Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, July 21, 1994 TAG: 9407220046
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 3 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Joel Achenbach
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
A: Cookies are the glory biscuit. Crackers just get kicked in the teeth. No respect. When was the last time someone passed along to you their favorite recipe for toll-house crackers or whatever? Is it even possible to make crackers at home? Come to think of it, what is a cracker, exactly? How much sugar would you have to add to a cracker to get it to be a cookie?
It is a world of mystery.
A cracker is basically a thin, crisp, simple biscuit. It's not as sweet as a cookie and is usually much thinner. (Should we go slower? Tell us if this is getting to be like one of our columns on quarks.)
You could argue that people don't make homemade crackers for the same reason that they don't make homemade Cheerios or homemade corn flakes or homemade butter. Crackers are a dull but necessary item the mass production of which is cause for great celebration.
But still: Wouldn't some snobs still have their own cracker recipes?
The cracker problem is a hardware problem. You have to bake crackers. But a normal home oven doesn't do a great job of drying them out enough to make them crisp. Oh, sure, you can make them crisp all right, but only by baking them until they're just burnt and desiccated.
``You'd end up with something that burned before you got it the right appearance,'' says Pat Mozeke, senior manager in charge of snack crackers for Nabisco Biscuit Co.
Nabisco uses ovens that are 297 feet long. The dough goes in one end on a metal mesh band and after a few minutes comes out the other end as a cracker. There are eight ``zones'' in the oven, each with its own little mission. Some zones are for drying the cracker, some for giving it the right color. Air circulates in a way that it doesn't in a home oven.
``You only have one zone to work in'' in your home oven, Mozeke says.
By the way, we have a slight problem with the corporate name ``Nabisco Biscuit Co.'' because Nabisco originally stood for National Biscuit Company. Basically the thing is now called the National Biscuit Company Biscuit Company.
Q: Why are baseball games stopped in the rain but not football games?
A: Baseball has no right calling itself a ``sport'' when it continues to cancel games simply because of inclement flooding. Football games, by contrast, are never rained out. Indeed, the Minnesota Vikings, before they had a domed stadium, played almost exclusively in blizzards. The snow was so deep some players had their own drifts. It was so cold, when they huddled up to call a play, they'd build a fire. These were men.
Meanwhile baseball players go mincing back to the dugout at the first sign of a dark cloud, practically. Why the big attitudinal dissimilarity between the two sports, climate-wise?
The proximate reason is that baseball simply cannot be played worth a dang in heavy rain. It is a finesse game with small margins of error. It's not that the slipping and sliding make the game frustrating so much as it makes the game dangerous.
For example, the mound will get muddy and the pitcher can't get good footing. That, combined with the slippery ball, will make it hard to find the strike zone and easy to throw a beanball. Another problem is that these huge sluggers can't hold onto the slippery bat - it could easily going flying into the stands.
The ultimate reason baseball games get rained out is that it's not a logistical disaster. A major league baseball team plays almost every day, 162 games a season, so it's no big deal to postpone a game. A pro football team plays only 16 games, hence the need to keep playing despite rain, snow, sleet, earthquakes, volcanoes and extremely bad officiating.
Mazda Millenia Update:
We continue to beaver away on the disturbing matter of the Mazda Millenia, specifically the fact that it is not the Mazda Millennia. We spoke to Rex Parker, sedan product manager for Mazda Motor of America, and he explained the thinking behind the name.
First, they decided that they wanted a name and not a number. Mazda has cars like the 626 and the 929, and they considered calling it an 828, but they wisely realized that it's not the most impressive appellation on Earth. ``It did not research very well,'' Parker said of the name ``Mazda 828'' (a slur that has often been leveled against the Why staff).
Any name they chose would begin with an M and end with an A, just like Mazda. The Mazda Miata had done well. The flow of the words has to be just so. They considered 250 names, including Meridia, Madeira and Mistra. They wanted a word that conveyed ``warmth, beauty, emotion, elegance, sportiness and fun.'' Millenia was chosen because it seemed to fit those requirements and because it also seemed timely, what with the millennium approaching.
So finally: Why did they spell the word wrong?
``In its full form with 10 letters it looked like it had a lot of filigree,'' said Parker, ``particularly the two Ns looked clustered and cluttered.''
They considered Milenia as a possible spelling but he said, ``It turned out that people in some parts of the country had trouble pronouncing it with one L and one N.''
Right. Could be My-lee-nia or Mile-nea.
Some purists at Mazda worried that Millenia was a misspelling. But others argued that it's not a word out of the dictionary exactly but rather a name, and it can be spelled any way they want.
For the record, we would have voted for Mylanta.
Washington Post Writers Group
by CNB