Because... back at the ranch, quarks, and Ramble On

The thing, akin to Meanwhile in Russia, which i was trying to remember that Jack had mentioned, is Because China. i'm not too proud to admit that this Diesel Sweeties comic helped jog my brain. Curiously, if you type 'Meanwhile in Wisconsin' into google, you get pictures of some children playing beer pong and other, snow-related entries.

Also, the phrase 'Meanwhile, back at the ranch', is something super familiar. It's is a transitioner between scenes frequently encountered in Americana/Westerns, and the name of a book that appeared (starting sometime around 3 minutes) on the 90s-babies favorite Reading Rainbow.

Thing number two: the word Quark. Quark is both a soft cheese as well as an elementary particle. i was curious if the particle name stemmed from the cheese, but no. First, the cheese name Quark is Middle High German for curd. Basically, buttermilk is curdled and strained together overnight into a soft mass. Murray Gell-Mann named the elementary particle for a passage from James Joyce's Finnegan's Wake ("Then, in one of my occasional perusals of Finnegans Wake, by James Joyce, I came across the word "quark" in the phrase "Three quarks for Muster Mark". Since "quark" (meaning, for one thing, the cry of the gull) ...I argued, therefore, that perhaps one of the multiple sources of the cry "Three quarks for Muster Mark" might be "Three quarts for Mister Mark", in which case the pronunciation "kwork" would not be totally unjustified. In any case, the number three fitted perfectly the way quarks occur in nature " from Gell-Mann's The Quark and the Jaguar, via wikipedia). i do appreciate that the types of quarks and other elementary particles are referred to as flavors, and that the names themselves include top, down, up, bottom, strange and charm. Also from the wiki article, "In the past, bottom and top quarks were sometimes referred to as "beauty" and "truth" respectively, but these names have somewhat fallen out of use. While "truth" never did catch on, accelerator complexes devoted to massive production of bottom quarks are sometimes called "beauty factories"."

So, no, the particle is not named for the cheese, nor is the cheese named for an elementary particle, but i think it would have been very sweet (err) had someone just decided it was cheese all the way down.

Regarding a conversation i started with my labmate Ryan this afternoon, Led Zeppelin's Ramble On contains references to Tolkien's works. Robert Plant (and probably Jimmy Page) were Tolkien fans, though apparently Plant was embarrassed by the references. There are actually a ton of references to Tolkien in several Led Zeppelin songs, and they're pretty well threshed out in this article. As i mentioned to Ryan,  Led Zeppelin music is great for earphone listening because of it's occasional stereo sound effects (switching emphasis/vocals between ears). Anyway.