I’ve promised to deliver up two items a week to those of you gracious enough to subscribe to this ramshackle affair. On Thursdays, I will send out something substantial, and on Mondays, something amusing. Eventually, there will even be something extra for the paying subscribers only. Or, at least, that’s the plan.
First up for today, Altoona-style Pizza is not an outright abomination, but it is on the slippery slope.
Altoona-Style Pizza is a Sicilian-style pizza (though they might be offended to hear that). The pizza is cooked on a Sicilian pizza dough, which makes it thicker than many other types of pizza that you’ll find in the area.
The pizza is topped with tomato sauce, green bell peppers, peppercorn salami, and, most controversial, yellow American cheese. The yellow American cheese now typically replaces Velvetta cheese, which was the original cheese of choice.
Velveeta replaced by American cheese? Push the upgrade button again, Bro.
Never forget, it’s the photos that really sell it.
Apparently, it was invented in 1996, which means my late father, who was from Altoona but left in 1959, bears no personal responsibility for this atrocity.
In my most recent piece, “Chewing Jerky Makes Your Face More Formidable”, I noted that, in 1972, Oklahoma ham producer Tup Robertson didn’t know what jerky was. Because of that, I speculated,
…what we think we know about the history of jerky is probably wrong... I think we’re going to find, when we look at it, that there was a modern jerky revival starting in the 1960’s, one that was largely disconnected from the older jerky traditions of the 19th century American Southwest.
Yesterday, I did a little poking around in the newspaper archives and I’m now even more convinced that this is the case. For example, here’s a excerpt from the Long Beach Independent, March 3, 1960.
In 1960, the experts at the USDA and the Library of Congress hadn’t heard of beef jerky.
The archives show that, prior to the 1960s’s, jerky was very much a regional speciality item, largely sold in Arizona, New Mexico and Southern California, usually in Hispanic markets. It was mostly unknown outside the Southwest, as evidenced by the above.
Who vaulted jerky into a national product, and exactly when, is a question yet to be answered.
Finally, again, you learn something new every day. Via the Facebook page of a high school classmate in the cow business comes this unexpected bit of arcana: the hairstyle of your cow is tied to its temperament.
What? That can’t be right. That’s entirely too random to be possible.
But, a quick search, and it turns out that Temple Grandin, herself, says it’s true…
Dr. Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University and author of the best-selling book Animals in Translation, first noticed a connection between the location of a bull’s hair whorl and whether the animal was excitable when handled by humans. Studies showed that location — meaning above, between, or below the eyes — as well as shape of the whorl could be, to some extent, a predictor of excitable behavior in cattle. Grandin showed that whorls above a bull’s eyes — called high whorls –correlated with more excitable temperaments.
Okay, so how does this work?
It all has to do with brain development, says Dr. Amar Klar, head of the Developmental Genetics Section within the National Cancer Institute in Frederick, Maryland.
“Our skin and the nervous system come from the same layer of cells in embryonic development, the ectoderm,” Klar says.
As embryonic cells migrate to form a developing fetus, skin and brain cells are closely intertwined, particularly at the scalp.
You really have to read this article from Modern Farmer, “Cowlicks: The Hidden Complexity of a Cow’s Bad Hair Day”.
Turns out that hair whorls in most mammals are tied to lots of behavioral things, like handedness (or, in the case of horse and cows, footedness). So, a clockwise whorl in your hair usually means you’re right-handed, while counter-clockwise is left-handed.
But, handedness isn’t personality, right? Right?
Next you’ll be telling me that physiognomy is real.
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