The Mystery of Fromage Blanc

Classic first phrase in french:  Qu'est-ce que cést?

"What is it?

The fromage (cheese) of France is world famous, and we've been learning some about it here in France.  For instance, certain cheeses have propriety names.  One cannot call your cheese Roquefort, unless the sheep who gave the milk for it ate from grass within a hundred miles of a certain group of caves, or something like that.  It's largely the same way with french wines.  We have several local proprietary cheeses, and we have enjoyed trying them out.  They aren't really cheap, but they are less expensive than if we would buy them in the US (which we never would, because of their expense).

But this is not about those cheeses.  This is about "fromage blanc", of which you can get a small bucket-full at a local store here for less than two euros.  It's literally "white cheese", but what does that mean?  We had heard that it could supplant yogurt, sour cream, whipping cream, ricotta cheese, and maybe some others.  So we had to try it.

We bought a mini-bucket yesterday and today added into some chili.  It is halfway between plain yogurt and sour cream, but thicker than either, and a bit cheesier than either.  Oh, the versatility!  Fromage blanc, you will be seeing more of us.

Which brings me to two somewhat random associations:

1.  Andrew Peterson's song of the Alien Cheese Juice.  This was found as a live version on his "Appendix A" where he sings that the queso at little mexican taquerias is really a mystery mind control device.  He sings "Mexico remembers the Alamo... In the temple of the Incas, there is a fountain flowing cheese dip.  Then they smuggle it to Texas, and they trick us with the free chips... What is that white stuff on my nachos?  It's too thin to be just cheese.  It's too thick to be just milk, in its sublime consistency."  (not exact quote)

2.  In high school, I once did a school project with a few friends where we filmed an advertisement for a product called "Creamy Cool Shave".  It was an aerosol cream that you could shave your face, shave your legs, spread on your toast, or just enjoy straight out of the can.  Who knew it was in France all this time?

A Very Old Thesis

I'm taking four weeks of Tropical Medicine here in Baltimore, and last week was "Vector-Borne Illnesses in the Tropics" or "Disease You Get From Bugs".  We had a lecture on Lyme Disease, which, as you know, is transmitted by ticks.  It's not a tropical disease, so I didn't think it should have been in the syllabus, but a rather odd thing happened during the lecture.

During the course, one of the "students", an Infectious Disease Doc from Mississippi, asked about STARI or Southern Tick-Associated Rash Illness.  The expert (who was quite a good lecturer, actually) said that the problem with STARI is that only one person had every isolated a Lyme-like bacteria from that kind of tick, a species called Borrelia lonestari, and no one had every been able to replicate that isolation.  Thus, most people thought that those southern ticks (a species called the lone star tick) caused a rash, but did not transmit bacterial infection.


Well, that was where I got quite excited.


And, if you don't know the rest of the story, you may be incredulous that I could get excited at that precise point.


But others of you know that, over 10 years ago, for my Honors Thesis at Belmont University, I did my one bench science project.  It was titled "The Presence of Lyme-like Bacteria in Sumner County, Tennessee".  Basically, I had heard about this new bacterium (though I thought 2 or 3 people had isolated it, even then), and went out to a Boy Scout camp outside Nashville and collected hundreds of ticks.  The methodology of that I won't go into, but suffice to say that, yes, in the process, I had a lot of ticks on me as well.


I took them back and ran a series of molecular tests on them to look for Borrelia lonestari.  And it was there.  I wrote my thesis.  I presented it a couple times.  Someone at another university offered to continue the work and maybe publish an article, but at the time, I saw that as only vain ambition, and it wasn't interesting to me.  It never occurred to me to think that anyone would find that information helpful in trying to figure out if STARI actually existed as a legit disease.  I left the results in the freezer at Belmont, and the two copies of my thesis on a shelf there.  I don't even have a copy myself.


So, after the Lyme lecture this week, I went up to the lecturer and told him that, over 10 years ago, I had isolated Borrelia lonestari.  He said, "Wow, so you were the one person?"  I said, "No.  I never published it.  I must have been the second person (thus showing that it could be replicated, that it likely did exist)."  He said, "Really?  You did?"  "Uh, yeah."


So he gave me the name of a tick-borne illness specialist in New York, and recommend that I let him know about this.  I sent him an email, and we'll see what comes of it.  I let my adviser from Belmont know, and he assured me that he still has a copy of my thesis.  I can't imagine that they still have the specimen in the freezer.


Lesson:  You never know how various strings of your life are woven.


Lesson:  Try to find out if your information or idea might be useful to someone else before you discard it.

Visiting "Focus Family"

Nestled away in the suburbs of Colorado Springs, with the snows of Pike's Peak in the background is the headquarters of Focus on the Family.  They have a visitor's center.  We tried to visit it in 2006, but they were closed for the Thanksgiving holidays.  Now we have had our revenge.

The pictures in this post are likely of little interest, save for a few people, and I am related to all of them.  There are, I guess, entire rooms and sections of the visitor center that are not directly related to Adventures in Odyssey, but I can't say that for certain.  And I may go back (after all, it's a free place for the kids to have a great time playing!), but I have little intention of explored the non-Odyssey sections.  And I know my family will resonate with that.  Without further ado, our visit to (as Maggie says) "Focus Family".

Outside the building

You have to take an elevator to the Odyssey section, but if you look closely, it's not really an elevator!  It's the Imagination Station, ready to transport you (and an obligatory novice friend who doesn't quite get it) off to another time, where a virtuous person of history is striving to make the right decisions!

Inside, just push the red button (behind Maggie)!

Here is the Whit's End soda shop.  We didn't buy anything there, but it's fun nonetheless.

After that, you have to travel through the Secret Passage, once used for transport of slaves during the Underground Railroad, to get to the rest of the areas.

I don't know who Maggie is supposed to be, because the only girls I can remember are Robyn, Lucy, and Donna Barclay, and I never pictured any of them with reddish pigtails.  But, in the back, there is a window into the KYDS radio station.

Maggie played with some of the puppets and costumes available for shows at "The Little Theater".

Out in the hallway, the staff offices (I guess) are all decorated with Odyssey names, such as this one as Bart Rathbone's Electric Palace.  There was also a "Harlow Doyle, Private Eye", and a theater poster for a Shakespearean drama starring Edwin (not Dr. Regis) Blackgaard.

Our kids hung out in the toddler room a good bit, which is painted to resemble Camp What-A-Nut.

And the best non-Odyssey moment went to the room that had a wardrobe, that you could open and walk through into a magical Narnia room (you may remember that FOTF did radio theater versions of many of the Narnia stories.)  It was like living a childhood dream.

Overall a great trip.  Things I would have liked to see:

• That secret room with all the knobs for controlling Whit's End
• Timmy's cabin, stayed in and possibly built by Johnny Appleseed
• Less of the cartoon characters from the videos, who never looked quite right to me (especially Eugene and Whit)
• A timeline of the various exploits of the Barclay family
• A timeline of the various generations of Odyssey children, whom I guess had to be retired when their voices changed.
• A to-scale model of Whit's End.  They had one from the outside, but it would have been fun to see how all the rooms fit together.

Maggie wants to go back.  Given that it's free and that my parents are coming out to visit, I foresee a good chance of this happening.