at least pretentious, just like anything you buy is better if you got it at the Ye Olde Shoppe or your health care is at it’s best if your paediatrician, orthopaedist, or anaesthesiolgist is evaluating your oesophagus.  Produced by Cerebos-Gregg of Auckland and named for the tropical paradise of Rarotonga, the vintage offers an enticing blend of sucrose, glucose, acidifying regulators, clouding agents, flavoring, antioxidants, and colouring (again, with the extra “u” so you know it’s elite).  Fifty mg of vitamin C in each 200 cc means you know it’s good.  For those who live in fear of scurvy but aren’t convinced that fruit punch has the necessary heft to prevent bleeding and death, we suggest Lime Raro ’23.  The drink lights up the night with its’ neon green hues, but harkens back to the Age of Sail, where the shipborne Limeys insured that Britannia ruled the waves.  (Britons never never never will be slaves.  Nor high-volume consumers of dental services.) 

Beverages from abroad to add a cultural element to their repast.  Manawa, the County Seat of Waipaca County, Wisconsin, and the home town of red-baiting Senator Joseph McCarthy, offers its’ Wisconsin Fruit Punch Drink Mix.  Midwestern nice is a feature of this treat, as it happily offers 100% of your daily dose of Vitamin C, in the loving yet insistent way your grandmother might.  If one prefers a stouter and more nutritional quaff, US Foods Pink Lemonade Drink Mix not only has vitamin C, but also contains titanium dioxide to make certain you get your heavy metals and gum arabic to maintain a uniquely chewy sensation.

If you’re a vegetarian, I’m sure that some of these products make a fine pairing with tofu or seitan or whatever stuff it is you’re pretending might be meat.  Personally, I don’t know, nor will I try.  The Dental Empress to whom I have devoted my off-ice life contends that vegetarianism is a false choice, because the Good Lord gave us canine teeth for a reason.  She also correctly notes that if vegetarianism (and especially veganism) is such a good thing, than why is it before a hurricane comes ashore, every grocery store in Florida is cleaned out except for the vegan aisle?  I will admit to a sneaking admiration for those who can truly stick to a vegetarian lifestyle, but the Voice of the Canines drown out the impulse to join the Leafy Green Crowd.  “Use us!” they cry.  “We’re here to help!  Give us Purpose!”  So I do, which is why I have no idea what you should drink with your fibrous meals.  One vegan I know sometimes chases down his sustenance with gin from a graduated cylinder.  That seems like an excellent solution, as the alcohol likely kills the taste of whatever it is you’re eating, which seems like the best pairing of all.

 

Just before the final cut, I was informed of a lie being propagated by our Galley Staff.  A rewrite was needed, because even with only 300 words, the truth must be told. The pictures mentioned are window covers of our galley staff holding a self-portrait, a handful of produce, and various kitchen implements.  Nobody’s smiling in these pictures.  I notice that we eat a lot more deliberately, and perhaps with a bit of fear, as these sentinels look down upon us.

 

I’ve always appreciated our galley staff, even if their pictures in the window covers raise the prospect of an Aztec human sacrifice.  Our sous chef reviews his life in photos prior to the offering; our baker clubs him into unconsciousness with a rolling pin as he is laid out on the altar.  The Chief Steward rips open the chest with a Ginsu Knife while the chef pulls out the still-beating heart with his hand and raises it skyward as an offering to the heavens.  Meanwhile, the other steward hacks off the still quivering limbs with a cleaver and feeds them to the hungry rabble.  The bloodlust of the deity has been appeased, and a successful harvest from the Greenhouse is insured.  But my journalistic integrity (found under the sink in the A4 bathroom) has forced me to reveal that the Galley is guilty of perpetuating a lie.  An in-depth investigative report and a quick look in the Koala Cabinet reveals that what we have long believed to be Lime Raro is an imposter.  Rather than the actual Cerebros-Gregg Raro product (which does not actually come in lime flavor), we are dosed with a drink called Freedom from Ross Foods in Christchurch.  It’s got to be a conspiracy of some kind, and one not based on price alone, as that would be too obvious. 

When confronted with this evidence, the Chief Steward freely confessed to her fraudulent behavior.  She nodded gravely as she spoke, without a trace of hesitation nor guilt.  “I was the one who told you that last week.  You’ve sat across from me a dinner twice since then, had a glass of the green stuff, and shouted, “Look!  I’m drinking Freedom!”  And it wasn’t funny either time.”

The Murrow of the South Pole now drinks grape juice instead.

 

For the next edition, I wanted to write about our movie premiere party.  One of the highlights of the polar night is the Winter International Film Festival (WIFF).  The WIFF is an informal contest between all the over-winter stations on the continent.  There are two categories of entry: an open event where any kind of artistic expression is welcomed, and a thematic contest where specific elements need to be included within your presentation and each station has 48 hours to submit their entry after the items  are announced. But as the WIFF doesn’t happen until the midpoint of the austral night, and it’s still early in the darkness, I’ve been told I can’t give out any details that might benefit the competition.  So all I can say is that it was a great party, the powdery stuff on the mirror really wasn’t cocaine but confectioner’s sugar (plus I wouldn’t snort anything through less than a rolled-up Benjamin), and that our entry, while a masterwork, has significantly and irrevocably damaged any 1980’s swimsuit and big hair post-adolescent fantasies I ever had. 

With the obvious topic off the table, I struggled for a week finding a new topic for the next edition of our erstwhile magazine.  Fortunately, a cleaning project provided all the inspiration I needed.

 

While people, sights, and sounds are often what we think of as we explore ways to make our Austral Gulag feel like home, we often ignore the importance of scent.  The sense of smell (or olfaction if you want to seem erudite) is the most primitive of our ways of interpreting the world; even single-celled animals have chemoreceptors to inform them of the presence of food or danger.  Primal feelings are associated with scents…the heartwarming smell of a homemade cookies; the love we feel when soaking in the aroma of a dozen roses from a special someone; the oneness with nature permeating us after a summer rain.

So it’s natural to think that our aromatic environment would play a role in feeling comfortable living at the South Pole.  Unfortunately, our “scentsory” (see what I did there?) inventory at the bottom of the world is pretty limited, and many of the smells we do encounter aren’t particularly pleasant.  We learn to recognize the smell of fuel, and can even detect it within ice cream.  We become habituated to body odors with the paucity of shower time, and in conjunction with young adult males spending inordinate amounts of time playing video games, we find ourselves acclimatizing to a somatic aroma my son would call “a mixture of desperation and Cheetos.” On the plus side, the greenhouse consistently smells nice with flowers and foliage, and there’s always the fresh scent of the outdoors, which I’m not sure is really a smell but rather a dispersion of anything else to smell as the cold and the wind simply batter any volatile organic compounds into submission.

It’s not like some of us don’t try to introduce olfaction into our polar sensory palate.  I shipped down some plug-in Febreeze scent generators for my room.  Once a month I change the cartridge so I can be continually bathed in the milieu of fresh laundry.  (At least I think that’s what it I, because I threw away the box that tells me for sure.)  But I suspect what it’s actually doing is hiding whatever smell emanates from stale  cookie crumbs I’ve dropped on the floor and are now embedded in the carpet for eons to come.

Aside from fuels and backed-up lift stations and the like, the South Pole Station seems surprisingly odor-free.  I’ll freely admit it may be just me, whose sense of smell has no doubt been permanently altered for the worse by a career in emergency medicine, where malodorous miasmas are simply background, and something has to be particularly noxious to get my attention.  (Pro Tip #1:  To dispel the aroma of rectal bleeding, bring a used coffee filter still containing the wet grounds into the room.)

(FYI, a lift station is a pump that “lifts” sewage from a lower level of collection to a higher plane.  By higher plane, I do not mean in a spiritual fashion, especially given the substance involved.  But isn’t “lift station” a great euphemism? Personally, I like the alliterative “poop pump” better, but this decision is above my pay grade.)

But there’s not a whole lot of other scents inhabiting our shared space, and I suspect a bloodhound would find the Station to be a rather sterile place.  My own theory is that the aroma molecules, floating in the air waiting desperately to come across a willing nose, just give up finding a friendly chemoreceptor and find their way to the floor, where they meet their fate in a mop bucket every Monday.  (Outdoor odors probably don’t even try to get noticed because it’s just too cold, and simply prostrate themselves upon the ice hoping to be carried on the floes to the beak of a welcoming penguin in a millennia or two.

So when I learned that the chairs in the galley were going to be deep cleaned for the first time in years, and that while drying they might smell like wet dog, I was excited.  Here was an opportunity to experience a bit of home in this harsh environment.

Some of you know that we have three dogs at home.  Goldie Goldstein (“My Furry Fellow Jew”) is a standard size golden doodle, more doodle than golden.  She’s the eldest pupper…smart, dutiful, and Daddy’s Good Girl.  Polly (full name Lucky Polly Harriet Tubman Fendi Coco Gucci Gaudi, for reasons I still don’t understand) is a smaller dog, more golden than doodle.  Her defining trait is laying on the bed and, unlike Taylor Swift, she and the pillows are never, ever, ever, like ever breaking up unless she hears the sound of kibble in the bowl.  And then there’s Zach, a small black and white furry thing who is quite companionate but has the blank stare of someone who left a lot of his brain in the 1960’s and only seems to come to life when barking at squirrels.

Because we live in Florida, wet dog smell is a daily occurrence.  Whether it’s because the trio is playing outside during the daily 3 PM summer deluge in the summer, or examining traces left by the latest canine visitors in the front yard when the lawn sprinklers go off, the scent of wet dog gives me a strange sort of comfort.  It’s not just an aroma I associate with the dogs, but also of love and affection, because even when soaked Goldie always knows to stop in the foyer for a hug and a kiss before moving on to saturate the couch.  (Pro Tip #2:  When you buy a new sofa, always get the “Paws and Claws” protection plan).

The chairs had been lined up in the second-level hallway, and I eagerly anticipated the opportunity to smell them and feel enveloped by my domestic canine companions.  I recognized that this would appear odd to anyone else:  a fully grown man bending down to sniff the padded seats.  If done in a movie theater or other public venue, the Vice Squad would surely be in pursuit.  But this is the Pole, where stuff happens, and I was told the chairs would smell like wet dog, and I miss wet dog, so why not?  Plus with my continuing insomnia I would be doing this at night where there would be fewer prying eyes.  So at 2 AM the night after the first wash I selected five or six chairs at random, inhaled deeply, and experienced…detergent.

I was later informed by those who did the cleaning that perhaps my expectation were too high.  It seems like the wet dog smell was always going to be related to the cleaning solution, which to me does not smell at all like a wet dog but of over-scented Tide, and certainly has none of the love that goes with embracing the aroma of Man’s Best Soggy Companion.  Rather, what they got out of the chairs was most vividly described as “three years’ worth of farts.”  If there was a dog involved, it was apparently a black one, for that was the color of the water pouring out from the cleaning machine.

If only Goldie was here, even soaked to the skin and radiating the essence of wet dog, I would feel better.  Old Jews stick together.

Oh, right, it was supposed to be 300 words or less.  Back to the grind.  Being the most literate guy on the continent is tough work.