27 Per Week
Just for the record, I formally state that while I am male,
I am not muddled. That’s one of the
differences between a mathematician and an engineer. Math guys are not muddled. We are often socially inept (98.7%), prone to
staring off into space, make strange jokes, dress poorly, and live in mental
monasteries where few choose to enter.
Most people would vaccinate themselves against us if there were such a
vaccine. There isn’t. Further, have you ever thought to ask just
who the NSA is hiring to do all the real work at the giant new NSA snooping site
in Utah and the existing sites around the world? The answer is mathematicians. The “Revenge of the Nerds” movie is coming to
your world but not as fiction. For
better or worse, we are taking over the world.
You won’t feel a thing. Do not
adjust your dial. It’s too late.
For myself, I personally blame my current condition on
ducks. My father, who was a lawyer,
loved to hunt ducks. It was impossible
for me and my brother (1 year younger than I) to avoid being initially caught
up in the enthusiasm. When I was 12 we
would get up in the dark every Saturday morning beginning in October, drive in
our 1953 Oldsmobile from Salt Lake to a small pond on some guy’s farm west of
Brigham City, wade out to our homemade blinds, and blast away at the migrating
birds. In those days the limit was 6
ducks a day but if you had 3 ducks that were pintails or widgeon you could
shoot 9. There were lots of these bonus
ducks on the little pond. The hunting
was great and so on Saturday night we would return with a gunnysack containing
27 dead and feathered ducks. On Sunday
we would spend hours picking, cleaning, and on occasion using paraffin for
pinfeathers until we had all 27 ducks ready for the kitchen. In those days nobody had a freezer, in fact,
early in my life some guy brought a block of ice to our house each day to put
in the refrigerator, which was therefore always stuffed with, well, you know,
ducks.
I thought that bringing all this provender home would
delight my mother. Wrong. While her family of Nimrods were all so
puffed up with testosterone and pride, she had to figure out what to do with
the 27 ducks before the next weekend. We
were 5 in number so one option would be to eat duck every night from Monday
until Friday. Every week. For months.
You can only cook a duck so many ways, none worth fossil fuel. It wasn’t too long before I learned to hate
ducks as food. You hate beets? Turnips?
Liver? Mush? (I note parenthetically that on mother’s oatmeal box there was a
skull and crossbones that she covered up).
Try duck ala daily, flavored with lead shot, for the entire season known
as fall. But we just kept shooting them
on Saturdays. Soon we began to give them
away but after a little while it was literally the case that people who were
our friends and potential duck sinks set up watch posts for our car and would
close curtains, turn off lights, and hide in storm cellars when we hit their
street. We were bringing the plague of
ducks to them. If only these had been
pheasants. In my mother’s exchange rate
1 pheasant has the same value as 2,342,132 ducks. And a goose, why it’s nothing more than a
morbidly obese duck. And the trunk of
our car smelled like a dead, wet duck.
The aroma of cooking ducks bonded with the wall paint in our house and
was not removable.
The upshot of all this is that I became a mathematician
because I spent so much time counting ducks and people we knew, figuring out
all the permutations of how many birds we could shed with each soon-to-former
friend. I began to appreciate and
understand the concept of infinity. May
there be no duck eating in heaven.
2 comments:
You know Chris, you may want to try ducks again. Now that you have aged and your tastes have become more gourmet you may find these birds ($30 each at stores) prepared with the right receipe delicious. By the way, I have some extra breast fillets I would be happy to drop by.
By the way....I would a lot rather hunt ducks than struggle with Calculus.
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