THAT WAS THE MILLENIUM THAT WAS (13 page)

Best Quest of the Millennium.

The Quest For Longitude. Yes, I know that a quest for a geographical unit of measurement doesn't have the same romance factor as a quest to slay a dragon. But finding an accurate gauge of longitude opened up the world, whereas slaying dragons never did anybody any good (least of all the dragons).

Now, you
do
remember longitude, don't you. Yeah, I know. 4th grade was a long time ago for me, too. Look, find a globe. Now, on the globe, you'll notice the planet is sliced up by a bunch of lines going two separate ways. The horizontal lines are called "latitude." They tell you how many degrees you are north or south of the Equator (if you don't know what the Equator is, you really should just kill yourself now). The vertical lines, by process of elimination, are longitude. They tell you how far east or west you are, using the longitude line that runs through Greenwich, England (for no really good reason) as the prime meridian. By using longitudinal and latitudinal coordinates, you can find any spot on the globe. 

The catch is getting an accurate reading of your coordinates. Latitude has never been too much of a problem; humans figured out early on that the sun's path reaches higher or lower in the sky depending on how far north or south on the planet  you are on any particular day. If you know what day it is, simply take a reading of the sun's position at high noon, do the math, and presto -- you know where you are, in a northerly or southerly sort of way. 

For a large chunk of human existence, this was perfectly serviceable. As humans and their ships navigated further and further from the shore, however, it became apparent that there was a need for longitudinal readings. The oceans are, by their very definition, without landmarks, and traditional methods of measuring how far east or west one's ship was were laughably inaccurate. Take, by way of example, the method in which distance was measured by counting how many rope knots, spaced about 50 feet apart, slipped out of a sailor's fingers in 28 seconds (thus the nautical term for speed, "knots"). 

This would be fine as long as you traveled in a direct straight line and were constantly gauging your speed. But no one on a ship ever did either; the former because of waves, cross-currents and winds, the latter because, oh, I don't know, the sailors were busy singing sea shanties and fondling the figurehead. This way of measuring distance was known as "Dead Reckoning," because frankly, if you reckoned by it, you'd be dead. 

While latitude only required the knowledge of the date and the ability to determine the angle of the sun, longitude required another determining dimension: The knowledge of the exact time at a place that was not where you were (let's call this place "Greenwich, England"). Due to the rotation of the earth, noon comes at different times at different places east and west on the planet. If you spotted the sun at high noon where ever you were, and then noted the time difference between you and Greenwich, you could determine your longitudinal distance from that point. What you needed was a clock, set to Greenwich mean time, that kept excellent time. 

This was no problem if one was on land. By the 17th century, thanks to the principle of the pendulum, there were some reasonably accurate clocks in Europe. However, pendulum clocks aren't practical on sailing ships, particularly the rickety deathtraps people used to cross the seas back then. A ship that's rocking and rolling on the waves is really not the ideal place for a time piece that uses pendular motion.

(There was a way around clocks, sort of: In the 1660s, French astronomers created a table of the exact positions of the Jovian moons every day at 7pm Paris time. On each day, one could look up, note the time at which those positions were achieved where they were, and then do the math. Of course, this required both a fairly large telescope and a stable base to put it on. Once again, a ship heaving on the seas was not an excellent candidate.)

After a navigational mishap in 1707 that killed thousands of sailors (English navy ships thought they were further west than the
y
were and tore open the bottoms of their ships on coastal rocks), the British Parliament offered a reward of 20,000 pounds to the person or person who could provide an accurate system of longitudinal reckoning. 20,000 pounds was an astounding sum of money at the time (think about 10 million dollars, which itself was a huge sum until all those Internet IPOs), and the contest coordinators, which included Sir Isaac Newton, found themselves wading through some really stupid ideas. 

For example, one suggested stationing warships in permanent positions across the Atlantic; at midnight Greenwich time, they'd send up fireworks that could be seen for 100 miles around. Ships at sea could take their reading from there. Of course, this solution assumes there was practical method for the "firework ships" to know when it's Greenwich time; obviously, were that the case, there would be no need for the ships at all. The entries became so cockamamie that the Quest of Longitude became a shorthand phrase for insanity.

The ultimate hero of the Quest of Longitude was a very unlikely fellow indeed: a certain John Harrison, a self-taught clockmaker and a carpenter by trade. Harrison did three things: First, he replaced the pendulum with balance springs. Second, he made the springs with a combination of metals to compensate for
shrinkage
and expansion. Finally, for the wood casings and other wood parts of the timepiece, Harrison used a tropical wood that was self-lubricating to reduce friction. At the end of it, Harrison had created the first timepiece that could keep accurate time at sea. 

He took the first version, the H1, on its maiden voyage to Lisbon in 1734 (and got so violently seasick he never sailed again). Harrison went through three variations of the timepiece before developing the ultimate winner, the H4. In 1761 the H4 went from England to Jamaica and back -- six and a half weeks -- and only lost five seconds. The contest board was so skeptical of the achievement they made the clock do it again. Even then, they only gave Harrison half the prize. It took the direct intervention from King George III (you remember him as the mean, crazy king we got our independence from) for the board to cough up the remaining dough. Cheap bastards.

Harrison not only created the means to establish positions at sea, he also gave the world the most accurate measurement it had ever seen to that point. He also made the important point that it's not just where you are, it's when you are. In this sense, the Quest of Longitude was also another quest entirely: The Quest for Time. Timing is everything when you're looking for your place in this world.

Best Cheese of the Millennium.

Processed Cheese, or, as it's vulgarly called, American cheese. Hey, don't blame the messenger. I'm not the one who is forcing humanity to eat two billion pounds of the orange stuff annually. I'm just telling you that we do. Anyway, cheese is hardly the thing to get snooty about. Any product that is made intentionally to both smell like feet and be put in your mouth, well, honestly. How much respect should it
get?

Cheese is in fact the first and best example that a great many of humanity's current culinary selections are based on bad judgment and/or someone drunkenly daring someone else to eat something entirely inappropriate. In the case of cheese, the going story (found on two entirely different cheese advisory sites, so you know it must be true) was that some 4,000 years ago, an Arab was crossing the desert with some milk in a pouch. What sort of idiot goes on a long journey across a desert with milk in a pouch? Well, see. This is the "bad judgment" part. 

As the immortal song tells us, "in the desert, the heat was hot,"
 
so
by the time the Arab fellow decided to have a pull off his udder squeezings, the stuff had fermented and became two separate and entirely smelly objects. The first was the runny, armpit-smelling liquid called "whey" (think of the ooze that floats on top of your sour cream before you stir it up -- sour cream, incidentally, yet another dare food from the land of dairy), and the other, a lump of disgusting goo which was the first cheese on record.

Any sane person would have flung the pouch of curdled mommy juice as far from their person as it is possible to fling it. But we've already established the fact we're dealing with a fellow who's a few camels short of a full caravan. So this genius eats the goo and drinks the armpit liquid. The cheese flacks who convey the story would have us believe he was "delighted" with his discovery, which makes me want to sit these flacks down and see how "delighted" they'd be to ingest fermented mammal squirts that had been lying in the sun all day, breeding microorganisms in a largely anaerobic medium. The fellow was probably delighted that he didn't die the next day of food poisoning, and that's about the extent of anyone's delightment.

So why did he do it? I suspect the truth went something like this.

Cheese-Eater:
Damn it, my goat's milk's gone stinky and bad. Look at it (shows it to friend).

Friend:
Wow, that's truly vile. I'll give you a shekel to try some.

Cheese-Eater:
You're out of your freakin' mind. I'd rather tongue my camel.

Friend:
All right, two shekels.

Cheese-Eater:
There's no amount of money you can pay me to eat this stuff.

Friend:
Five shekels.

Cheese-Eater:
Okay. 

(Tries some; doesn't die.)

Friend:
How is it? 

Cheese-Eater:
Not too bad. Want some?

Friend:
You're out of your freakin' mind.

When you think about it, cheese and the process you use to make it is still unspeakably vile. Take milk and let it go bad, either by exposing it to various forms of bacteria or by ladling on an enzyme called rennin, which is obtained from the fourth stomach of cows (this last one is why vegans will have nothing to do with cheese). After it's gone sufficiently bad, you dry it out and shove it in a corner for several months to let it go bad some more, only slower. You know it's done when allowing it get any more bad would actually, you know, cause you to
die
when you ate it. I imagine they lost quite a few cheese-making monks to this testing phase.

There are hundreds of types of cheese, from Abbaye de la Joie Notre Dame to Zamorano; varied nature of cheese initially had less to do with anything humans were doing than to the fact that every place on the planet has its own sorts of bacteria, so milk goes bad in different ways in different places. Eventually people gained some sort of control over the cheese-making process and started intentionally making different kinds of cheese, although the high-volume commercial aspect of cheese making had to wait until 1851, when the first cheese factory was constructed in upstate New York. Wisconsin, cheese capital of the world, saw its first cheese factory open seventeen years later. It was a limburger cheese factory. There's no punchline there, it's the truth.

Processed cheese, the cheese of the millennium, reared its bland orange head in 1911 in Switzerland. However, the cheese gods had already favored that land with its own sort of cheese, the one with all the holes in it, so it was left to the Americans to take the process and popularize it. And they did: James Kraft developed his cheese processing process in 1912, perfected it five years later, and unleashed the cheese food product on the world shortly thereafter.

The process of processed cheese is the secret to its blandness -- the natural cheese ripening process is interrupted by heat (read: they fry the bacteria before it gets out of hand and gives the stuff actual taste), and what you get is a block of proto-cheese that has an indefinite shelf life. It's bland, but it lives forever: The Dick Clark of cheese. 

Within the realm of processed cheese, there are gradations, relative to the amount of actual cheese in the cheese; the higher the number of qualifiers, the less cheese it has. To begin there's processed cheese, which is 100% cheese, just not a very dignified kind (usually some humiliated form of interrupted cheddar, labeled "American" so the other cheddars won't beat it up and steal its lunch money).  Then there's processed cheese
food
, which features cheese by-products as filler. This is followed by cheese
food product
, which includes some entirely non-dairy ingredients such as vegetable oils. Finally, of course, there's
cheez
, which may or may not feature plastics. The less said about that stuff, the better.

I certainly wouldn't argue that processed cheese is the best cheese of the millennium in terms of taste, texture, quality or snob appeal (I may be glib, but I ain't stupid), but I will suggest the utter ubiquity of processed cheese,
American
cheese, allows it to walk away with the title. Indeed, American cheese is to cheese as American culture is to culture: It's not necessarily
better,
it's just designed to travel, to be convenient to use, to be standard and unvaried and largely non-biodegradeable no matter where you find it. 

We can even go so far as to say that American culture and American cheese will go hand in hand, right to the last. Thousands of years from now, after the inevitable apocalypse of some sort wipes out our civilization, future archeologists will scour the land to make some sense of our times, and I think the process will go something like this.

Archeologist 1:
Look, it's another one temple of the ancestors' dominant faith. Note the golden arches.

Archeologist 2:
And look what I've found in the storage crypt! 

(pulls out a box of cheese slices)

Archeologist 1:
Ah, the communion squares. For their ritual obescience to Ro-Nald, the demon destroyer of worlds. You can see his terrible visage, bedecking the illuminated windows from behind the tithing altar.

Archeologist 2
(sniffing the cheese): These smell terrible. It must have been some sort of penance to ingest these.

Archeologist 1
(glancing over): You know, these samples have maintained their unholy orange taint. They may still be potent.

Archeologist 2:
What are you saying?

Archeologist 1:
I'll give you 10 glars if you eat one.

Archeologist 2:
You're out of your freakin' mind.

Archeologist 1:
All right, 20.

Archeologist 2:
Okay.