I'm Taking A Break, But Some More Good Stuff Is Coming -- Stay Tuned -- February 5, 2022

Come back in about six hours.

Word for the day: haimish. Or heimish. Definition  here.

I first saw this word in this ad which appeared on my blog.

My wife and I love babka. Not sure if we would have known much about it except for "that" Seinfeld episode. Looks like a drive to Central Market to get a chocolate babka today. It's still a bit cool outside today -- you know, that dreaded Texas winter storm -- and a babka would make the house feel so cozy and haimish. Will need to get two loaves; one for Sophia's family.

I thought "babka"had a Russian root but I was wrong. Apparently, Polish, baba:

How did babka get its name?

It started when Jews on Shabbat took leftover challah and twisted it with seeds and nuts, such as poppy seeds and walnuts. 

The word 'babka' means grandmother, referring to the grandmothers on Shabbat who made this out of the leftover challah. 

Chocolate wasn't added to babka until Jews arrived in New York.

And there you have it, your cocktail party trivia for tonight. 

The twins call me "Papa." Perhaps we can get them to call their grandmother, "baba." 

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The Book Page

Again, if interested in origin of solar system, earth, fossil fuel, origin of life, this is currently the best new book on the market right now for armchair/amateur biologists, geologists, fossil fuel aficionados. 

• How The Mountains Grew
• John Dvorak
• c. 2021
• Pegasus Books, August 2021

From the book, pages 293 - 297:

Throughout the Cenozoic Period (modern), the Atlantic Ocean has been opening and the North American [tectonic] Plate has been moving westward, as both continue to do today.

For forty million years the Farallon Plate [a Pacific Ocean plate] collided with the North American Plate all along the western boundary ... but that changed when an edge of the NAP had moved far enough west to begin to override the oceanic spreading center ... and at that moment, the San Andreas fault was born.

As the North American Plate continued its westward movement, it ran over more and more of the Farallon Plate, lengthening the San Andreas fault ... today the fault runs for four hundred miles from Cape Mendocino [in the Bay area] to the eastern edge of the Salton Sea.

The Salton Sea could someday be renamed the "Lithium Sea." More on this later.

The San Andreas Fault run remarkably straight for more than four hundred miles from Cape Mendocino to the southern end of Carrizo Plain. There there is the first of two large bends, first to the left, and then to the right, before it ends at the Salton Sea. 

About six million years ago, the southern position of the San Andreas Fault jumped a few hundred miles south and east to a point on the NAP. That caused a slab of North America to shear off and swing away from the continent. The slab is the peninsula of Baja California. The new seaway being formed and continues to grow wider between Baja California and the North America is the Gulf of California. 

And so, though much of South California and all of Baja California were once part of North America, both are now firmly attached to and are moving slowly in a northwest direction as part of the Pacific Plate.

[The same separation is happening all along the San Andreas Fault, north to Mendocino.]

And so it is conceivable, given the current state of earthquake activity, that the plate boundary could shift again and, in the distant future, essentially, the entire state of California will detach from the North American Plate, become part of the Pacific Plate, and drift slowly as a collection of large islands into the northern Pacific Ocean. 

For some, it cannot happen soon enough. 

Note:

The San Andreas Fault is also responsible for the three main corridors that are land connections into and out of the Los Angeles Basin. All of the interstate highways, main railways and most of the pipelines, water lines, and power lines that link the basin to the rest of the continent run through one of these narrow corridors, through what would otherwise be a long line of continuous high mountains. And it is at each of these points -- Tejon Pass north of Los Angeles, Cajon Pass north of San Bernardino, and San Gorgonio Pass east of San Bernardino that the  San Andreas Fault cuts through the mountains. 

The three passes:

• Gorgonio Pass: I-10 and the UNP railroad.
• Cajon Pass: BNSF and UNP railroads; I-15 does not traverse Cajon Pass but rather the nearby Cajon Summit.
• Tejon Pass: the "Grapevine," I-5.

My hunch: we are "way overdue" for a major San Andreas / southern California earthquake. Maybe our grandchildren will get to hear reports of same some day.