By Genevieve Rajewski | Smithsonian, June 3, 2007
Othniel Charles Marsh and Edward Drinker Cope were the two most prominent dinosaur specialists of the 1800s—and bitter enemies. They burned through money, funding expeditions to Western badlands, hiring bone collectors away from each other and bidding against one another for fossils in a battle of one-upmanship. They spied on each other's digs, had their minions smash fossils so the other couldn't collect them, and attacked each other in academic journals and across the pages of the New York Herald—making accusations of theft and plagiarism that tarnished them both. Yet between them they named more than 1,500 new species of fossil animals. They made Brontosaurus, Stegosaurus and Triceratops household names and sparked a dinomania that thrives today.
One of Marsh and Cope's skirmishes involved fossil beds in Morrison, Colorado, discovered in 1877 by Arthur Lakes, a teacher and geologist-for-hire. Lakes wrote in his journal that he had discovered bones “so monstrous...so utterly beyond anything I had ever read or conceived possible.” He wrote to Marsh, at Yale, to offer his finds and services, but his letters met with vague replies and then silence. Lakes then sent some sample bones to Cope, the editor of American Naturalist. When Marsh got word that his rival was interested, he promptly hired Lakes. Under Marsh's control, the Morrison quarries yielded the world's first fossils of Stegosaurus and Apatosaurus, the long-necked plant eater more popularly known as Brontosaurus.
Lakes spent four field seasons chiseling the most easily reached bones out of the fossil beds. Before he left the area, he allegedly blew up one of the most productive sites—“Quarry 10”—to prevent Cope from digging there.
For 123 years, the site was lost, but in 2002 researchers from the Morrison Natural History Museum used Lakes' field notes, paintings and sketches to find the quarry, expose its original floor and support beams and begin digging once more. “The first things that we found were charcoal fragments: we were digging right below the campfire that Arthur Lakes had built,” says Matthew Mossbrucker, director of the museum.
They quickly discovered that at least one misdeed attributed to the feud between Marsh and Cope was probably exaggerated. “It looks like [Lakes] just shoveled some dirt in there,” says Mossbrucker. “I think he told people that he had dynamited it closed because he didn't want the competition up at the quarry—playing mind games with Cope's gang.”
The reopened quarry is awash in overlooked fossils as well as relics that earlier paleontologists failed to recognize: dinosaur footprints that provide startling new clues about how the creatures lived.
The dig site is perched halfway up the west side of a narrow ridge called the Dakota hogback. The only way up is to walk—over loose rock, past prickly brush and rattlesnakes—with frequent pauses to catch one's breath. On this July morning, Mossbrucker leads six volunteers as they open the quarry for its fourth full modern-day field season. The crew erects a canopy over the pit before forming a bucket brigade to remove backfill that has washed into the hole since last season.
Down in a test pit, the crew digs into the side of the ridge, carefully undercutting the layer of cracked sandstone that served as the original quarry's ceiling. The ledge collapsed several times in the 1870s. More than 100 tons of rock crashed into the pit one night, and had the crew been working instead of sleeping nearby, Lakes wrote, the “entire party would have been crushed to atoms and buried beneath tons of rocks which afterwards took us over a week to remove by blasting and sledge hammers.”
Robert Bakker, curator of paleontology for the Houston Museum of Natural Science, helps out at the dig. “If you want to understand the late Jurassic, you need to understand the common animals, which means Apatosaurus,” he says. “This is the original Apatosaurus quarry, and it's a ‘triple-decker'—the only one in the world with three dead Apatosaurus buried one on top of each other.”
Most people know Apatosaurus as Brontosaurus because of a mistake made by Marsh. In 1879, two years after he named the first Apatosaurus, one of his workers discovered a more complete specimen in Wyoming. Marsh mistook it to be a new animal and named it Brontosaurus. Though the error was soon discovered, scientific nomenclature required keeping the first name. But in the meantime the “Brontosaurus” misnomer had made its way into popular culture.
For almost 100 years, Apatosaurus was portrayed as a swamp-bound animal whose immense body was buoyed by water. In the 1960s, Bakker joined a handful of paleontologists who argued that the massive beasts were really more like elephants: all-terrain animals that could roam over the flood plain, through river channels and anywhere else they wanted to go.
Bakker, then an undergraduate at Yale, went to Morrison to see if Apatosaurus' habitat supported his idea that the beasts were mobile. But he and two students spent two years unsuccessfully hunting for Quarry 10, which aside from being partially filled in, as Bakker finally discovered, was also obscured by bullet cartridges, beer cans and other remnants of teenage outings.
Today, Bakker is sifting through Lakes' spoil pile—lumps of clay stone that the 1870s crew tossed aside—when someone in the pit excitedly calls for him. He scrambles down into the hole, where his bearded face lights up under his straw cowboy hat. The museum crew has uncovered what appear to be Jurassic-era castings of a small tree's root system. “This is a big deal,” says Bakker, using a finely bristled brush to baste the knobby fossils with glue. “In ‘CSI' terms, that's the crime scene floor. Victim number one”—the Apatosaurus found in 1877—“lay buried just above.”
The clue adds to evidence that Apatosaurus did not live in water. The team has found layers of sediment consistent with a small pond, but none of the crocodile or tortoise fossils typically found in swamps from the Jurassic Period more than 200 million years ago. This spot may have attracted generations of Apatosaurus, Bakker says, because it provided a watering hole on a dry wooded plain. “If there was a forest, there would be a lot more wood—and there isn't—and a lot more fossilized leaves—and there ain't. So it was a woodland but probably a lot like Uganda—hot tropical woodland that was dry for most of the year.”
The most significant recent discoveries at the Morrison quarries have been dinosaur tracks. Early dinosaur hunters overlooked them. In Quarry 10 and another Lakes quarry less than a mile away, museum staff have recovered 16 Stegosaurus tracks. They include ten hatchling tracks—the first ever discovered. One rock appears to show four or five baby Stegosauri all heading in the same direction. Another boulder includes a partial juvenile Stegosaurus hind paw track that was stepped on by an adult Stegosaurus. “It suggests that Stegosaurus moved in multiple-age herds,” says Mossbrucker, and adults may have cared for hatchlings.
The researchers have also found the world's first baby Apatosaurus tracks. They could change paleontologists' view yet again: the tracks are from the rear legs only, and they are spaced far apart. “What's really cool about these tracks is that the baby animal is functionally running—but it's doing this just on its back legs. We had no idea a Bronto could run, let alone scoot along on its hind legs like a basilisk,” Mossbrucker says, referring to the “Jesus lizard” that appears to walk on water.
He and others speculate that adult Apatosauri, some of the largest animals ever to walk the earth, could prop themselves up on two legs with the help of their long tails. But others argue that it would have been physiologically impossible to pump blood up the animals' long necks or to raise their heavy front limbs off the ground.
Bakker and Mossbrucker say their goal is to look at Quarry 10 holistically—considering the local geography, climate, flora and fauna—to create a picture of where and how Jurassic dinosaurs lived. “I want to know as completely as I can what kind of forgotten world these dinosaurs knew,” says Mossbrucker. “I want to see what they saw, touch their earth with my own feet and be in the Jurassic.”
Bakker gestures toward the pit, where Libby Prueher, the museum's curator of geology, sifts soil alongside volunteer Logan Thomas, a high-school student with a passion for snakes. “It's weird that [Marsh and Cope] thought that dinosaurs were a zero-sum game, that Marsh thought, ‘If Cope got a bone, I lost a bone,'” says Bakker. The goal isn't to vanquish one's rivals, he says: “the guiding inspiration for studying the dead dinosaurs is to get back to how they lived.”By Genevieve Rajewski | Washington Post Magazine, May 6, 2007
TWO TEENAGE BOYS, REED BEVERSTOCK AND RICK VANGEE, AND JENNIE DYNESIUS, who is in her 50s, set up their music stands and lift their accordions onto their laps. In unison, they lean forward and struggle into the shoulder straps, their legs braced wide to support their instruments. The fingers on their left hands hover clawlike over the bass buttons, while the fingers on their other hands splay awkwardly across the keys.
And then they begin making music.
Almost immediately, Dale Wise hears something he doesn't like.
“Reed,” Wise starts, and his students stop abruptly. “Reed, do you have a new baby at home that I don't know about?”
“Nooo,” answers Beverstock with a quizzical look.
“Because it sounds like you're afraid you're going to wake the baby,” Wise says. “Put some muscle on that.”
Beverstock nods, and the three turn back to their method books, which were developed by two acclaimed accordionists in the 1950s and 1960s and have changed little since—still offering tunes such as “Camptown Races” and “Vegetables on Parade” and featuring bobby-soxers on their covers. The students play with more emphasis on the bass notes this time—for an audience consisting of only Wise, a wall of accordions and “Carlos Santucci and his super international accordion.” The large, framed poster of the maestro hovers appropriately large in the room, as Santucci was Wise's first teacher. In the picture, Santucci smiles approvingly and wears glasses, a dark suit and an enormous black accordion bejeweled with silver rhinestones—the same accordion glittering atop the filing cabinet beneath the poster.
During the biweekly lesson, in the basement of his Burr Hill, Va., home, Wise runs the two home-schooled teens and Dynesius through numerous drills, all designed to help them master dynamics: the control of air through the bellows and the secret to expressive accordion playing. “We replicate different instruments while playing the accordion. We're the whole band,” he tells them. “So when you play the bass notes, you're like a tuba or a bassoon. The chord is played by a much smaller instrument, like a string bass, so you underplay the chord note after the bass. It's a lot more than just pushing a bunch of plastic.”
As graduates of Wise's Accordions for Kids program, the students are trying to apply this lesson. Beverstock, Wise's first student in the three-year-old program, recently played accordion with a Christian grunge band he describes as “like Metallica, but more laid-back.”
“I have no idea what that means,” says Wise, 65, shaking his head.
Despite the name of the program, Jennie Dynesius is not that much younger than Wise herself.
“I saw an article in the paper about Dale wanting to get together a group of eight to 11 to teach accordion,” she says, “so I called him up, and he said, 'No, I meant 8- to 11-year-olds.' I went, 'Ohhh.' But he said, 'Come on up, and I'll teach you anyway.'” Wise is loath to turn away any interested student. Sessions such as these—as well as the various accordion programs and initiatives he has set into motion over the years—reflect Wise's determination to squeeze new life into the instrument.
“Time is waning,” Wise says. “The accordion is hanging by a thread.” The instrument's downward spiral in the American music scene over several decades is especially painful for someone who remembers its once vaunted status.
“If something is good, it'll come back again,” Wise says. “If we could just live long enough, we'd see the cyclical nature of so many things. The seasons, we count on them every year. But with something like music or trends, it may be a 35-year cycle.”
After a moment, Wise says, “Most of us don't get to see too many 35-year cycles.”
In a “Far Side” cartoon, departed souls stand in line at two gates. In the upper panel, an angel says, “Welcome to Heaven . . . here's your harp.” The lower panel's devil: “Welcome to Hell . . . here's your accordion.”
Wise happens to play both instruments, though the harp is a much more recent pursuit. When Wise sits at his harp, he narrows his eyes, plucks a few heavenly notes from the red C strings and breaks into a boyish grin. “It's a daily discipline,” he says. “Every morning, I practice while DeAnn's still in bed. The dog comes in, lies down and just takes it all in.”
“Even when he hits a wrong note, it sounds beautiful,” says DeAnn Wise, his wife.
Unlike the accordion?
“Well, Dale never hits a wrong note on the accordion,” she says.
Wise's fervor toward the accordion is in direct contrast with the level of ridicule it generally receives, but the instrument has not always been seen as a punch line. Although originally conceived in the early 1800s as a device to tune pipe organs, the accordion was quickly embraced as an instrument throughout Europe for its versatility, rich sound and portability. It traveled to the United States with the wave of emigration at the turn of the 20th century and became big business in the 1930s, when immigrant vaudeville performers stole the spotlight with their ornate accordions and fast-flying finger work. It was accordionist Dick Contino who spawned legions of imitators after he made numerous appearances on, and ultimately won, Horace Heidt's “Original Youth Opportunity Program” in the late 1940s.
The program “was like 'American Idol,' only it was on the radio, and you didn't have to be a singer,” explains Cheri Thurston, president of the Closet Accordion Players of America. “Dick Contino was this really handsome, hot accordion player who kept winning. He had teenage girls swooning and following him.”
The instrument's mainstream popularity soon began its slide, although it remained an enormous influence in zydeco, Cajun and polka music. Thurston attributes the plummet to two factors. “One was 'The Lawrence Welk Show,' which was nerdy, and the accordion was strongly associated with it,” she says. “And, two, the advent of rock-and-roll.”
“That's what happened to me,” says Thurston, who played accordion into high school. “The Beatles came into fashion, and, suddenly, I wasn't cool playing an accordion. I put it in the closet. A lot of people did.”
But not Dale Wise. When he was 11 years old and living in Ottawa, Ill., Wise's parents signed him up to learn guitar. He studied it for a few weeks until he wandered across the hall from the classroom and met his future mentor: Santucci, an Italian immigrant who was both Ottawa's mayor and an accordion teacher.
Wise was immediately hooked.
“All the musical elements—including melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre—are all wrapped up in one beautiful package,” Wise says of the instrument's appeal.
Wise started working accordion jobs as a young teenager and went on to teach band and orchestral instruments in public schools in Illinois and Arizona. In 1971, he moved to Northern Virginia and began teaching in Maryland.
In 1980, after 17 years of teaching in public schools, Wise quit to devote himself solely to the accordion and its survival—by performing, teaching and selling and repairing instruments. He named his business Accordion Plus. He moved to Burr Hill, near Culpeper, about three years ago.
ELISE MALOUF TRAVELS 135 MILES ROUND-TRIP from Springfield for lessons with Wise. Her mother, Anne Van Heyste Malouf, says the 10-year-old was drawn to the instrument precisely because no other kids played it and that Elise has never been teased by her classmates—only by one “inappropriate” scoffing adult. “Kids today didn't grow up with a sense of the accordion being an old-fashioned or unhip instrument,” she says.
In Wise's basement, Elise's gleaming black Hohner accordion dwarfs her tiny frame, but when Wise asks her to play “You Are My Sunshine,” she delivers a jaunty rendition, playing chords on the right-hand keys and wielding the bellows with ease.
“Not bad, kiddo,” Wise says. “But what do I know about music?”
“Nothing,” Elise replies. “You're old as dirt.”
Elise next plays “Church in the Wildwood,” which shows off her prowess on the left-hand bass buttons.
“That's ready to perform, isn't it?” Wise says.
He presses her to play at two public concerts the following month: one organized by the Washington Metropolitan Accordion Society and his own Accordion Plus concert. But Elise, like most kids today, is overscheduled. She rattles off a list of July dates she's unavailable.
Wise reminds her that the concerts are in June.
“I might not be able to make it, because I'll be doing a play,” Elise says. “It's about electricity,” she explains. “Ben Franklin has to rap.”
But a month later, on the night of the Washington Metropolitan Accordion Society's June concert, Elise shows up with her father, her body almost bent in half under the weight of her accordion backpack. More than 50 people—accordionists and their family and friends—fill the basement of Sleepy Hollow United Methodist Church in Falls Church. Nearly all the night's attendees have white or gray hair, and many of the men are wearing ties. Some are strapped into accordions and wander in and out of the room, warming up, as people begin to take their seats.
WMAS organizes semiannual concerts, workshops and visits by celebrity guest artists, such as Frank Marocco, a jazz accordionist who has written music for films. Wise is not playing tonight but will serve as emcee. He talks about the progress he's made in recruiting young accordionists, then scans the room until he spies a familiar curly brown head and invites Elise up to perform. She lugs her case to the front of the room, unzips it and hauls out her 48-bass instrument.
Before giving the floor to Elise, Wise tells the crowd proudly that the girl recently performed for a large audience at a Baltimore library. A murmur of surprise and smattering of applause greets this news.
“This is called 'Church in the Wildwood,'” Elise says, and plunges into the number. Although she nailed the song in her lesson with Wise, tonight it does not go well. About four phrases in, she stumbles over a note. She mutters “eck” in frustration but continues. She fumbles again and, with a professional's poise, corrects herself by stopping and starting over. But the same mistakes haunt the performance to the end. The 40-second number stretches to over a minute, as some of the audience members shift in their seats, crossing and uncrossing their legs in impatience.
When Elise finishes, Wise returns to the front of the room.
“That was very nice. Thank you, Elise,” he says, giving her a pat on the back. He claps until the room joins him in a round of applause.
AT WASHINGTON'S GANGPLANK MARINA, the Wises turn down a narrow plank and see friends from WMAS waving from a 46-foot-long houseboat. Paul Aebersold, the boat's owner, sits on the top deck, playing a haunting German song on his accordion. From inside the boat's tiny kitchen wafts the aroma of Viennese goulash, spaetzle and red cabbage—takeout from a German restaurant where Aebersold plays accordion on the weekends.
As the sun sets over the Potomac, a paddle-boat glowing with lights plows quietly by. The day's oppressive heat and humidity have dissipated, and everyone agrees it's a far more beautiful night than the last houseboat party, when someone had to hold an umbrella over Wise as he played.
Later in the evening, Wise climbs to the houseboat's upper deck with his accordion, pulls up a chair and begins to play “La Vie en Rose.” Although Wise finds it difficult to articulate exactly why he loves the accordion, he always returns to the principle of tension and release in music. He says that how he chooses to express himself reflects his struggles throughout the day and that, “as the music comes to rest so, too, does the player.”
“La Vie en Rose” can be an accordion cliche, but Wise's orchestration elevates it to a personal anthem. He slouches into his accordion, arms hugging it tight, eyes closed, chin tucked against the instrument's top, coaxing a symphony out of the cumber-some box. The bittersweet melody reveals itself slowly as Wise's right hand strolls down the keys, evoking strings, his fingers on the bass buttons summoning a piano's gentle percussion. While Wise rocks in his seat, the bellows gradually begin to voice a lone coronet that lifts the notes higher and higher until, at last, they break and retreat to quiet.
Across the inky water comes a ripple of faint applause from another houseboat, the clappers unseen.
IN 2004, WISE PERSUADED A REPORTER for the local newspaper to write about his idea for Accordions for Kids. The Associated Press picked up the story, helping spread word of his 10-week program in which children receive free lessons and a loaner accordion. Wise has since taught more than 30 children and recruited still more to pair with program teachers in other states.
Last August, 10-year-old Katelyn Peters and her brother, Aaron, 8, attend the recital that is the traditional last lesson of the program. Their mother, Karen Peters, and the Wises make up the audience.
Katelyn starts with “Hot Cross Buns,” as does Aaron. She next heads where her little brother can't follow, playing “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” from memory and adding new notes along the way to liven it up. When the children finish, Wise says: “Take a bow. Both of you,” and waits for them to stand before presenting two certificates of achievement.
“He who climbs a ladder must begin at the first step,” Wise says. “May you take the next step and continue a lifetime of joy with your music.”
Now, the Peters family has to decide if either of the kids, who enjoy playing, will continue with accordion.
“So, what do you think?” Wise asks.
“I don't know. Katelyn is pretty busy with violin,” says Karen Peters, referring to the rigorous lessons the girl takes through a public school. “Maybe Aaron . . .”
“Well, you don't have to decide right now,” Wise says. “Why don't you keep one of the accordions for now and think about it?”
“Are you sure?” she asks.
“Yes, yes, keep it, and get back to me later.”
After the Peterses leave with Aaron's 16-bass loaner, Wise sits alone in the lesson room. “There's some selling that has to be done,” he says. “But this accordion thing is going to happen, one way or the other. How big it becomes is just a matter of how much energy we got.”
Wise gazes down at the blue pearl accordion abandoned by Katelyn. He lifts it by its tiny shoulder straps and, for a moment, considers shutting it away in its case. Then he carries the child-size accordion across the room and gently places it on a shelf next to his own well-traveled instrument, where it awaits a taker.By Genevieve Rajewski | Wired.com, April 20, 2007
It's not easy being a lab rat. What's worse still is being a lab rat used for practice—undergoing endless manhandling, injections and intubations, just so lab techs can get hands-on training. Is there no god?
To help ease the hard life of the lab rat, Craig Jones plans to release a furry, fully jointed rat mannequin, code-named “Squeekums,” later this year as the newest training model in his Rescue Critters line. While Squeekums will never replace the live rats used in lab testing, it will allow technicians to learn how to handle rodents—including safely inserting IVs and placing endotracheal tubes—before they ever touch a real one.
Being able to help reduce the use of live animals in education and training drives Rescue Critters' president, Jones, to create the most lifelike animal training models on the market.
It's the plastic innards that make the mannequins viable stand-ins for living animals or cadavers. Disposable lungs expand the chest like a real patient's as they fill with air. An IV bag runs artificial blood into models' replica veins, allowing users to insert a needle and either inject or draw fluids.
Rescue Critters even offers an installable breath-and-heart sound simulator, which features samples digitally recorded at Cornell University's College of Veterinary Medicine. “We installed speakers so, in a simulation scenario, students place a stethoscope directly onto a mannequin, hear a breath sound or heart sound, and have to interpret what they are listening to,” says Jones.
Jones, a former emergency-response instructor, started Rescue Critters in 1998 when he realized there was only one unrealistic dummy dog available to teach a pet first-aid course. From his home near Los Angeles, Jones tapped contacts in the local special effects industry to develop “Jerry,” a life-size, furry dog mannequin with a convincing airway, working lungs and artificial pulse. Jerry was designed to allow users to practice compressions and mouth-to-snout resuscitation.
The Red Cross adopted Jerry as their pet first-aid training model, and veterinary colleges followed closely behind. Requests for other models started pouring in, and soon Rescue Critters was creating animal mannequins to help veterinary technician programs, fire departments and other groups train people in veterinary procedures and life-saving techniques.
Today, Rescue Critters offers 20 mannequins—dogs, cats and one horse—as well as replacement veins and lungs and “customizations” such as bullet entrance wounds and impaled knives. The Van Nuys, California, company sells 300 to 350 mannequins a year, priced from $300 to $7,000 apiece.
Rescue Critters' fake cats and dogs may sport goofy Muppet-like facial expressions, but they serve as very serious substitutes for practicing intubations, thoracentesis, catheterization, finding pulses and other emergency care. Meanwhile, the company's “Fetch” dog mannequin helps train Army Rangers and Marines to parachute with search-and-rescue dogs, and “Lucky,” a 400-pound jointed horse mannequin, can be tossed off ledges to simulate rescue scenarios.
To ensure anatomical accuracy, Jones regularly interrogates the veterinary education community and observes procedures and surgeries. Rescue Critters' staff of five full-time employees sculpts all the anatomical pieces from commercial-grade modeling clay. They then use fiberglass molds lined with silicon to produce the durable mannequins, most of which are covered in artificial fur.
Elizabeth White, RVT, director of Los Angeles Pierce College's Veterinary Technology Program, says she has taught students using Rescue Critters for several years now.
“They are especially good at helping novice students gain confidence,” says White. “They are also great for duplicating emergency situations, such as cardiac arrest, that we could not otherwise teach in the classroom.”
The greatest challenge in creating the models is weighing realism against durability, says Jones.
“We could make tissue that feels and acts exactly like real skin when you cut into it, but it would be too fragile,” he says. “We could make a horse exactly like a real horse, but it wouldn't last through one exercise.”
Instead, Lucky is made of a rugged elastomer composite, enabling the horse mannequin to survive 100-foot ravine drops, helicopter lifts, trailer rollovers and water rescues.
“What I like about Lucky is that he has some weight to him. He's only about half the weight of a full-size horse, but he gives people a good sense of just how big horses are,” says Roger Lauzé, equine rescue and training coordinator for the Massachusetts Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals.
In January, a Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association review of comparison studies found that using alternatives like Rescue Critters' mannequins, instead of live animals, produced results that were just as good as those in more conventional instruction. That applied to all areas of biomedical education, from high school to college to veterinary training.
“Nobody is suggesting that you can learn to do surgery using only models,” says Gary Patronek, VMD, one of the journal article's authors. “But in many instances it is vastly better to use an alternative that allows you to practice a technique as many times as needed to get it right. Then, when you have to do a procedure on a live animal, you can do it much quicker and more effectively—and the animal need not suffer because of it.”By Genevieve Rajewski | Wired.com, May 15, 2007
For SharkDefense partners Eric Stroud and Michael Herrmann, the latest eureka moment in their efforts to repel sharks came not from their extensive research but their utter geekiness.
Since 2001, SharkDefense has been working on a chemical shark repellent. According to Herrmann, he and Stroud were playing around with powerful rare-earth magnets in 2005, when he dropped one next to their shark research tank in Oak Ridge, New Jersey. The lemon and nurse sharks inside instantly darted to the opposite wall.
Bewildered, the two scientists began to investigate. The results, chronicled by Ocean Magnetics (their spinoff company), bode well for the much-maligned and often needlessly killed fish.
In testing at the Bimini Biological Research Station shark lab in the Bahamas, Stroud and Herrmann have found that sharks dramatically avoid magnets made from neodymium, iron and boron. The magnets even rouse sharks from tonic immobility, a coma-like state induced by turning them upside down.
Herrmann says he and Stroud think the magnets overload a shark's ampullae of Lorenzini, small vesicles and pores around the head that form part of a subcutaneous sensory network. What's more, he says a metal with similar electropositive qualities also appears to affect sharks the same way. Hermann preferred to keep the identity of that metal secret for now.
Divers and swimmers may thrill to the idea of shark safeguards. However, before you rush out to buy neodymium magnets to create your own shark-repelling gear, Herrmann cautions that the magnets appear to have an effective range of only 10 inches. Also, you'd need to align the magnetic poles outward and keep the magnets from clicking together, and once you had the necessary 10 to 20 pounds of magnets all over your body, you'd sink. So, at a cost of about $5 a magnet, you could theoretically turn yourself into a $400 shark-safe anchor at the bottom of the sea.
Rather than being a solution to shark attacks on humans, Stroud and Herrmann hope the magnets or metals can help protect sharks from us.
Last year, the World Conservation Union announced that 20 percent of shark and ray species are close to extinction, and SharkDefense believes magnets or metals can create more-humane underwater fences than the often lethal nets currently keeping sharks out of swimming areas.
SharkDefense won $25,000 from the World Wildlife Fund's annual International Smart Gear Competition to develop magnets or metals to keep sharks from dying on commercial fishing lines intended for other fish, such as swordfish—which they do in great numbers daily.
Rare-earth magnets and electropositive metals would be expensive and cumbersome to add to longline fishing hooks, says Herrmann. “But if you think about it, when a fisherman catches a shark by mistake, that's one swordfish worth at least several thousands of dollars he doesn't catch,” he says.
By Genevieve Rajewski | The Boston Globe, April 6, 2003
The accident occurred near the end of a weeklong trip to Oaxaca City, Mexico. My husband and I were traveling by taxi to the nearby Zapotec ruins. We had grown comfortable enough with our limited Spanish to chat with our driver about the mountainous terrain.
Farther up the road, I saw a dog paused tremulously between two lanes of traffic, unsure of which way to move. I cried, “Oh, don't hit him!” a split second before an approaching car rammed the dog's hindquarters.
There was a loud thud and a yelp. Our cab sped on, with my husband and me struck dumb and teary inside. Our driver continued to converse cheerfully.
There was no malice involved. It was as if the other car had hit a pebble. Neither driver even slowed down.
Coming from a nation where pets are often regarded as family members, Americans may be upset by the tenuous existence of the animals they encounter abroad.
Mexico is hardly the only country where travelers will find strays haunting tourist routes. Fueling the problem in many areas is a lack of widespread pet sterilization, which is often hampered by cultural beliefs, no affordable veterinary care, or no such care at all. In some
countries, veterinarians are not required to learn how to perform pet sterilization.
According to Susan Sherwin, campaigns manager for the World Society for the Protection of Animals, the quality of care received by dogs and cats also depends on financial resources and the status animals hold in a particular society: whether they're loved as pets, viewed as vermin, or seen as capable of fending for themselves.
In the US territory of Puerto Rico, stray dogs, locally referred to as “satos” (slang for mixed-breed street dog), roam the streets.
“From the San Juan airport, in any direction, you'll see carcasses along the highways,” says Kathy Ward, who manages donations and a website for Save a Sato, an organization that rescues and rehabilitates satos before bringing them stateside to be adopted. “The dogs chew on rocks because they're so hungry. Their teeth are often worn down to the gum line.”
In fact, much of the Caribbean is teeming with strays, says Kelly O'Meara, a program manager for Humane Society International, the international arm of the Humane Society of the United States. “In the Bahamas, it is particularly bad,” she says. “Nassau, the capital island, is overrun with dogs.”
Dogs and cats meet with harsh conditions in tourist destinations worldwide, including Spain, Eastern Europe, Nepal, and South Africa.
“Tourists are often appalled by the insensitivity toward animals in Greece,” says Dianne Aldan of Greek Animal Rescue, which supports several shelters in Greece. “They return with memories that are emotionally disturbing.”
The number of stray dogs and cats in Greece is staggering - an estimated 30,000 to 90,000 in the Athens area alone. As Athens prepares to host the 2004 Olympics, the debate on how to address the overpopulation problem is generating controversy.
But no single nation has a lock on pet problems. The United States' severe animal overpopulation is more hidden from view than in countries like Greece because of the shelter system, which euthanizes more than 12 million animals every year.
How can animal-loving travelers respond? “When we're working with a government that turns a blind eye, that's where tourists can make a big difference - especially Americans with their love of dogs and cats,” O'Meara says. “If a tourism board receives a couple of letters from
people who say they can't believe what they saw, that animals were really in horrible condition, it can prompt them to do something.”
O'Meara suggests that tourists also tell hotel managers, local shop owners, travel agents, and tour operators how the situation has affected them. “Let them know it's something you don't want to see and that it would prevent you from coming back.”
Before traveling, do some research to find local animal-welfare groups that may be able to help should you witness an accident or abuse. Donating money to such groups, she said, can make a profound difference. “Most local groups have next to no budget,” says O'Meara. “Any modest contribution could go very far.”
The WSPA encourages tourists to report incidents of cruelty - including the date, time, and location - to the local police, tourist office, and animal-welfare society as well as to the WSPA upon return. If it's safe to do so, taking photographs or videotape will provide valuable
evidence.
Animal-advocacy groups discourage feeding strays because it often nourishes them just enough to allow them to procreate and perpetuate the cycle. However, most groups understand why it can be hard to resist a pleading look from a starving animal.
If you do feed a stray, be careful. Local laws often forbid it (as in Puerto Rico). And the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention discourages petting or feeding animals to guard against bites and the transmission of rabies and other diseases.
“If someone wants to offer some food or fresh water, they can put it down and then back up to give the dog space,” says Ward, who has worked with satos in Puerto Rico. “Many satos are now in loving homes with tourists who bonded with them on the island.”
Bringing a dog or cat into the United States is not as complicated as a traveler might expect. For information on regulations, US Customs Service Pets and Wildlife Licensing and Health Requirements, visit www.customs.gov. Some airlines require health certificates for pets traveling with them, so travelers should ask about this and other requirements, such as approved kennels and fees.
Simrit Dhesi and her husband met Sandy—a skinny, limping sato—in Puerto Rico when they stopped at a beach on their way to the airport after a family vacation. “He drank saltwater, and that didn't seem very healthy,” recalls Dhesi. “We gave him bottled water. He threw it back up.”
Back home in Chicago, she e-mailed Save a Sato to ask if they could locate Sandy. “They found him with five other dogs,” says Dhesi. “About a month and a half later, up he came.”
*****
Here is a sampling of humane organizations that operate shelters, offer low-cost pet- sterilizations, or arrange adoptions abroad. You can find other groups online at the World Animal Net directory, www.worldanimalnet.org, and through the listing of member Societies of the world society for the protection of animals, www.wspa-international.org.
Worldwide
The International Fund For Animal Welfare
www.ifaw.org
Humane Society International
www.hsus.org
Bahamas
Abaco Animals Require Friends
PO Box AB-20856
Marsh Harbour Abaco, The Bahamas
242-367-3262, ext. 201
Costa Rica
asociacion humanitaria para la Proteccion animal de costa rica
apartado 73-3000, heredia, costa rica
506-267-7158
www.infoweb.co.cr/refugio
Greece
Greek Animal Rescue
c/o Mrs. Dianne Aldan
1617 - 25 the esplanade
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
M5E 1W5
416-361-5046
www.garcanada.bizland.com
Italy
Lega Pro Animale
Via m. Tommaso, I-81030
Castel Volturno (ce), Italy
39-823-859-552
http://web.tiscalinet.it/legaproanimale
torre argentina roman cat Sanctuary
www.romancats.com
Jamaica
Jamaica SPCA
c/o Susan Rondon, Managing Director
10 Winchester Road
Kingston 10, Jamaica
809-876- 929-0320
E-mail: artpro@cwjamaica.com
Mexico
Sociedad Humanitaria de Cozumel
PO Box 649, Cozumel 77600
Quintana Roo, Mexico
52-987-23-952
E-mail: spca@cozumel.net
Amigos de los Animales
Puerto Vallarta, Mexico
52-322-33-576
e-mail: roieg@prodigy.net.mx
www.surfnetusa.com/amigosdelosanimales/home.html
Puerto Rico
Save a Sato Foundation
Villas de Caparra #D-2
Calle c Guaynabo, Puerto Rico
00966
www.saveasato.org
By Genevieve Rajewski | Imbibe
At Belmont Farm, a long dirt road winds through a sea of towering cornstalks to a small, rough-hewn building tucked behind a barn. Inside, a tall, sinewy man wearing a straw cowboy hat and knee-high rubber boots loads a round-bottomed still to make another batch of “corn licker.
Although he looks the part, Chuck Miller is not your grandfather’s moonshiner—or even his own grandfather’s. Miller’s grandfather once craftily evaded authorities to sell his homemade corn whiskey, but the younger Miller instead used his wits to build a thriving, legal moonshine operation.
On an August morning, Miller tells a group of five distillery visitors, “This building has a lot of spirit in it—in more ways than one.” He built the distillery using the remains of a church that burnt down in the 1960s and never reopened. “I figure the preacher must have given one hell-raising sermon that day,” he says.
Miller, 61, did not start out wanting to make corn whiskey. In the 1970s, when he and his wife, Jeanette, bought 140 acres in Culpeper, Va., they raised thoroughbreds and beef cattle and harvested hay and corn as a side business to his work as a commercial pilot.
Then, after a couple of years, the Millers decided to try winemaking, but that proved short-lived. “Man, those grapes, they were a lot of work,” recalls Miller, whose voice has a Southern twang, but whose words clip along as quickly as a New Yorker’s. “For four years, I hoed, I pruned, I tied. Then I got to thinking, ‘My grandfather used to make whiskey out of corn.’”
Moonshine is fresh whiskey bottled straight from the still, without any aging, usually hastily because it is being produced illegally. The name derives from the fact that moonshiners often would work at night—or by moonlight—to avoid detection. Miller’s grandfather made the “white lightning” in Virginia and sold it in Washington, D.C., during Prohibition, and relatives regaled the young Miller with tales of his illicit adventures. “One day they were going to get him for sure,” Miller recounts. “But he just ran through the dang-gone roadblock and shot out the back window.”
Miller procured his grandfather’s whiskey recipe from one of his former drivers, Great-Uncle Johnny, and set about securing licenses from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Virginia Department of Alcoholic Beverage Control. “I thought he was crazy,” his wife Jeanette remembers. “But he applied for the licenses, and when he got them, I was shocked.”
Once that two-year, paperwork-intensive process was over, Miller needed a still. He got wind of a copper-pot still recently discovered on a mountain outside nearby Charlottesville, Va., and bought it from the property owner for the cost of the scrap copper. The still was made in New York City in 1933—the year Prohibition ended—and Miller says the registration number shows “it was in use until about 1960, then disappeared.”
Moonshine may evoke romantic images of bootleggers delivering hooch to parched flappers during the Roaring ’20s, but the illegal activity persists today. Modern-day moonshiners sell their product to after-hours clubs along the East Coast, and the authorities—locally referred to as “revenuers”—hunt down the tax evaders and routinely bust up stills in Virginia and other states. “I figured if they’re just going to ax another one, why not let me get it?” Miller says of the antique still he saved from destruction.
Moonshine, like other whiskies, is made from grains—usually some combination of corn, barley, rye or wheat—that are ground up and mixed with water, then cooked, mixed with yeast and malt and left to ferment, creating a mash. When boiled in a still, the mash vaporizes and rises into a condenser, where it cools and becomes liquid.
Today, most whiskey distilleries use towering, highly efficient column stills that allow for a continuous flow of mash over steam-generating plates and never need to be stopped and emptied. In contrast, Miller still loads one ton of mash into his 2,000-gallon still for a process that takes five days from distillation to bottling. Between each batch, he empties the slightly alcoholic spent mash (which he says his cattle happily consume). “It’s the antique way of making whiskey, so it’s not efficient,” Miller says. “But what the old pot still does is allow you to keep a lot of the flavors and aromas that would escape otherwise.”
He then cuts the whiskey from 150- to 100-proof—which initially presented a challenge. According to Miller, the farm’s limestone well water makes a flavorful mash, “but if you were to try to cut the whiskey with that water, the minerals would cloud the whiskey and possibly ruin the taste.” Although Miller knew nothing about water purification, he picked up a system, once used to purify water for hemodialysis, at a University of Virginia Hospital auction. “I got it for a song and a dance and now have the cleanest water around,” he says.
Miller’s Virginia Lightning moonshine looks like vodka, smells like a nose-hair-singeing sake, but goes down smooth—smoother than some whiskies and bourbons. It tastes slightly sour, with a hint of earth or corn, and has no aftertaste or burn. The Millers like to describe it as something between grappa and tequila.
In 1989, the Millers began selling Virginia Lightning in state-run liquor stores. “Our first order was for 300 cases,” recalls Jeanette, who manages the distillery’s marketing and bookkeeping. “A newspaper article came out right before it hit the stores, and everybody had to have a bottle.” Every liquor store in the state promptly sold out.
Soon, Belmont Farm Distillery branched out into neighboring states under names more palatable to the locals, including Carolina Lightning, Kentucky Lightning and Tennessee Lightning. Maine, for some reason, embraced Carolina Lightning, which Miller jokes “must be cheaper than fuel.” And a liquor buyer began importing bottles into Japan under a special label that says “Virginia Bootlegger” in Japanese.
In 2002, the Millers launched Copper Fox whiskey—corn whiskey flavored with chips of apple wood and oak and barrel-aged for two years. They sell about 25,000 bottles of their moonshine ($12.55) and whiskey ($17.90) a year to people of all backgrounds and professions. Some have enjoyed moonshine in the past and are thrilled to have found a quality source, while many more have long been curious about moonshine but either afraid to sample the illegal variety or unlikely to ever encounter it in the first place. Both of the Millers’ products are produced on-site, with the help of a small part-time staff, and sold to locals and tourists at the farm and through liquor stores.
The whiskies weren’t always sold on-site. After the History Channel broadcast a program on their operation in 2005, the Millers opened an information center and began offering distillery tours from April through December, the months the farm is in operation. The distillery draws about 10,000 visitors a year, including day trippers from Virginia, as well as tourists from numerous other U.S. states and countries such as Australia, England, Germany, Holland, Japan and Scotland.
But the gift shop—which did a steady trade in Virginia Lightning T-shirts, shot glasses, caps and postcards—conspicuously lacked bottles of moonshine. Selling the whiskey onsite was illegal, and again, rather than following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Miller set out to change the system.
“Chuck came to me and said, ‘My business is growing, but I’d like to take the next step,’” says Ed Scott, who represents the 30th district in the Virginia House of Delegates. “One of the ways Virginia’s wine industry has grown is by offering a form of agritourism, where folks can visit the winery, sample the wines and, through that process, become customers.’”
Scott, who has known Miller and admired his persistence for years, collaborated with the Virginia alcohol-control board to draft legislation that would allow distilleries to sell their wares onsite. The Virginia General Assembly approved the bill—which applies only to distilleries that produce their own grain and does not allow for onsite tastings—and the governor signed it into law last April.
“This is the first time anyone has been able to sell whiskey off the farm since George Washington sold his rye whiskey at Mount Vernon,” Miller beams. His pride is evident as he cradles souvenir bottles in his lap and carefully signs them with “Best of Luck—Moonshine Chuck” at guests’ requests.
Still, Chuck respects backwoods distillers, many of whom he says have passed on their craft for generations. “It’s a forgotten art,” he says. “So I figure if I do this legally, I’m kind of preserving a piece of America.”
By Genevieve Rajewski | The Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 2004
The advertisements first appeared Dec. 15. Pictured on movie screens, posters, and newspaper pages was a two-foot-tall garden gnome with a ruddy complexion and pointy red cap. He stared yearningly at the horizon.
“Wanted: My Garden Gnome. Have you seen him?” the ads read. The desperate owner, “Bill,” provided a URL and toll-free hot line. Over the following weeks, more than 308,000 people visited the website (www.whereismygnome.com), which featured postcards of the gnome in exotic locations. Another 140,000 or so called the hot line.
As it turns out, the ads were a precursor to an $80 million Travelocity advertising campaign. In the latest television ads, the gnome, speaking with a slight British accent, narrates snapshots of his adventures: bobsledding, duct-taped to skis, and submerged in a hot tub.
The publicity stunt reminded many of the 2001 French film “Amélie.” In the film, Amélie conspires with a flight attendant to send her father's gnome on a world tour—complete with photographs of the gnome at foreign landmarks—to inspire him to travel. However, David Emery, who covers urban legends for About.com, says that gnome-napping is an international phenomenon with at least a 20-year history.
“I don't know if it's possible to pinpoint the earliest instance of gnome-napping, but the first reported case of a 'roaming gnome' took place in the mid-1980s,” says Mr. Emery. “It was documented by an Australian folklorist named Bill Scott, who wrote of a gnome disappearing from the front lawn of a Sydney family.” Shortly thereafter, the family received a postcard from the gnome saying he was vacationing in Queensland. The gnome returned two weeks later, coated with brown shoe polish—a souvenir suntan.
“As the '80s wore on, the prank grew popular not only in Australia but in England and, to a lesser extent, America as well,” says Emery. And years before “Amelie,” the long-running British soap opera “Coronation Street” featured a similar plot in which a man stole his neighbor's gnome and taunted him with ransom letters and photographs.
Barbara Austin of Greensboro, N.C., had never thought about gnome-nappers until one of her three gnomes disappeared in August 2002. When she came home to find his spot empty, she saw a note inside a plastic bag. It read: “Gone travelin'. Back later.”
The gnome would return, but not before Ms. Austin received several packets of photographs from “Gnome.” Nearly 50 days later, she woke up and spotted balloons in her front yard. Outside stood the gnome with a photo album and a map detailing his trek. He had had traveled 11,016 miles, to 28 states, Canada, and Mexico with four men and one woman. The snapshots showed him at national landmarks and baseball parks, in cars and airports, with pets he befriended, and next to yard art he encountered.
Sometimes, though, the gnomish pranks can get out of hand. In 2002, three men, ages 18 to 21, were arrested in Lockport, N.Y., for possessing 14 stolen gnomes. Such arrests are becoming more common as some gnome-nappers try to fulfill grander ambitions such as those of the Front de Libération des Nains de Jardin (Garden Gnome Liberation Front). The French group has reportedly “liberated” more than 6,000 gnomes since 1997. Instead of sending photos, such gnomes typically turn up en masse: returning to forest life, congregating on church steps, and, once, hanging by their necks from a bridge.
Perhaps because they fear being apprehended or simply unmasked, many gnome-nappers seek anonymity. One such thief posts photographs on his website (www.nigelthegnome.com) but refuses to reveal his identity. However, via e-mail, “Nigel the Gnome” reports that he was taken in 2001 from Destin, Fla., by a student on spring break and that he sends updates to his “mom.”
“My friend still has not met my mom. I will make it back home one day, but I'm not ready yet,” writes Nigel. “I still have more traveling to do.” While the widely traveled gnome says a cruise is under consideration, he professes a longing to hike the Appalachian Trail.
A couple dozen news stories about stolen—though not always postcard-sending—gnomes surface worldwide each year, notes Emery, and have become staples of popular culture. “There's a definite homespun charm to the roaming-gnome prank that probably stems from their tacky cuteness and how they're anthropomorphized by clever pranksters,” he says. “Plus, each case is a minimystery of a sort that rarely gets solved.”
Austin still derives much delight from the mysterious nature of her gnome's travels. Perhaps that's why she finds a rear-view photo of the gnome and his secret companion so appealing. “They're both just looking out over the city, wherever this city is, kind of... daydreaming. For some reason, it really strikes me.”
By Genevieve Rajewski | The Boston Globe, June 3, 2007
The doggie workplace, as it is portrayed in movies and television shows, sings a siren song to those seeking an antidote to the poisons of office politics. On-screen it's one tail-wagging, ball-throwing, sun-kissed, dizzyingly meeting-free good time.
Back when I held sometimes tedious but comfortable office jobs, the idea of working with dogs was only a daydream I entertained on particularly bad work days. Then I accepted a new job in what turned out to be a severely dysfunctional marketing department. The manager fired good workers at will, screamed at employees until they were in tears, and otherwise snapped and snarled at her reports.
I quit without another job. It was the first time I had ever been without a financial safety net, and I couldn't believe my luck when I quickly landed a doggie day care position.
Unlike at my office jobs, I was immediately welcomed into the pack—no months of bonding over bad projects or water cooler gossip required. There also was no awkward period of trying to figure out the unwritten rules of the office dress code. I threw out my nylons, stashed my heels, and came to work in T-shirts and jeans, and not even Pia, a Lhasa apso and the most fashionably coiffed dog there, gave me a second look because of it.
Best of all, my work stories were suddenly populated by characters named Bisco, Gabby, Vegas, and Chewey. And instead of clarifying anecdotes with something like, “you know, that EVP in charge of finance,” I'd say “you know, that humpy Boston terrier.”
Although I loved all my charges, Gretyl, an athletic German short-haired pointer, led the bunch. Whenever I arrived, she rushed past the other employees to greet me, ball in mouth and ready to play. Each workday ended with Gretyl curled in my lap.
Even when cleaning pee off the floor, I found myself thinking, “This is still better than office work.” A puddle of urine is straightforward, requiring nothing more than a mop and disinfectant to check off the to-do list. Most white-collar projects, on the other hand, seem to drag on indefinitely, with their endless paper trails, shifting deadlines, and empty corporate speak.
It was enough to make me swear I'd never work in an office again. So when harried owners—arriving straight from the office to pick up their pooches—said I must have the best job ever, I answered confidently, “Yes, I do.”
This response remained automatic and unstrained until I agreed to cover a hectic morning shift instead of the serene closing hours, during which nine or 10 worn-out pooches would doze until their owners arrived.
As I approached the yard, I heard a dull roar. The screened chain-link fence shook and quivered under the assault of 25 straining, hairy, panting, barking bodies.
“Tuck all straps in your pockets! Don't make eye contact! Move quickly through the gate!” the employee on duty shouted as I braced myself to enter.
“This must be what visiting prison is like,” I thought, as I pushed my way through the jumping throng into the yard. “Only a prison where the inmates are allowed to paw and slobber on the visitors.”
Obviously, such behavior would never be tolerated, at least publicly, in any respectable office.
Within the corporate hierarchy, people tend to look out for their own interests. Not so dogs—and not in a good way. That day, each and every dog seemed hell-bent on self-destruction. The 10-pound Boston terrier relentlessly tried to hump a disgruntled 90-pound Rhodesian ridgeback. A beagle slipped his leash and led a merry three-hour chase through a nearby swamp. An anxious Marmaduke-sized Great Pyrenees whined incessantly and got trapped trying to slither through a one-foot hole under the fence.
Only Gretyl had my back. More loyal than any co-worker you could ever wish for, she obediently followed me everywhere, looking (to my eyes) sympathetic and bemused.
For six months, I came home from work each night covered in fur and reeking of dog, my blood pressure, by turns, dramatically raised or lowered. For every workday that ended with a blissful group snuggle, there was another that featured a heart-pounding escape attempt or a homesick dog that no amount of petting could placate.
Eventually, my mortgage meant I had to leave the day care for a better-paying office job.
On my last day at doggie day care, there was no card, cake, or goodbye party. I certainly hadn't expected anything like that; they were dogs, after all. Anyway, I've always hated office farewells, with co-workers awkwardly holding plates of cake and making well-meaning, but meaningless, promises to keep in touch.
Also unlike at any previous office job, I spent my last day training my replacement. She was sweet, and I cheerfully introduced her as the “new me” to owners. But an unexpected blow was watching my pack of regulars play fetch with her as if I was already gone. The surge of jealousy both surprised and embarrassed me. I fought it back as best I could, reminding myself they were only dogs.
Gretyl hung back from the crowd, waiting for me to throw the ball. When I did, she bounded gazelle-like to the far end of the yard, caught the ball on a bounce, skidded—and barreled straight past me to my replacement.
The girl cooed when Gretyl dropped the ball at her feet and, without hesitation, threw the ball for Gretyl again . . . and again . . . and again.
I always wondered if I was quickly forgotten upon leaving a job, if I am indeed all too replaceable. Each time Gretyl breezed by me, a bright orange ball wedged in her dog-honest grin, she seemed to drive this point home.
By Genevieve Rajewski | Edible Boston, Fall 2008
The vibe is hectic at Island Creek Oysters’ headquarters this September morning, as a crew of college students nears the finish line of the morning rush. They fluidly haul in and stack 20-pound yellow, mesh bags of oysters–today alone about 32,000 mollusks will be delivered fresh to Boston restaurants and around the country.
Adding to the sense of urgency is the approach of Tropical Storm Hanna—and possibly on its heels, the remnants of Hurricane Ike. Boats and floating workhouses must be moved and moored this afternoon, well in advance of the expected 60-mile-an-hour winds.
Still, Island Creek Oysters owner Skip Bennett cheerfully finds the time to give this Edible Boston emissary a sneak peak at his lesser-known product: bay scallops.
Bleary-eyed after a late night at a Jimmy Buffet concert, Bennett fires up a small motorboat and heads out with scallop farmer John Brawley for a look at this year’s crop. As low tide turns, the men race the boat toward the scallops’ field a few minutes from shore. Duxbury Bay’s water is shockingly clear, and oysters litter its sandy bottom.
“Here we are,” says Brawley, upon spotting his buoys. The boat sputters to a stop, and Brawley hastens to hike chest-high rubber waders over his torn jeans. He swings himself over the deck and tentatively feels for the bottom; the water is just low enough not to spill inside the waders.
He digs around in the lapping waves, returning to the boat with a metal cage chockfull of glistening white, gray and dark-brown ruffled-edged shells. The two men pry open the cage to what sounds like applause: on dry ground, the scallops clap and clatter like wind-up teeth. According to Bennett, scallops have “about 30 beautiful blue eyes along the mantle edge inside their shell,” and peacock-blue dots truly do stare back from inside the shells.
“They grow very quickly,” says Brawley, who beams, noting the mollusks are ready for market. Brawley left a senior scientist position at Battelle to try his hand at raising oysters, scallops and more, but he quickly plays down his Ph.D. with self-deprecating jokes about his occasional use of scientific jargon.
In April, Brawley arranged to purchase “seed”—juvenile scallops about the size of a grain of salt—from the research hatchery at Massachusetts Maritime Academy. After growing over the summer, the scallops are big enough to harvest and sell in September and October.
Bennett first experimented with raising scallops in 2006.
“I bought seed from a friend who was running a hatchery on the Vineyard,” he says. “At first we tried raising them very similarly to how we grow oysters. But we learned scallops are very different. We have tanks where we keep the oysters and blow a lot of water by them. The water has a lot of nutrients, which the oysters siphon out,” Bennett explains. “But the bay scallops don’t like that. They like being still and don’t eat as well when water is rushing by. They are very finicky and eat only certain types of plankton and prefer to see, reach out and select their food. So we’ve come up with a wooden box that has a screen on both sides; they sit on the screen and the water flows gently through the box.”
Although fishermen harvest wild scallops at about two years of age when the shells are three or four inches, Island Creek Oysters harvests them as early as three or four months old when the shells are about an inch and a half. It’s not the only difference in the product.
“Normally, with scallops, the shell is shucked and people only eat the abductor muscle; the rest of the animal is discarded,” says Bennett. “We sell the whole animal to the chefs, which they basically use as a pasta clam. It makes for a beautiful presentation. And this time of year, scallops have a little bit of roe, so you have the sweetness of the abductor muscle with a bit of a caviar flavor.”
Keep an eye out for them at last year’s takers: Boston restaurants Toro, East Coast Grill, Neptune Oyster, Great Bay, No. 9 Park and Kingfish Hall.
At this point, the men raise scallops more as a hobby than as a money-making venture.
“The hardest part is finding a hatchery to spawn them out for us. The one on the Vineyard that I used to get seed from isn’t doing it anymore,” says Bennett. The lack of available seed limits how many scallops Island Creek Oysters can produce. Bennett says only half-jokingly of his business–which has expanded from just Bennett himself in 1992 to include 12 farmers and a four-person wholesale arm–“maybe we’ll have to add a hatchery next.”
By Genevieve Rajewski | The Boston Globe, May 23, 2007
The morning's desolate parking lot and ominous clouds around Lake Quannapowitt don't seem to perturb Fred Rex. “You have to be part weatherman to do this job,” he says, tucking a hot dog into the sole customer's waiting bun. The man scurries away, using one hand to shield his lunch from spitting raindrops. He dines in a parked car with the wipers going.
When Rex, who owns Fred's Franks, began preparing for today's cookout at 7 a.m., he felt confident that he made the right call. Sure enough, as if on cue, both sunshine and customers appear at noon.
On a nice day, spotting Rex on the lake is an annual rite of spring. Walkers, runners, stroller-pushers, and other fresh-air junkies might be circling Quannapowitt year round. But when Rex and his tow-along Big Green Egg grill reappear, locals from Wakefield and the surrounding towns come out in droves.
From the back of a homemade red wooden trailer, Rex grills hot dogs, kielbasa, chorizo, and linguiça to order over hardwood lump charcoal with a touch of apple wood. He has been working this spot near the Route 128 rotary five days a week—spring through fall—ever since he was laid off from his job four years ago. He had been at the electronics company Trilogic Systems for 17 years until Suntron bought it.
For his new venture, Rex decided to grill franks over wood because “there was no place around here to get a great dog.” Over the years, the lakeside operation has undergone several iterations. Rex started by cooking on a Weber Smokey Joe but it was inefficient, fuel-wise, “keeping a fire going seven or eight hours a day.” The Big Green Egg (see related story below) maintains a high temperature consistently and holds moisture.
The entrepreneur also used to lug everything to his site in a wooden boat he had made, then put out tables and chairs—these, of course, had to be taken down and set up daily—but that managed to both annoy a local official and physically wear Rex out. The efficient design of his current operation owes much to lessons learned “through trial by fire,” he says.
Places to sit are now limited to the public benches facing the lake. Customers step up to the trailer to place orders with Rex's helper (today it's Hannah Gregorio), who grabs buns from the built-in trunk and snatches chips from clips on the underside of the cedar-shingled roof. At the other end of the trailer, Fred grills under the shelter of the roof. The Big Green Egg is housed in a cart with an easy-to-clean stainless steel top.
If you examine the trailer's counters closely, you'll spy a crown branded into the pine. This is Rex's own “maker mark,” the crown a nod to his last name, which means king in Latin.
While awaiting their orders, customers fill fresh buns and bulkie rolls with chopped onion, sauerkraut, hot cherry peppers, and other toppings from built-in condiment holders. If a customer is willing, Rex will fill the bun with his own special “yin-yang” mixture: a combination of mayonnaise, Rosoff sweet sauerkraut, and Cholula hot sauce, topped with chopped sweet onion.
The sun is now blazing so Rex sheds his colorful knit cap and dons sunglasses. Using a bungee-cord pulley, he raises the porcelain cooker's ponderous lid to retrieve some meat. A gust of wind snatches a puff of smoke and perfumes the group of waiting lunchers. Natural-casing all-beef franks are nicely crisp and snap when bitten. “The standard dog at Fred's is crispy,” he says. “So if you don't want it crispy, just tell me. I want it the way you want it.”
“Done just right,” announces Somerville resident Ron Boudreau about his deeply browned dog with crosshatch grill marks. “I haven't had a hot dog since he folded up the stand last year. And I cook a lot at home,” he says. “Once, I picked up my wife, who works in Woburn, to take her to lunch here. She was expecting a steam cart with hot dogs. I told her, 'I wouldn't take you for just any hot dog.' “
Rex, 51, stocks only locally made Pearl brand hot dogs, which he's been eating since he was 14. To outfit his trailer, he has a system down pat. The night before, he slits all the dogs. Mornings at 5:30 a.m., he orders bread, which he picks up later at the Atlantic Food Mart en route from his Reading home. Icing the coolers, stocking the sodas, and loading the trailer begins at 7 a.m. In iffy weather, he decides if he should go to the lake, and posts a notice on his website by 9 a.m.
When he arrives lakeside at 10 a.m., he sees which direction the wind is blowing, because direct gusts make the grill burn hotter. Then he parks the trailer to block the wind and begins setting up. His customers, mostly men, with an equal balance of suits and work boots, often arrive before he's open.
Rex now takes winters off. “From the beginning, the plan was to work for six months a year,” he says. He lives very simply, but enjoys a more fulfilling life, taking care of his 83-year-old mother and visiting a sister and her children in Colorado to cook, fly, and ski.
In Wakefield, customers who want to grab a bite at Fred's Franks need a bit of luck—and some planning. Rex isn't there in inclement weather and will only grill dogs and sausages until he runs out. Also, he's open only for lunch. Though Fred's Franks has been a weekday business, this year Rex dropped Mondays and began setting up on Saturdays instead.
“I have a lot of customers who say they'd like to bring their wife, kids, or husband, but can't do that during the week,” says Rex. And he doesn't seem to tire of doing the same packing and unpacking routine every day. “What can I say? I really still get a buzz out of putting a hot dog on a bun and watching someone's eyes light up when they take a bite.”
By Genevieve Rajewski | St. Petersburg Times, September 5, 2004
Coney Island's nearly footnote status in our New York guidebook had hinted that it no longer claims its early 20th-century title, “Playground of the World.” So my husband and I had not expected a trip there to transport us back in time.
Still, this expectation extended to the eerily barren landscape of the 1970s cult-classic film, The Warriors. So when we arrived on the W subway, the utter emptiness of the station's platform left us edgy and debating whether we should bolt for the next train and the 45-minute trip to midtown Manhattan.
Fortunately, the neon lights of Nathan's Famous Frankfurters beckoned from across the desolate street, and we agreed to at least grab dinner before leaving.
Nathan Handwerker, a Polish immigrant, didn't invent hot dogs (though he once worked at Feltman's, the Coney Island restaurant cited by some as the one that did). But when he opened his stand in 1916, he was the first to sell hot dogs for a nickel, half the cost of those sold elsewhere.
Despite the overcast sky and lack of pedestrian traffic, Nathan's buzzed with activity. We ordered two original hot dogs topped with sauerkraut and onions, fresh-cut fries and lemonade. We savored our meal outside, surrounded by diverse young families and Russian-speaking teenagers.
Sitting at Nathan's, it was hard to imagine deserted Surf Avenue as ever having teemed with lights and life. But we had seen photographs of Coney Island's heyday, when people packed shoulder to shoulder across the beach, an elephant-shaped hotel rose above Surf Avenue and flappers posed coyly next to the world's largest swimming pool.
In the early 20th century, Coney Island saw three major amusement parks flourish. Each was more fantastical than the one before, full of animal acts, ballrooms and dangerously wild rides that would now likely reap lawsuits.
At Steeplechase Park, men and women flouted the conservative mores of the day by hugging each other on the park's signature Steeplechase Ride, a sort of mechanical horse race.
Folks also lined up for bizarre rides such as the Grinder, a machine in which people were squeezed through soft rollers, and the Human Roulette Wheel, which started with riders on a spinning wheel and revolved until all were thrown clear.
Luna Park featured the revolutionary Trip to the Moon ride. The park's Epcot-besting skyline was full of minarets, pagodas and other exotic structures that took on an ethereal quality when lit at night. An unfathomable million lights lit Dreamland, which had a Spanish-style tower and featured attractions with moralistic tones.
Nearly everything from this period has been lost over decades to spectacular fires in the earlier years and later to demolitions spurred by financial failures.
Yet some vestiges of Coney's glory remain, and these we hunted. From Surf Avenue, we headed for the boardwalk, drawn by the towering red silhouette of the Parachute Jump.
Nicknamed “Brooklyn's Eiffel Tower,” the Parachute Jump was originally developed as a training device for U.S. soldiers. It debuted as an amusement ride at the 1939 New York World's Fair and was reconstructed at Steeplechase Park in 1941. Until 1964, you could be strapped into canvas seats that whisked you 250 feet into the air before letting you drift back to earth under a parachute.
The wide boardwalk led us past the now parachuteless tower to a more isolated area, where we were rewarded with another echo from Coney's past: the former Childs Restaurant, an ornate building dating to 1924.
Brightly glazed terra-cotta friezes on the building's archways depicted frolicking fish and King Neptune; above, chipped stucco revealed the brick beneath.
We retraced our steps to Steeplechase Pier, which jutted into the roiling Atlantic. As we strolled the pier, we paused to watch families and old men cast fishing lines and lower traps full of raw chicken into the water.
Nearby, a flock of black-headed gulls dipped and jerked in the air like marionettes. Below them, a group of children, laughing and feinting, tossed minnows into the air.
In the early 1900s, Coney Island had a host of sideshows featuring “human curiosities.” Dreamland created Lilliputia, an experimental community of 300 little people living in a half-scale city. So-called 10-in-1 sideshows featured people with medical conditions, such as conjoined twins and alligator boys, plus sword swallowers and tattooed ladies, and “exotic” peoples.
The 10-in-1 tradition lives on today at Sideshows by the Seashore, which nonprofit Coney Island USA runs in a more enlightened though still campy vein.
Unfortunately, the theater was closed during our visit. However, Shoot the Freak, a sideshow of another sort all together, was open and doing a thriving business.
We first noticed Shoot the Freak when we saw “Live human targets! Real paint ball guns!” spray-painted on a wall behind a pit near the amusements area. Then we heard the barker, a teenage boy, droning, “Come on: Shoot the freak.”
Morbidly curious, we ventured closer. A teenager paid $3 for five shots and assumed a shooting stance, his girlfriend looking bored. In the pit was a teenager wearing what looked like a baseball catcher's gear. With a resigned sigh, he lifted up a paint-splattered sheet of plywood to shield himself.
Before the shooting could begin, we hurried off.
A ride on the Cyclone, the world's most imitated roller coaster, seemed likely to be less ethically comprising.
Opened in 1927, the Cyclone was built on the site of what some call the world's first roller coaster: the Switchback Railway. Built in 1884, the Switchback Railway hit a top speed of 6 mph as it coasted down a rolling wooden track between two towers.
Its gravity-driven design required passengers to get out halfway through the ride, so the cars could be manually towed to the second hill's top for the return trip.
The Cyclone promised a more thrilling experience. Thanks to its minuscule lot size of 75 by 500 feet, the coaster seemed to tower out of a parking lot. I felt an uneasy shift in my stomach when we settled into a cramped seat. But I figured that once we made it past the initial rickety ascent and plunge, the rest of the ride would be fairly tame.
However, after dropping 85 feet at a 60-degree angle, the Cyclone blazed through eight more drops. Traveling 60 mph over the wooden tracks, we spun and climbed and dropped again and again, crossing under tracks so low my husband feared his hands might get lopped off if he held them up for too long.
When the coaster rattled back into the station, the attendant offered to let us both ride again for the price of one. I could only mutter, “I feel sick.”
Something less stomach-churning was definitely in order, so we made for the Wonder Wheel, a 150-foot Ferris wheel built in 1920.
The brilliant red and green Wonder Wheel is known for its 16 swinging passenger cars, which rock and slide down S-shaped tracks within the wheel's circumference. You can choose this adventurous route or opt for one of the eight stationary cars by lining up under the appropriate sign before boarding.
Or you can simply do as we did: The attendant asked, “Chicken?” as he took our tickets, and we nodded yes.
No hokey audio commentary was piped into our car. There were only the groans and shudders of the swinging cars above and beneath us. Far below, tots circled on a miniature roller coaster, the Break-Dancer spun teenagers madly around to hip-hop music and the Spook-a-rama gave couples an excuse to bind to each other in the dark.
As our car swayed gently at the top, we looked at the seemingly infinite Atlantic coastline, the tiny-looking Empire State Building and the soon-to-be-twinkling New York City skyline. Dreamland's lights may have dimmed forever, but magic remained.
Nonprofit Coney Island USA (www.coneyislandusa.com) organizes many events, such as the annual Mermaid Parade on the first Saturday of summer, and preservation efforts. It is an excellent source of information and ideas for visitors. Its online shop sells a walking tour map for $6.
Nathan's Famous Frankfurters, 1310 Surf Ave. at Stillwell Avenue, Brooklyn. For more information, call 718 946-2202; www.nathansfamous.com
Coney Island has two main amusement parks off the boardwalk, as well as batting cages, go-kart tracks and arcades:
Astroland Amusement Park, 1000 Surf Ave. corner of W 10th Street, Brooklyn. For more information, call (718) 372-0275; www.astroland.com While Astroland is known for the Cyclone roller coaster, you'll also find bumper cars, a water flume and several rides for children. “Pay One Prize” wristbands cost $21.99 per person and are available on weekdays. Otherwise, adult rides cost $2 to $5 each; kiddie rides cost $2 each or 10 rides for $18; and the Cyclone costs $5 (ride again for $4). The park is open daily from June 18 to Sept. 6 and weekends only from Sept. 6 to mid October. Hours are noon to midnight, weather permitting.
Deno's Wonder Wheel Park, 3059 Denos Vourderis Place formerly W 12th Street, Brooklyn. For more information, call (718) 372-2592; www.wonderwheel.com This park features five adult rides, including the landmark Wonder Wheel, and 17 kiddie rides. Tickets for the adult rides are $4 to $5; you can buy a pack of five for $18. Tickets for kiddie rides cost $2 each or $18 for 10 rides. The park is open daily from Memorial Day through Labor Day with a fireworks show at 9:30 p.m. every Friday night. It is open weekends in April, May, September and October. Hours are noon to 9, weather permitting.
Sideshows by the Seashore, Surf Avenue at West 12th Street, Brooklyn. For more information, call 718 372-5159; www.coneyisland.com
The 10-in-1 tradition lives on in the historic 1917 former Child's Restaurant building, which also once housed Dave Rosen's Wonderland Circus Sideshow. There is a Freak Bar (serving beer) and gift shop, and both the inside and outside are decorated in canvas sideshow banners. From Memorial Day weekend through Labor Day weekend, the full cast performs from 2 to 8 p.m. Fridays and from 1 to 11 p.m. Saturdays and Sundays. Additionally, the show is open with a reduced cast on Wednesdays and Thursdays from 2 to 8 p.m., depending on the weather. Tickets are $5 for adults and $3 for children 11 and younger.
Capt. Bob's Historic Coney Island Tour, departs from Nathan's Famous Frankfurters, Stillwell Avenue at Surf Avenue, Brooklyn. For more information, call 718 372-8091; www.captainbob.8k.com
Every Saturday and Sunday, rain or shine, historian and “former Belize jungle guide” Capt. Bob leads a tour of the Coney Island boardwalk, the old bathhouses and noteworthy restaurants while sharing the history of the Cyclone, the Steeplechase ride, the Parachute Jump and the hot dog. Tours take place at noon and 2 p.m. and cost $12 per person.
By Genevieve Rajewski | The Boston Globe, March 10, 2002
Don’t go to New Orleans for Mardi Gras. Go to glimpse lush gardens through wrought-iron gates. Go for the strains of ragtime music wafting out of Preservation Hall.
Or, by all means, go to rub shoulders with locals as men in muscle shirts yell “Stella!”The moment my husband and I heard of the Stella Shouting Contest, we were determined to witness the spectacle for ourselves. Held every March as part of the Tennessee Williams Literary Festival, the “Stell-off” pits 20 men and women against each other for the best interpretation of the infamous scene from the play A Streetcar Named Desire.
Fortunately, the contest coincided with our planned long weekend in New Orleans. We wanted a good view, so we arrived at Jackson Square early. However, instead of securing great seats, we found ourselves wondering whether there was a contest at all.
Twice, my husband and I checked in at the literary festival’s headquarters at Le Petit Theatre de Vieux Carré. The first time, we received what sounded like legitimate instructions: “The contest starts around 4. People start lining up around 3:30 or so, about three-quarters of the way down the square.”
Only there was no sign of a line at 3:30 or even at 4. There were jugglers, fortunetellers, families playing in the park, and mule-drawn carriages awaiting passengers at the square’s edge. But there wasn’t one Stanley Kowalski wannabe in sight.
After waiting, and more inquiries, and more waiting, we saw a man leave festival headquarters, carrying a chalkboard on which was written “Stella!” As he set down the chalkboard, a crowd materialized. A line began to form. People with cameras lowered themselves to the curb. Cries of “Stellaaaaaaaaaaaaaa” rang out from passersby.
Before traveling to New Orleans, we rented the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire. In it, Marlon Brando’s Stanley—remorseful after hitting Kim Hunter’s pregnant Stella in a drunken rage—hollers for her to return from the neighbor’s apartment in which she has sought refuge. After this viewing, my husband mentioned that he might try Stella-shouting.
I nudged him toward the growing line. It was already eight people deep.
Once registered for the contest, my husband sat by my side, smiling sheepishly and holding his place card (#9). Shortly thereafter, the emcee welcomed the crowd and explained how the contest works.
Each contestant gets three “yells” to direct to their “spouse,” who stands on a balcony overlooking the square. Men yell for Stella’s attention, women for Stanley’s. The judges – a random group that included author Dakin Williams (Tennessee’s brother), movie critic Rex Reed, and actress Stephanie Zimbalist (from the ’80s television show Remington Steele) – then select five finalists to compete on the venerable stage of Le Petit Theatre.
Stella and Stanley waved from the balcony. With his slicked back hair and tight, white T-shirt, Stanley looked authentic, like the young Brando. With her parasol and pinned-up bouffant, however, Stella resembled Scarlett O’Hara more than the scrappy woman created by Tennessee Williams.
The first contestant sported tight jeans and a scowl and had a cigarette pack tucked into the sleeve of his T-shirt. There was an expectant hush as he entered the clearing in the crowd’s center.
“Stell. Laaaaaa,” he yelled. “Stell. Laaaaaaa!”
“It’s one name, sugar,” Stella called back.
An appreciative roar greeted this interruption. Stella’s heckling, apparently, is a large part of the contest’s appeal.
Undeterred, Stanley #1 finished with his two-word approach. (Despite Stella’s drawling reprimand, this proved successful: Stanley #1 went on to the finals.) He was followed in quick succession by, among others:• A Stanley who stripped down to a tank top, doused himself with a bottle of water, and shook his fists at the sky.
• A business-casual Stanley who seemed to be losing Stella due to a poor cell phone connection. (“Hey, Stella, are you still there? Stella?”)
• An older Stella who shouted for Stanley as if he was going deaf after 45 years of marriage.
Despite the obvious limitations of word choice, each contestant was like no other.
My husband looked somewhat nervous about jumping into a mix largely made up of Louisiana and Texas natives, but the small cheer after his introduction visibly steeled him.
He may not have found glory and reached the finals, but once back in the audience, he received back slaps and congratulations from all sides.
And we both certainly found more than we went looking for – including the knowledge that we could rely on the kindness of strangers.
The Stella Shouting Contest preliminaries will be held in Jackson Square on Sunday, March 24 at 4:30 p.m., with the finals on the Le Petit Theatre Main Stage at 5:30 p.m. It is free and open to the public.
This year’s Tennessee Williams Literary Festival takes place from March 20 through March 24. Programs include panel discussions, theatrical performances, walking tours, musical performances, and a book fair.
For a schedule or more information, call 504-581-1144 or visit www.tennesseewilliams.net. You can purchase tickets for the following events through TicketWeb, at 1-800-965-4827, or www.tennesseewilliams.net. Advance ticket purchase is recommended for all events.
The Bed and Breakfast Reservation Service (1-800-729-4640, www.historiclodging.com) represents a variety of guesthouses in every section of the city. Rates range from $75 to $200. The service can often find rooms on short notice.
The Omni Royal Orleans (621 St. Louis St., 1-800-843-6664, www.omnihotels.com) is the host hotel of the festival. Rooms start at $249.
Tennessee completed A Streetcar Named Desire at the Hotel Maison de Ville (727 Toulouse St., 1-800-634-1600, www.maisondeville.com), where he was a regular guest in room number nine. Rooms start at $235.
You can enjoy samples from leading New Orleans chefs, cookbook signings, and swing music at the festival’s New Orleans Cooks & Books event. It takes place Sunday at 11:30 a.m. in the Royal Orleans Grand Ballroom (621 St. Louis St.). Tickets cost $25.
Tennessee’s favorite restaurant, Galatoire’s (209 Bourbon St., 504-525-2021) serves French cuisine in a formal setting. In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stella took Blanche here while Stanley played poker.
The following restaurants will celebrate the festival with special prix fixe menus or menu items inspired by food and drink references in Tennessee’s works. Reservations fill quickly, so call early.
Arnaud’s Restaurant (813 Bienville St., 504-523-5433)
The Bistro, Hotel Maison de Ville (727 Toulouse St., 504-528-9206)
Brennan’s Restaurant (417 Royal St., 504-525-9711)
The Clock Bar, Chateau Sonesta Hotel (800 Iberville St., 504-586-0800)
Cobalt (333 St. Charles Avenue, 504-565-5595)
Crescent City Brewhouse (527 Decatur St., 504-522-0571)
Dickie Brennan’s Steakhouse (716 Iberville St., 504-522-2467)
Dominique’s, Maison Dupuy Hotel (1001 Toulouse St., 504-522-8800)
The French Quarter Bar, The Ritz-Carlton (921 Canal St., 504-524-1331)
Grill Room, Windsor Court Hotel (300 Gravier St., 504-522-1992)
Gumbo Shop (630 St. Peter St., 504-525-1486)
Herbsaint (701 St. Charles Ave., 504-524-4114)
Maison Bleu (228 Camp St., 504-571-7500)
Marisol (437 Esplanade Ave., 504-943-1912)
Muriel’s Jackson Square (801 Chartres St., 504-568-1885)
Palace Café (605 Canal St., 504-523-1661)
Peristyle (1041 Dumaine St., 504-593-9535)
Quarter Scene Restaurant (900 Dumaine St., 504-522-6533)
Red Fish Grill (115 Bourbon St., 504-598-1200)
Restaurant August (301 Tchoupitoulas St., 504-299-9777)
Stella! (1032 Chartres St., 504-587-0091)
Upperline (1413 Upperline St., 504-891-9822)
On Saturday at 5 p.m., Brennan’s Restaurant (417 Royal St.) will host Tennessee Sips: A Wine and Word Pairing. Created by Gourmet magazine wine consultant Michael Green, the event will feature wines that evoke the characters and atmosphere of Tennessee’s works. Tickets cost $25.
Offered Friday and Saturday at 4 p.m., the festival’s one-hour Cocktail Tour will visit the fabled drinking establishments of New Orleans. Tickets cost $20; beverages are sold separately.
Tennessee patronized Lafitte’s Blacksmith Shop (941 Bourbon St.), the oldest building in the French Quarter and the rumored former front for a group of pirates. Dimly lit by candles at night, the cozy, cave-like bar seems a world apart from the rest of raucous Bourbon Street.
The festival’s eight walking tours—which include an African American heritage, a gay heritage, and a cradle of jazz tour—provide a great opportunity to soak up some sun. Tickets cost $20 per person.
By Genevieve Rajewski | The Bark, May/June 2006
Staring at the x-ray screen at Boston’s Logan International Airport, Tara Kennedy did not know what to think.
After circling and sniffing the suitcase in question, her dog, Lily, a six-year veteran of the U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s Beagle Brigade, had confidently sat down—the signal that agricultural products are hidden within.
However, the x-ray machine revealed nothing more than clothing, the usual personal effects and several boxes of legal cigars.
Open it up, Kennedy told the x-ray technician.
An initial search of the bag indeed yielded only the items seen on-screen. But the cigar boxes turned out to have a secret. Each contained a row of cigar-shaped German sausages, complete with decorative paper bands—tacky and probably tasty souvenirs that, unfortunately for their owner, would never leave the customs area.
It was a typical day for the beagle and her handler at Logan’s international terminal, where two things are for certain. When you go sniffing around someone’s suitcases you never know what you’ll find inside—a butchered hog, crocodile meat, land snails, live pigeons. And if there is meat, produce or plants to be found, a beagle’s nose trumps x-rays every time.
Although “detector dog” often evokes the image of tough-looking shepherds searching for narcotics or bombs, sunny-tempered beagles are equally important members of the CBP’s canine team. Nationwide, Beagle Brigade teams patrol international airports, land border ports of entry and major international mail facilities, where they help inspectors seize about 75,000 prohibited agricultural products a year.
Contraband beef, mangos and tulip bulbs certainly aren’t scary on the surface. However, they and other agricultural imports can harbor devastating threats to the U.S. food supply and economy.
Together, CBP agriculture inspectors and their U.S. Department of Agriculture counterparts intercept about 2 million agricultural products each year. The seized goods include more than 295,000 lots of unauthorized meat and animal byproducts that could carry diseases to poultry and livestock.
Kennedy says the Beagle Brigade always refers to its watch list and only seizes meat “from areas that are known to carry disease in the particular type of meat we are seizing.”
As an example, Jim Silviero, who works at Miami International Airport, describes a llama fetus his female beagle, Q-T, found on a passenger from Peru. “It was some kind of religious article. But llamas can carry cattle diseases, and Peru does have foot and mouth disease, so it was confiscated.”
Anyone who recalls the news footage of U.K. travelers scrubbing their shoes with bleach can understand this measure to stop such an import from leaving the airport. All confiscated meat is incinerated on site.
In addition, CBP agriculture inspectors and their USDA counterparts found nearly 55,000 exotic plant pests last fiscal year, including diseases and noxious weeds. Intercepted fruits and vegetables are checked for foreign pests and destroyed. Preserved insects and plant material are sent for further inspection and identification to USDA specialists.
“If you made a list of the 100 worst insect pests in the country right now, probably 99 of them have come from overseas,” says Robert Tracy, entomologist for the USDA’s inspection station in Linden, N.J. Al Falco, the officer in charge, agrees: “Japanese beetles, gypsy moths—all the common pests we are trying to control now—were originally exotic.”
Tiny Mediterranean and Oriental fruit flies—found in fruit seized by the Beagle Brigade—can multiply quickly and decimate a crop should they hitch a direct or connecting flight to Florida or California.
Also costing the nation hundreds of millions of dollars to control are diseases imported into the country on plants, according to Martin Feinstein, a USDA plant pathologist at the Linden, N.J., facility.
These include citrus canker, which has damaged citrus crops and residential plantings in many Florida counties after arriving from endemic areas of Asia, and sudden oak death, an exotic disease of oak and other woody species that has killed tens of thousands of oak and tanoak trees in California and threatens the U.S. ecosystem wherever susceptible flora flourish.
Of course, an awkward aspect of patrolling for potential threats is that—unlike those smuggling explosives or illegal drugs—passengers with agricultural goods often don’t realize they are doing anything wrong.
“[Passengers usually] aren’t bringing in stuff maliciously,” says Kennedy. “They are doing it so they can go out in their backyard and pick fresh lemons. Or it’s a special kind of meat their grandmother likes. It’s hard to explain why we are taking away their products. It’s only a possibility that the meat contains a virus. It’s only a possibility that the mango has insects.”
Working with beagles not only allows inspectors to clear passengers faster and with more accuracy, but it also keeps the process objective and free from profiling.
“Let’s face it, I put everything on Lily,” says Kennedy. When people get angry about being searched, she explains, “I’m sorry, m’am or sir, I’m only doing what my dog is telling me to do.”
In fact, the beagles’ secondary role as goodwill ambassadors was one reason they were chosen to work among travelers. In addition to the high food drive that makes them so trainable and a hound’s predilection to follow their noses, beagles are far from intimidating.
“They’re small, cute. People want to touch them,” says Kennedy. “Most people think I’m walking my dog. They don’t notice my badge or uniform. They don’t even notice [Lily’s] uniform, which she wears to emphasize that she is a working dog.”
Kennedy appreciates being able to work without adding stress to the terminal, which is hectic enough when 200 people are getting their bags among jostling baggage carts and whirring carousels.
When Lily subtly sits by a traveler, Kennedy asks if they are carrying any fruit, meat, vegetables or plants—or if they have eaten anything during the flight that may have left a residual odor.
Even if they deny having anything on them, Kennedy has learned to trust Lily.
“Show me,” Kennedy instructs Lilly, and show her Lily does: quickly, but gently, striking the exact location of the smell with her paw.
When a prohibited item is uncovered, Lily receives a food reward, while the passenger usually gets a warning and the item taken away.
“I choose carefully who I fine,” Kennedy says, citing the time her former canine partner Casey found six plants sewn into the lining of a passenger’s jacket. “I [had] no hesitation fining someone who obviously knew that bringing in plants and soil was not allowed.”
Sometimes the scope of the intentional smuggling surprises even veteran CBP inspectors.
On June 28, 2004, Silviero stopped to question a passenger from Cuba, when Q-T sat at the base of the woman’s motorized wheelchair.
“So I got down on the floor and looked, and I saw some things strapped underneath it,” recalls Silverio. “I questioned the woman, and she acted like she had no idea. I reached under and pulled out a black cloth bag. Inside, there were four plastic tubes, and I peeked in them and saw live birds.”
“There ended up being five of those cloth bags with a total of 39 birds,” he continues. “I’d say half were already dead, and more died shortly after that from the stress of the travel.”
Under U.S. federal law, imported birds must be placed in quarantine upon arrival as a safeguard against the numerous diseases they can carry. “Of course, right now, there is a lot of talk about the bird flu,” says Silverio. “There is also a lot of concern about diseases that would be harmful to the poultry industry, like Newcastle disease.”
Interestingly enough, the Beagle Brigade is not trained to ferret out wildlife.
However, animal scents most likely cause the dogs’ natural hunting instincts to kick in, says Kennedy, and the dogs respond by alerting officers to the unusual contraband. The officers reward their beagles—even though they are acting outside their training—because live animals can host so many diseases.
“We also have the [gratitude] of Fish and Wildlife inspectors [for] the endangered live species that have been saved by our beagles’ curious noses,” says Kennedy, whose beagle partners have discovered live pigeons, parrots and even endangered Egyptian turtles that were eventually returned safely to their native country
Instinct may lead dogs to detect animals, but the beagles’ agricultural finds require extensive and ongoing training on how to—and how not to—use their powerful noses.
Beagles undergo 10 to 13 weeks of training at the National Detector Dog Training Center in Orlando, Fl., depending on whether they will clear international travelers or vehicles, ships, containers and palletized materials. For the 40 to 46 teams the center trains each year, the center’s staff “may look at anywhere from five to 15 dogs to find one good candidate,” says Director Mike Smith.
Likely candidates—who must be between one and three years old and are not necessarily purebred—are often found in animal shelters but also come from private owners and breeders. The right dog is outgoing with a serious interest in food.
Dogs begin by learning to distinguish six key scents: mango, apple, citrus, pork, meat and plants with soil. The dogs receive food rewards for passively sitting when they locate target items hidden in loose cardboard boxes. As beagles’ skills improve, targets are placed in first soft, then hard suitcases and typical tourist items are added to the bags to simulate real airport situations.
“They start adding other foods commonly carried by passengers to make sure [the beagles] are bypassing chocolate, candy, crackers, peanut butter,” says Kennedy. “Products like apricot shampoo and coconut hand creams are added, too, to make sure that the dog is being very specific about whether he smells a fresh mango or mango shampoo.”
Not every candidate will make the grade. “Some dogs are just not as intelligent as we had thought; their food drive may be really high, but they just can’t grasp what is requested of them,” says Smith. Other dogs cannot concentrate amidst the commotion of the typical work environment or may turn out to have a preexisting medical condition, such as hip dysplasia, that will keep them from comfortably working.
All dogs, whether retired or flunked, are found homes through the center’s popular adoption program.
Once on the job, beagles spend four hours a week training “to keep them sharp” and work on any problem areas, according to Silviero. After six months, beagles sniff out prohibited material correctly 80 percent of the time. Their success rate rises to about 90 percent with two years’ experience, and some beagles have been known to recognize nearly 50 odors during their five- to seven-year career.
And while spectacular beagle busts—such as pounds and pounds of fresh fruit—make for great photo opportunities, Kennedy says Lily’s most impressive find was a single chestnut.
“It’s one thing for Lily to find a bag of fresh chestnuts, but it’s another to find one chestnut in a pocket when someone has a winter coat on over it,” says Kennedy. “I think that’s much more significant to find one tiny smell when there are so many other smells floating around.”
This ability is what makes dogs much more effective than machines for odor detection, says Dr. Larry Myers, a professor of veterinary medicine at Alabama's Auburn University and researcher at the school’s Institute for Biological Systems Detection.
“There are instruments that are certainly more sensitive than a dog is,” says Myers. “But dogs sample the air better, and they do it in what amounts to real-time. In a matter of a second or less, they can say, ‘yep, it’s there.’”
“I don’t want to make it out like dogs are magic: they’re not,” continues Myers. “But they are really pretty impressive. If there is a single chemical, or a ratio of chemicals, unique or pretty close to unique to a target, dogs can be trained to detect it. So take your drugs, your bombs, your off-flavor catfish, your termites—dogs can detect all of them.”
By Genevieve Rajewski | The Boston Phoenix, April 30–May 6, 2004
There’s something undeniably captivating about movies that chart their action using the device of a plane moving across a map of the world. Whether it’s Casablanca or Raiders of the Lost Ark, such a stylized international adventure always seems to brew romance, camaraderie, and foreign intrigue.
Of course, those three ingredients would just as easily make for a memorable evening on the town. So next time you head out for drinks, imagine the Hub and its environs as a map of the world and choose your drinks—or foreign destination—accordingly.
For example, should you wish to travel to Mexico, visit Olé Mexican Grill, which evokes Oaxaca with its hand-painted tiles and terra-cotta pottery. Here, you can wash down guacamole prepared tableside with an orange margarita, made with Hornitos, Cointreau, sour mix, orange juice, and lime juice. If you prefer your agave juice straight up, you can order the Monte Alban mezcal ($5) for a true Oaxacan touch. Six tequila flights ($6.50–$8) allow you to sample several aged tequilas and come with sangrita—spicy tomato juice traditionally used as a chaser in Mexico. The bar also stocks bottled Mexican beers ($3.75) including Carta Blanca, Sol, Pacifico, Tecate, Bohemia, Modelo Especial, and Negra Modelo.
If you’d rather hop the pond than head south of the border, try the Elephant & Castle. Although part of a chain, the downtown bar and restaurant has ample British spirit, thanks to its red British phone booth and convincing pub menu. If you like your drinks from the tap, order up a pint of Bass Ale ($4.75) or Boddingtons ($4.75). If you prefer your brew from a bottle, you can sample more from the UK, including Fuller’s London Pride ($4.50), Fuller’s ESB ($4.75), Old Speckled Hen ($5.75), Old Peculiar ($5.75), and Samuel Smith Pale Ale ($5.75) and Taddy Porter ($5.75). The bar also stocks several Scottish imports, including Belhaven Scottish Ale ($5.75), Belhaven St. Andrews ($5.75), and McEwans Scotch Ale ($4.50).
While in England, you may well want to cross the Channel, so to speak, using the MBTA’s Red Line. The reproduction Art Nouveau métro entrance at Sandrine’s Bistro isn’t the only Parisian touch that will transport you from Harvard Square to the City of Light. The bar makes a wonderful kir royale ($14)—a sweet, effervescent drink made with Champagne and crème de cassis, a black-currant cordial. You can also enjoy kir ($10) made with white wine and crème de cassis or an Alsatian Picon ($7), which features Kronenberg beer mixed with Picon, an orange bitter cordial.
From France, head due south and cross the metaphorical Pyrenees to savor Dalí Restaurant and Tapas Bar’s exceptional sangria ($5.50/glass; $18/liter; $30/two liters). Should you seek a Spanish drink that has yet to be co-opted by Tex-Mex chain restaurants, try one of several licores imported from Spain: sloe-berry pacharán ($6); orange-flavored Gran Torres ($6); vanilla-flavored Licor 43 ($6); anise-flavored Las Cadenas ($6); or Orujo de Galicia ($8)—a Spanish grappa. And should you be making merry with a group, order the porrón ($25), a communal drinking vessel filled with cava, a Spanish sparkling wine.
Imagine again a map of Europe; now move onward and upward to Jacob Wirth Restaurant, where beer lovers can enjoy a perpetual Oktoberfest. Boston’s second-oldest restaurant boasts an extensive menu of draft German beers ($4.25–$6.50/pint; $17–$28/pitcher): Spaten Lite, Spaten Optimator, Warsteiner Pilsner, Frankenheim Alt, Warsteiner Dunkel, Radeberger Pilsner, Paulaner Hefeweizen, Franziskaner Doppelbock Weissbier, Hoffbrau München, Ayinger Celebrator, or Clausthaler.
A taste of Poland is located, strangely enough, in Southie. At Café Polonia, you’ll find grzace (“warmers”), a traditional winter drink from Poland’s mountain regions. The beer warmer ($5.95), which comes in a glass stein, is steaming beer flavored with raspberry syrup and carnation. The wine warmer ($4.95), served in a hefty mug, features red wine mulled with carnation, ginger, and cinnamon. There are also several bottled beers ($4). Okocim, EB Pils, Zywiec, and Lorza are from Poland; Obolan is from the Ukraine; and Kalnapilis hails from Lithuania.
You can sample another of Poland’s favorite beverages in the country it is most synonymous with: Russia. In Brookline’s small and elegant Café St. Petersburg, diners wash down their meals with a number of homemade vodkas—including ones infused with lemon, horseradish, garlic and pepper, and cranberry.
While still in the East (or, er, Brookline), voyage to Fugakyu, where you’ll encounter a river of artful sushi boats and private booths. The Choya martini ($6.75) features Choya plum wine, vodka, and dry vermouth, while the sake martini ($5.75) contains sake, vodka, vermouth, and an olive. The Roy Yamaguchi sake ($29.95/375 milliliters) is homemade, and the house sake ($4.75/small; $7.78/large) is served warm. For a refreshingly sweet drink, try the Kinsen plum wine ($5.25). Meanwhile, several Japanese beers—including Kirin Ichiban ($4.75), Sapporo draft ($4.75), and Yebisu ($7.75)—appease those with less adventurous tastes.
From Japan, head southwest to India—or, rather, to the Bombay Club, in Harvard Square. In addition to Indian beers such as Flying Horse ($7.95) and Kingfisher ($4.95), the Indian restaurant and bar serves up two deceptively sweet cocktails. The Kama Sutra ($7.50) is a blend of Hpnotiq (which is itself a blend of cognac, vodka, and tropical-fruit juices), pineapple rum, triple sec, and a squeeze of lime. The potent Indian Flame ($7.50) features citrus vodka, Licor 43, mango juice, grenadine, and a splash of soda water.
Next, set your drinking sails for a passage across Boston’s version of the Arabian Sea. Tucked away in the South End is Addis Red Sea, an outpost of Ethiopian cuisine that serves several African beers and wines. Tusker ($4.95) is a lager from Kenya; Harar ($4.25) is an Ethiopian Pilsner. More unique still are two honey wines imported from Ethiopia: Axum ($5.25/glass; $21/bottle) and Royal Mead ($5/glass; $21/bottle).
A trip to Cuchi Cuchi, in Central Square, takes you south of the Equator. Its clericó ($20/liter) is a sangria-like concoction from South America made with white wine, sparkling cider, and fresh fruit. The Pisco sour ($9) originated in either Chile or Peru (both claim responsibility). Cuchi Cuchi’s version features Pisco Capel (a Chilean brandy distilled from grapes), simple syrup, pasteurized egg whites, and a dash of bitters. The caipirinha ($10) hails from Brazil and here is made from lime slices muddled with sugar, Cachaça (Brazilian sugarcane liquor), and lime juice.
Grabbing one of the few bar tables at Chez Henri, in Cambridge, is the barhopping equivalent of outwitting US Customs by getting into Cuba itself. But it’s worth arriving early to be able to relish a Cuban sandwich along with the bar’s renowned mojito ($6.95). Other Cuban-style cocktails include the original daiquiri ($6) and a Havana special ($5) made with pineapple juice and rum. The flamingo ($5.25) features pineapple juice, rum, and grenadine over crushed ice, while the periodista (that’s Spanish for “journalist”) combines triple sec, apricot brandy, rum, sugar, and lime juice. The brisa ($7.25) is a potent mixture of Ketel One vodka, agua dulce, freshly squeezed grapefruit, and cranberry juice, served straight up.