On the hottest day of the year, a toast to ice!

Mark your calendars for November 2015. That’s when ice celebrates its 200th birthday.

The declaration will no doubt startle those who revere the literal word.

How could ice be only 200 years old when earth endured what is known as “The Ice Age” 20,000 years ago? 

Let me to explain.

Prior to 1815, ice was a substance that inspired one expression: profanity. It was slippery. It impeded motion. It made drinking water without a campfire difficult.

Sure, there may have been some Nordic types who reveled in ice, but that’s only because they had no choice. Guaranteed, go to Disney World this February and I’ll wager you dollars to lutefisk you’ll spend at least an hour standing in line with folks named Sven and Olga.

No one in their right mind chooses to live in landscapes dominated by ice. In fact, the only species that seems to do so is one the one famously ill-suited for any kind of mobility. That is the penguin.

It can’t fly, its webbed feet make migration impossible, and its lack of thumbs rule out the hitchhiking option. They seem like agile swimmers, but that can’t be or else they’d have long ago colonized places like Key West.

So we can all agree ice is a menace to hospitable living, right?

Wrong. And that’s why 1815 is a year to commemorate.

All hail Frederic Tudor!

He is to ice what Benjamin Franklin is to electricity. He didn’t invent it, but he realized its potential and harnessed it.

In fact, you could draw a line through history right at Tudor and 1815. On one side is barbarity, the other side civilization.

Tudor is the visionary who in 1806 gazed upon frozen New England ponds and saw gold.

Perhaps I’m drawn to celebrating him and his achievement because he seems like exactly the kind of guy with whom I could sit around and enjoy a cold beer.

And that was precisely the problem.

Cold drinks were an unheard of luxury back in the 19th century. No one ever dreamed ice had a utilitarian potential.

No one but Tudor. The third son of a wealthy Boston lawyer, he was a renown family layabout who’d skipped going to Harvard, as was his privilege, because he reasoned excessive study would bore him.

Sensing a kinship?

One day he and his rich brothers were enjoying an afternoon idyll with ice cream -- I like to imagine hammocks and really, really early Jimmy Buffett songs were involved -- when the oldest brother casually remarked what a pity it was that people in the sunbaked climes would never know what it was like to experience a chill.

The speculation immediately brain barnacled in the young Tudor’s head.

Why not, he wondered, take the chill to them?

It’s interesting to wonder if he considered mass moving equatorial people north in what would be a racially charged version of Make-A-Wish. Probably not. Taking ice in the other direction made more sense.

He’d spend the next six years and thousands of dollars of other people’s money trying to make that happen. 

With borrowed money he bought a freighter and set sail on a 1,500-mile journey with a cargo preposterous enough to earn ridicule from the Boston Gazette. This from the paper’s February 10, 1806:

“No joke. A vessel has cleared the Custom House for Martinique with a cargo of ice. We can only hope this doesn’t prove a slippery speculation.”

Who knew smart ass bloggers existed 200 years ago?

His early efforts were uniform failures that led him to long stretches in debtor’s prison. The ice kept obeying basic physics and melting from solid to slush to liquid then being too tuckered from the exertion to turn to steam.

My favorite part of the story is imaging him trying to explain to baffled islanders why he kept showing up on their shores with boats full of warm water.

A restless self-promoter, he’d carry a cooler of ice with him to restaurants to add to the glasses of fellow diners to create demand where none previously existed.

He never quit and history shows that on Nov. 1, 1815, Tudor succeeded in delivering 150 tons of ice to the Caribbean, a region that today is difficult to fathom without frozen daiquiris, pina coladas and other cocktails to slurp.

I suppose I’m drawn to his story because it so contrasts with mine. He never had access to cold liquor and changed the world.

I have access to plenty of cold liquor and rarely bother to change my profile picture.

I bare him no historical grudge. I can’t imagine enduring these forecasted scorchers without access to ice for my bourbon or to add refreshing chill to beer-filled coolers.

He’s a man who should be memorialized.

Anyone think a big ice sculpture is too obvious?

Sounds cool to me.

Ben Franklin, Rocky Balboa & The Wonder Nun

I’m in a Philadelphia hotel full of romance novelists and the only stranger who’s inspiring any real love is a 70-something nun.

Good thing I’m not on the make.

More than 700 romance novelists are nothing like you’d expect, that is if you’d expect romance novelists are like the vixens on the sexy covers of the bodice-rippers they all pen.

They look homely, fatigued and they seem to talk endlessly in elevators about how clever each of them is.

In short, they’re a lot like me only with successful careers in the writing field.

What they do makes what I do seem like small potatoes.

I’m here for three days with my family to do a story on the world’s toughest restaurant.

That’d be the 107-year-old Moshulu at Penn’s Landing. It’s been docked there along the Delaware River since 1996. It’s sizeable enough to satisfy the appetites of up to 2,000 diners a night in the exquisitely appointed spaces that used to be dreary cargo bays.

That’s heavy duty for fine dining, but it’s sissy stuff compared to what she’d been doing.

She traveled around Cape Horn in the world’s fiercest weather 54 times hauling coal, coke, copper ore, nitrate, lumber and grain. She was confiscated by Americans in one war and the Germans in another.

She’s clearly seen bringing immigrant Vito Corleone into New York harbor in “Godfather” and going toe-to-toe with Rocky Balboa in that classic.

We had a blast on board, and neither of the kids nor their father did anything that would cause the maitre d to make us walk the plank.

I love coming to Philadelphia for reasons the romance novelists try to inspire.

My top two man crushes will live forever in Philadelphia.

The first, of course, is Benjamin Franklin, a man so cool it’s a confounding surprise to learn he didn’t invent sun glasses.

He’s the Founding Father whose conceptual fingerprints are today on everything from the way Americans deliver mail (hang in there, USPS!), heat homes, fight community fires, patronize libraries, and, not incidentally, lead and inspire a world that before Franklin was uniformly ruled by monarchs, chieftains, and spiritual poobahs who wielded power based on an alchemic brew of birthright and superstition.

But to me his greatest invention often goes unmentioned.

Ben Franklin invented America.

He’s the spark that ignited the flame that became the American spirit. He’s can-do and no quit. He’s self-made and selfless. He’s Free Speech and free hors d'oeuvres. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Stacy Schiff describes him as “equal parts Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Ronald Reagan, and Bugs Bunny.”

My other love is for the fighter who by one sacrilegious standard is the greatest fighter in history. Sure, Muhammad Ali beat Joe Frazier, but Rocky Balboa, Philadelphia’s underdog everyman, is on some score cards kicking the butt of historical heavyweight Benjamin Franklin.

“To many people Rocky Balboa has become the identity of Philadelphia,” says Meryl Levitz, president of Greater Philadelphia Marketing and Tourism.

You sense that at the steps to the Philadelphia Museum of Art where the strains of “Gonna Fly Now” still reverberate. Running the Rocky steps is one of the history-rich city’s biggest tourist attractions. Books have been written about what it means to people who scale the steps.

Jo-Jo and I did on Thursday. We ran clear to the top then duked it out on the spot where Rocky does his triumphant dance.

The 10-year-old disputes the result, but I contend the scorecards have me kicking her butt.

That was far from the best ass-kicking story told near the Rocky statue that day.

That would be the nun.

The Rocky statue is in a little park-like area just off the foot of the steps. There was a line of people about 20 deep waiting to take their pictures in front of the statue.

There were old and young, tattooed and reserved, the whole human panoply.

Still, the nun with the tripod stood out.

She was in line behind us. We didn’t even know she was there until we’d snapped our pictures.

As we walked away, we saw her set up a tripod; she was all alone.

We turned to watch and soak in more of the joyful atmosphere.

This frail, slight woman stood before the triumphant statue and raised her hands.

She yelled, “I beat cancer this year and this picture is going to be on the front of all my Christmas cards!”

And that’s the abbreviated story of the nun who loved Rocky.

Think you can beat that one, you published honeys of the romance novel world?

Go ahead. Take your best shot.

I am becoming left handed

I may not be the best writer, but I’ll wager I’m the only writer who can do 10 regulation Army pull-ups and juggle.

Not simultaneously. Not yet.

It’s probably not the kind of boast you’d hear from writers like Stephen King or John Grisham, but it suits me.

If even hack psychologists diagnose I’m trying to compensate for so many professional shortcomings, so be it.

I like the fact that if I ever had to arm wrestle either of those two best-selling titans I’d have them both screaming uncle and racing back to their limos.

But that achievement will pale in comparison to my next great quest.

I’m becoming left handed. I’ve been willing myself to cease using my dominant right hand for all the menial tasks I reflexively summon it to do.

It dawned on me years ago the laziest part of my whole ever-loving lazy body was my deadbeat left hand. The right hand did everything and when it came to doing even the least of motor skills, my left hand never bothered to lift a finger.

It was unfair. It was like a marriage where the one spouse good-naturedly does all the work while the other one sits around and schemes of doing things like becoming left-handed.

But I digress.

So now I brush my teeth, shave, work the computer mouse and do things like button shirts with my left hand.

I  still wouldn’t trust the southpaw to toss darts when there’s a pregnant woman within 10 feet of the cork, but it can certainly lift a 12-ounce beer mug every once in a while.

Our over-reliance on our dominant hands throws our whole bodies out of balance.

It’s true. Ask any tailor. They’ll tell you our dominant hands are as much as an inch longer than the ones that do little more than dangle. Can you imagine how the progression of such natural atrophy could effect people who make sleeves?

My goal is pure ambidexterity. 

It’s just so cool not to mention, well, handy. Both Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci were ambidextrous and would paint with both hands, switching when ever one got tired. British artist Sir Edwin Henry Landseer (1802-1873) was famous for drawing with both hands simultaneously -- a horse’s head with one hand, a buck’s antlered head with the other.

Benjamin Franklin was ambidextrous and signed both the Declaration of the Indpendence and the Constitution left-handed. That he didn’t think to sign one right handed and the other lefty is the only intellectual blemish on America’s greatest rascal.

This isn’t purely theoretical. Painful misadventure will result in many of us one day winding up in slings. Worst case scenario: What if during one of my midnight strolls I stumble into a bear with a palate so discriminating it consumes only right arms?

Much of my motivation comes from being a really bad writer -- and not the occupational kind, although skimpy professional accomplishments heave the subject into question.

It’s my handwriting. It is atrocious. Elegant penmanship is something I so admire. It’s a vanishing art I turned my back on in about the fifth grade when I saw Jon Logue writing in little block letters and thought it looked really neat.

Today, it’s impossible for me to writing anything in cursive beyond my own name, a pathetic scrawl that.

So I’ve for years been resenting my right hand. Even what little I ask it to do, it does poorly. If it were a second baseman, I’d yank it from the line-up and give the new kid a shot.

That’s what I’ve been doing with my left hand.

My goal is to learn to sign my name left handed in a more stylish flourish than I do with my right. That’d be a good gauge of success.

Studies show a direct correlation between involvement in motor skill exercises and brain growth. Our brains sleep walk through routine tasks, but comes alive when we challenge it with unfamiliar tasks.

My ultimate goal is the increase my brain power to a density sufficient enough to differentiate between foolhardy tasks and ones that might lead to actual income

And I hope observers will one day be able to detect results more tangible than equidistant arms that look snazzy in sleeves.

Being known as someone who writes badly with both hands would be professionally unwise for an otherwise even-handed guy like me.

Dining on dinos to end world hunger

I was at a professional dinner recently seated with three women, all avid travelers, who were sharing stories about the most exotic meals they’d ever consumed.

That meant my role was to sit there biting on my spoon with sufficient force to ensure that neither food nor stupid observations would spill from my mouth.

Of course, I couldn’t help myself. I made about four offbeat observations that left the ladies looking at me the way cows look at passing trains.

I’m fascinated by global eating habits. What on this continent is revered as delicacy is over on that one reviled as repugnant. People cuddle dogs over here while over there they think nothing of tossing them in the wok with rice, carrots and bok choy.

I judge not.

I understand we’re running out of food and believe we’ll all need to alter our diets to meet rising demands. Who knows? Maybe one day we’ll be getting our roughage from things like tree bark.

I have to imagine that would clean out the system more effectively than iceberg lettuce.

It might even become a delicacy. Fancy restaurants might serve things like dogwood salad -- and wouldn’t that bark have some bite!

One woman said a language misunderstanding once tricked her into eating squid. This was repulsive to her, she said, because she was a great admirer of the squid.

I told her I admired Benjamin Franklin, Mark Twain and Bugs Bunny.

She said squid is more intelligent than dolphin. She saw a documentary that showed a squid reach way around and with one of its eight arms and give an unsuspecting shrimp a distracting tap on the opposite shrimpy shoulder.

I told her I’d seen Moe pull a similar trick on Curly. I asked if she thought that’s where the squid had seen it. Now, that would have been evidence of true intelligence.

She ignored me.

“When the shrimp looked the other way, the squid seized it and ate it!”

She was confusing intelligence with treachery. There are multi-million dollar international bounties on the heads of notorious outlaws who use similar tactics.

One woman startled the table when she said she’d once eaten cat brains.

“That’s disgusting!” said the squid lover. “How could anyone do that to a cat?”

“Bullshit,” I blurted out. “Cats don’t have brains.”

Turns out we’d misheard her. She’d said calf brains.

The women asked about the texture, how it tasted and if the flavor’d been enhanced with French sea salt.

I asked if it cost more to dine on a smart calf brain than that of a dunce.

She pretended she didn’t hear me, but I thought it was a good question. Certainly, if given a choice, I’d pay more to eat the brain of Stephen Hawking over, say, Ashton Kutcher purely for health reasons.

No nutritionalist would advocate consuming something that’s been dead for so long.

I thought it was a great question and evidence that my brain should be worth more than hers.

As I mentioned, I was struggling to keep quiet, but the topic was so energizing it was hopeless, especially when talk turned to how to feed a world with exploding population.

That’s when I threw one of my big pet theories on the table. And I mean really big.

“World hunger will be eliminated,” I said, “in 20 years when scientists learn to farm dinosaurs.”

A typical sauropod, the largest animal ever to roam the earth, weighed up to 70 tons and on a football field could have its tail tip at midfield and its nose be breaching the goal line (dingbat on-field refs would still need to go to the replay booth to confirm its snout broke the plain).

Imagine the immensity.

Just one sauropod could feed a family of four for 123 years, provided the family had a freezer the size of your typical Chuck E. Cheese.

I chose the sauropod over the T-Rex for dietary reasons. Sauropods ate exclusively plants and other heart-healthy offerings while T-Rex ate things like, well, sauropods.

Of course, their diets were certainly better than ours, assuming things like Hershey bars and Big Macs were unavailable 140 million years ago.

Sadly, my grand theory was met by looks of stunned silence. It was clear they were intellectually incapable of grasping the genius of my idea.

Must not have eaten enough brain food.

Kites, phones & a Bell

I'm so convinced multi-tasking is detrimental to true efficiency that I refuse to walk and chew gum at the same time.

This puts me at odds with the rest of the productive world and in happy harmony with one of the world’s most renown geniuses.

That would be Alexander Graham Bell.

I had the opportunity to work on a very enjoyable story this week for msnbc.com about the Zilker Park Kite Festival today in Austin, Texas. 

Among the many things I learned is I want to spend more time among people who fly kites, a global phenomenon that predates Christianity by 200 years. Kite people are splendid and artistic problem solvers who allow their inner 6 year olds to emerge anytime it gets a little windy.

I don’t know whether they get high as their kites, but they act like they do. They are perfectly at peace. Near the eve of the biggest kite festivals of the year, the participants conveyed no tension. 

It has me wondering why “Go fly a kite” ever became such a nasty putdown. It should be something doctors recommend instead of things like Valium.

So I intend to go fly a kite in the very near future. And I’ll, as I usually do, leave my smart phone behind.

I’ve had mine a month now and am pleased to report there’s no danger of it  enslaved me.

It provides so many marvelous conveniences, but that only makes me more aware of the need to keep its seductions at bay.

And that brings me to the man whose name in phone history towers above even Steve Jobs.

That’d be A.G. Bell, a man I confess to having known little about prior to this week. I thought he was a Yank like me, but he was a hosehead. Who knew?

Yes, he was born March 3, 1847, in Edinburg, Scotland, and at age 23 moved to Nova Scotia where he resided until his death August 2, 1922, at age of 75, bearing a mirthful resemblance to St. Nick. The  Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in the provincial town of Baddeck not far from his estate.

Bell, of course, is famous for having been issued the patent for the first telephone on -- anniversary alert -- March 7, 1876. Remember that tomorrow the instant your phone rings.

Here’s a thought: What sound would the original phone have registered if it had been invented by a man named Alexander Graham Horn?

I was surprised a story of kites would lead me to Baddeck, but I wanted to include some history of kites and was stumbled into illumination that Bell was an avid and life-long kiter.

“Alexander Graham Bell spent his whole life tinkering with kites and in 1909 constructed these enormous monstrosities capable of lifting grown men 100-feet in the air, ” says Bell museum superintendent Eddie Kennedy. “He was a genius, but a child at heart. He adored kites.”

And that wasn’t even the most fascinating thing Kennedy told me. It turns out the man credited with inventing the now ubiquitous form of communication was uneasy about how they’d be used.

“He said he didn’t think anyone would want one in his home or his office because the phone would be too much a distraction,” Kennedy said. Talk visionary.

Think about that. The man who invented the device was ambivalent about its apps about 130 years before apps about things like angry birds became an international insanity.

Looks like I have a new hero to research and, like another hero of mine, Ben Franklin, he, too, was into kites.

So soon as it gets windy, I’m going to go find a really spiffy kite and a long line of thread I can unspool into the distant winds.

And, yeah, first thing I’ll do is see if my distracting little smartphone has an app for that.

A disdain toward multi-tasking doesn’t preclude a kinship to cool.