summer

Amy Poehler on Her First Summer Job

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

A delightful piece by Amy Poehler, past cast member on Saturday Night Live and star of Parks and Recreation on NBC, on her first summer job and how it was a catalyst for her to go into acting:

Chadwick’s was one of those fake old-timey restaurants. The menus were written in swoopy cursive. The staff wore Styrofoam boaters and ruffled white shirts with bow ties. Jangly music blared from a player piano as children climbed on counters. If the style of the restaurant was old-fashioned, the parenting that went on there was distinctly modern. Moms and dads would patiently recite every item on the menu to their squirming five-year-olds, as if the many flavors of ice cream represented all the unique ways they were loved.

There was a performance element to the job that I found appealing, to begin with. Every time a customer was celebrating a birthday, an employee had to bang a drum that hung from the ceiling, and play the kazoo, and encourage the entire restaurant to join him or her in a sing-along. Other employees would ring cowbells and blow noisemakers. I would stand on a chair and loudly announce, “Ladies and gentlemen, we are so happy to have you at Chadwick’s today, but we are especially happy to have Kevin! Because it’s Kevin’s birthday today! So, at the sound of the drum, please join me in singing Kevin a very happy birthday!”

I wasn’t sure yet that I wanted to be an actor. I was planning to go to Boston College as an English major and maybe become a teacher, like both of my parents. But when I stood in the dining room and demanded attention I was reminded of things I already secretly knew about myself. I wasn’t shy, I liked to be looked at, and making people laugh released a certain kind of hot lava into my body that made me feel like a queen.

I love this line: “It’s important to know when it’s time to turn in your kazoo.”

###

If you’re a subscriber to The New Yorker like I am, I highly recommend the entire series:

“Piano Man” by Jeremy Denk

“Caught Napping” by Nicole Holofcener

“Labors” by Norman Rush

“Pure Bleach” by Ed Ruscha

The Invention of the Ice Cream Cone

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

With summer here, it’s good to reflect on America’s favorite dessert: ice cream. Per this brief New York Times article, the first ice cream cone was popularized (invented?) at the 1904 World’s Fair by a Syrian vendor:

America was on the cusp of an agricultural golden age as the first gas-powered tractors plowed fields and bumper crops spilled out of silos. People who gaped with wonder at the abundance at the fair may well have longed for a way to sample it immediately. According to eyewitness accounts, Ernest Hamwi, a Syrian concessions vendor, invented a way to make that possible: he curled a waffle cookie and transformed it into a receptacle for ice cream. This freed tourists to climb miniature Tyrolean Alps or witness the creation of the earth while slurping ice cream. No plates. No spoons. It was a revelation.

I’ll be making a few visits to Bruster’s ice cream in the next few months, to be sure.

The Mathematics of a Swimsuit

readingbyeugene Leave a comment

The New Yorker is currently presenting its Swimsuit issue, and one of the more interesting pieces comes from Gregory Buck, a mathematician. In the piece “A Mathematician Goes to the Beach,” Buck considers the mathematics of the swimsuit, breaking out terms such as visual volatility and singularity:

The job of a swimsuit is to uphold decency while you hang out in places where people might, conceivably, swim. We can think of this decency, this modesty, as a load or strain the suit must bear. Different suit designs solve this problem in different ways, though each must take into account the regions which must be covered (RMBCs). There has, it’s well known, been a considerable decline in the percentage of skin area covered by swimsuits over the last hundred years (which has increased visual volatility—dramatic swings to both ends of the attraction/repulsion spectrum). As the suit becomes smaller and smaller, each square inch takes on more and more of the weight of propriety.

The equation here is pretty straightforward. For example, let DL represent the total decency load. DL has been declining with time, but can be considered fixed during any given beach season. Let SA be the surface area of the suit, and SK the surface area of the skin. Then if VV is the visual volatility, we have:

equation,jpg.jpg

The proper mathematical way to look at this is to say that since, as the suit shrinks, a finite decency mass is concentrated into an ever smaller region, the decency density grows larger and larger—growing toward infinity. This point of infinite density is called a singularity. So we have that each RMBC has an associated singularity. And each beach-goer, on each beach, has an associated decency surface, with some number of singularities. The first thing a mathematician does, when faced with a surface or space with singularities, is, naturally enough, count them. A most unusual aspect of this particular singularity problem is that the count is culturally dependent—in fact there are countries where the sum is less than it is in the United States. I have heard that there are beaches where a bather’s decency surface might have no singularities at all, a prospect I have not the courage to consider.

Hilarious and enlightening.