Hot, Hotter, Hottest

While he certainly didn't invent Cajun and creole cooking, few chefs have done as much to popularize those cuisines as Emeril Lagasse. Despite being born in Massachusetts, he is as much associated with the flavors of New Orleans as Mardi Gras and the French Quarter.  No "hint of this" or a "touch of that", the spices used there are decidedly in-your-face. Nothing exemplifies that more than his catch phrase as he cooks, where throws a little more spice into the dish while putting up his arms and yelling "Bam!" 

When asked what was in that "Bam!" he described a secret blend called "Essence of Emeril." Not really a secret, as you can buy it by the jar at your local grocery store, it is a combination of salt, paprika, spices, garlic, onion and black pepper. "Being me, I always kicked it up a notch, which means I would always elevate the spice level or the complexity of a particular dish. So, it was always like we're going to kick this up a little bit."

It's also true that one man's heat is another man's merely smoldering. To really raise the intensity many turn to other preparations such as Tabasco or Frank's. Indeed, an entire subcategory of condiments exist under the heading of pepper-based hot sauces. There you can find an almost endless variety from mild to downright incendiary. But while the low end might be a matter of taste, as you rise up the scale it becomes an objective measure of intensity. Back in 1912, pharmacologist William Scoville developed a system used to this day, wherein he dissolved a pepper in alcohol, then diluted it with sugar water. The result was given to five trained tasters in decreasing concentration, until at least three could no longer detect any heat. How many times it had to be diluted times 100 translated into the eponymous Scoville unit. 

So you start with bell and banana peppers that have no heat, and clock in at zero Scoville Heat Units or SHU. At the other end of the scale is the pure form of capsaicin, the active chemical in peppers that causes the sensation of heat in mammals (birds don't feel it). It registers at 16 million SHU. Along the way you have jalapenos which rate between 2500 and 8000 SHU, and serranos at 10,000 SHU. Higher up the scale are Bird's Eye Chilis, which are found in Thai and Indonesian cuisine and run to 100,000 SHU, and Habaneros in Mexican and West Indian food at 150,000 SHU. Beyond that it's less about adding flavor or bite, and more about adding pain.

Aficionados (also know as masochists) have tried for years to see just how hot they can go. Up until this month that meant the Carolina Reaper pepper. Developed by Ed Currie of South Carolina in 2013, the Reaper held the world's record for the hottest pepper at 1.64 million SHU. By comparison, the pepper spray the cops use is 1.6 million units and bear spray is 2.2 million units. Try putting that in your chili.

But Currie didn't stop there. He kicked drug and alcohol addiction, and considers the kick he gets from the heat a natural high. And so for the past decade he has been cross breeding the Reaper with others, trying to perfect a pepper that delivered "immediate, brutal heat." And this month he succeeded, releasing Pepper X, which has been rated the hottest pepper in the world by the Guinness Book of World Records, with an average rating of 2.69 million SHU.

What does that mean in in terms of taste? As one of only five people to actually eat an entire Pepper X, Currie said "I was feeling the heat for three-and-a-half hours. Then the cramps came. Those cramps are horrible. I was laid out flat on a marble wall for approximately an hour in the rain, groaning in pain." Natural high indeed.

While Pepper X is not yet available commercially, Currie has other seeds and sauces on sale through his store. There you can get Angry Irishman Franken Sauce or Smokin' Ed's Chocolate Strawberry Hot Sauce. Just be aware that all his products pack a punch. Put in Emeril terms, they take "Bam" up to nuclear explosion level. Which also helps to explain Currie's company name: PuckerButt Pepper Company.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford prefers Frank's Hot Sauce. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Lost Then Found

While we take thousands upon thousands of pictures these days, most exist only electronically. We might print out one from a wedding or a family reunion, but most never see the physical light of day. But before the advent of mass market electronic photography in the 1990's, we printed every picture because that was the only way to see them. While some were framed or put into albums, the vast majority disappeared into shoe boxes stuffed into the back of a closet. Regardless of where they resided, however, they almost all had one thing in common: they weren't labeled. Maybe there was a first name and date on the back, or something like "Our House," but just as likely they were anonymous.

As the generation that owned these historical artifacts downsized, moved or died, these historical records got shuffled and displaced. Eventually they might surface at a garage sale or antique shop. But most had no provenance, no trail or documented history. Indeed, most had little import and were worth next to nothing. Nothing, that is, except to the people who took them or were in the photos or related to those people. And that's where Aaron Turner comes in.

It started when he helped his grandmother sort and organize her pictures and discovered old photos of friends and kids she babysat for in the 1950's. He helped her research where those people were, package the photos up, then sent them out with a note saying that perhaps the recipient would appreciate these relics. The response was overwhelming: letter after letter came back, thanking her for her kindness. That instilled in him a keen sense of history and pictures, and led to his hobby of finding old photos and reuniting them with their owners or their descendants.

It started with an eBay store in 2001, where he bought and sold old items, earning enough to pay for college. But occasionally an old picture caught his eye. It might contain a handwritten note or an unusual name, a fragment of an address or something interesting in the background. Based on that scanty evidence he researched them using old maps, records and whatever he could find online. When he made a match he did a "cold mailing," sending the picture off with an explanatory note, with no request or expectation of payment. Needless to say, people were surprised to receive an item in the mail from their past from someone they didn't know. Was it a scam? Nope: it was just Aaron doing something he liked to do. 

By and large the result was delight and astonishment. He received hundreds of letters thanking him for his efforts, along with donations to his cause. As a hobby it became all-consuming and self-sustaining, so much so that he eventually quit his teaching job and got a second Masters degree, this time in library science and archival studies. Along the way he broadened his lost then found efforts, reuniting not just photos of people with their owners, but pictures of old houses, church and school programs and circulars, CB QSL cards, diplomas, and other personal mementos that would have been otherwise lost to history.

Occasionally Aaron will come across an entire old album from one family. Maybe it was misplaced or accidentally sold as part of an estate. If he can figure out an interested party, he will send them a note, explaining who he is and what he does, while offering it at cost. He takes pains to explain he is not extorting people for their old possessions, but reuniting them, and it's their choice to buy or not: "I am not wealthy enough to just buy and give it to you. I invest my own time and do the research it takes to figure out who these people are and then find you for free because, well, I just like to do that."

Aaron calls his efforts "random acts of genealogical kindness." But it's something more. He also volunteers at the Ohio Genealogical Society, curating their yearbook collection and writing articles for their bulletin, and speaks to local groups about the need to label and archive an individual's precious personal historical artifacts.  Otherwise, all those treasures will be lost and forgotten. Thankfully, Aaron likes to find them, and help us remember.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford has a number of photo albums, but needs to label them. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Who's That Lady?

If you had a baby girl way back in 2014, you might have named her Emma or Olivia or Sophie, the top three choices for that year. Or you might have dug deeper into the list, and gone with Harper (#19), Elizabeth (#44) or Sadie (#62). Had you gone just one step further in the rankings you would have chanced upon Alexa, a lovely name meaning "defender of man." A perfect name for a young girl with a promising future. 

And then came 2015 and the general release of Amazon's Echo.

The smart speaker that began the revolution gave you the option of answering to a "wake" word of "Amazon," "Echo" or "Computer." But most defaulted to the name of its underlying personal assistant software and called it "Alexa," tainting it for every generation to come. And now you have to go to all way to #536 to find that same name in the list of newborns.

Since then multiple AI based assistants have been rolled out by various companies, and the vast majority of them have female identifiers. Many use names not in general circulation, such as Siri (Apple) and Cortana (Microsoft). But the point of these things is to make them as human as possible, so calling it Vlingo or Brainia puts it one step behind before it even gets going. And so new systems are tagged with monikers more in the mainstream, with the hopes of having them feel like old friends rather than alien invaders. 

The latest example for this is the fast food arena. With 50% to 70% of customers opting to use the drive-up window, companies are looking for ways to streamline that process. And since that scenario is the perfect environment for an AI based intelligent voice response system (a limited list of choices, people talking directly into the microphone, no need of visual human presence), most are at least experimenting with machine-based ordering systems. Which brings us to Julia.

Julia is the computer ordering persona at hamburger chain White Castle. They have plans to roll her out to 100 drive-thru lanes by the end of 2024. She functions like a standard-issue human, asking for your order, telling you the total and then directing you to drive forward to the delivery window. She does have backup: if at any point she gets confused or a customer requests it, an actual person can come on to assist.

Julia joins Tori, the AI ordering system installed in some Panera locations. And while it doesn't have a nom-de-service, the AI ordering system in place at almost half the Checkers and Rally's fast food locations is also bilingual in Spanish, and capable of recognizing and responding in either language. Other players are also testing various systems across the country, including McDonald's, Taco Bell and Del Taco among others, with names to come. One benefit is that AI assistants are less shy about upselling to higher margin items, with the result that Popeyes says drink sales completed with their voice response system have actually increased. Assertive young women to be sure.

It's just one more instance of AI gaining a toehold in areas where human labor used to have no equal. And in the case of Julia, she is not just an order taker, but a lady boss. If your order includes fried foods, she might pass the request off to Flippy 2, a robot specifically designed to work the deep fryers. With no human intervention, it takes the raw chicken, potatoes or onion rings, drops them in the bubbling grease, cooks them to perfection then dumps them out in a tray to be packaged for customers. And her staff may expand: over at Jack In The Box, Flippy is joined by its sibling Sippy, an automated drink filling system.

Alexa and Julia are merely the latest in a throughline that began with HAL in Arhtur C. Clarke's "2001: A Space Odyssey," but they certainly won't be the last. Hopefully each will advance the state of the art, and become a force multiplier rather than take a Terminator-esque detour. But it's worth noting that the AI assistant Samantha in Spike Jonze's "Her" didn't go rogue because it murdered other people, but because it dated other people. We can only hope that our biggest problem with AI assistants won't be domination, but heartbreak. 

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is learning how to use voice commands with more things. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.

Yo Yo Yo Safety

I can't remember if I locked my car. I can't remember if I closed the window in the bedroom. I can't remember if I left the lights on downstairs, or which side the fork goes on, or what the color was of the shirt I wore yesterday. But ask me the lyrics of a particular song from Steely Dan or Fleetwood Mac or Stevie Wonder that I first heard 20 or more years ago, and I can recite it back no matter how nonsensical it seems. From Talking Heads: "We are vain and we are blind / I hate people when they're not polite / Psycho Killer / Qu'est-ce que c'est ? / fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa fa far better." Just be happy you are merely reading this, and can't hear me singing it.

For many, music is like that. It seems to dovetail with our brain waves in a way that makes it not only easier to remember but actually unforgettable. Back in the 1970's an advertising executive named David McCall noted this very phenomenon, wherein his young son couldn't remember his multiplication tables but could belt out the lyrics from the Rolling Stones. He pitched an idea to then ABC programming exec Michael Eisner (later head of Disney) to develop a Saturday morning series for kids in which educational concepts would be put to music. "Schoolhouse Rock!" ran in multiple iterations on and off over the next 40 years. Songs such as "Naughty Number Nine" on multiplication, "Rufus Xavier Sarsaparilla" about pronouns and "I'm Just a Bill" about the legislative process helped countless kids sing their way to a passing grade in math, English and social studies.

Now the Consumer Product Safety Commission is trying the same tack to get their messages out. Sure, they have PSA's that run on broadcast outlets, print ads and online reminders about food safety, health and a bevy of other topics. But figuring you should fish where the fish are, they have ventured into the music world where so many people old and young spend a great deal of their time. And rather than drop a product recall, they have dropped some tunes, in the form of an album called "We're Safety Now Haven't We."

In styles such as K-pop and hip hop, the songs are freely available to download and remix. They address bread and butter safety issues for younger people such as wearing a helmet when you ride your skateboard, using your cell phone responsibly and using fireworks safely. There are also tunes reminding you to check the smoke alarm in your home and to ride your ATV with the proper equipment. 

The lead track is "Protect Ya Noggin'" reminding listeners to tie their helmets on tight: "Ok let me flip scripts / Kick push, then I kick flip / I can do this all wearing lipstick / I got on a sick fit / Just one more accessory / Let me pick the helmet that will tie it all together please." It's also recorded in Spanish, where the hook "En la- en la calle / estés alerta / no seas cabeza hueca" translates as "In the - in the street / be alert / don't be an empty head." Then there's "Going Off Like Fireworks," which bows to the fact that people may use them, but need to do so safely: "Yea, we burning bright bright / So hot we might ignite nite / Smokin hot like noone else / gotta step back before I burn myself / Oh you're dangerous like dynamite / Let's set it off / Let's watch it light." And "Phone Away" repeats over a techno beat "You gotta put your phone away / On the sidewalk / On the dancefloor / When you're riding."

No, there're not "Hotel California" or "We Will Rock You" or "I Want To Hold Your Hand." But then again neither the Eagles, Queen nor the Beatles ever tried to write a song about smoke detectors, so some slack is due. But if they help make a dent in accidents involving young people, it's an effort worth making. The messages aren't new, it's just a new way of delivering them. After all whatever you do, you have to yo yo yo, do it safely. Word.

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Marc Wollin of Bedford is always looking for new music. His column appears regularly in The Record-Review, The Scarsdale Inquirer and online at http://www.glancingaskance.blogspot.com/, as well as via Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter.