The Taste of Kap.itan.o (Part 2)

---

When my age was in single figures, my teacher taught the class that there are four basic flavours detectable by the tongue - sweet, salt, sour and bitter. The tongue has "sweet" receptors on the tip, "salty" further back, followed by "sour" and "bitter" near the throat.

The upshot of this was (a) there are only four flavours and their combinations in the whole wide world and all the others are illusions and (b) if you put chocolate on the back of your tongue...you can't taste it!

So I tried it, and was rather puzzled to find I could indeed taste it. So I did the same with the rest of the packet just to be sure - eventually concluding that (a) chocolate is very very nice and (b) I must somehow be doing it wrong.

I wasn't quite sure what it meant to call a taste sensation "unreal" - it felt rather like my parents telling me I didn't really have a headache, I only thought I did. so I just filed it with the other daft things adults said - like "Jesus made the little butterflies" and "If you don't suffer you won't succeed".

When my age was in double figures I read about the mysterious fifth tongue flavour of "umami" - also called "savoury", "meaty" and "monosodium glutamate". And a different teacher taught the class that, because the tongue only tastes four flavours, when we think we're tasting other things, we're actually smelling them - but around the back of the nasal cavity.

And that's why you can't taste much when you hold your nose. I wasn't entirely clear on why blocking the front of your nose should stop air circulating around the back, but I tried it and it seemed to work. Besides, the teacher lent me a book by Stephen Jay Gould, for which I'm eternally grateful.

Now that my age is in five figures - at least as measured in days - I'm ready for the truth. Namely that almost everything I was taught is complete bollocks.

There's 40 or so kinds of taste receptors spread evenly on the tongue, plus 300 or so kinds of smell receptors in an area the size of a postage stamp behind the nose. Thus the flavour of a piece of cheese might be a dozen tastes and two dozen smells, all experienced in shifting proportions as I chew it.

This is clearly too difficult for the seven year old Kapitano to understand. My teachers were right to mislead me slightly. Either that or they didn't know what they were talking about.

---

If I had a dollar every time someone said their computer had a virus...I'd ask for British money instead so I could spend it.

In this case the "virus in Windows" turned out to be a hard disk that wouldn't boot up. So after taking the laptop apart, cleaning it, checking connections, reassembling and finding it made no difference, it's going back to the vendor, with strict instructions to the owner that he deny it was ever taken apart.

Especially that we used a kitchen knife because we couldn't find a screwdriver.

---

I'm told I should go to Libya to teach, because they have a shortage of English teachers, and living is incredibly cheap. I'm also told I should go to Saudi Arabia, because they have a shortage of English teachers, and the pay is astronomical - so I'd leave rich but insane and/or dead. And I should go to the Czech Republic, because they have a shortage of English teachers but the fastest expanding economy in Europe. Turkey needs teachers too.

But first I'm going to ask the college down the road if they have a shortage of teachers for their English-for-immigrants courses. This would mean teaching Czechs (here to work before returning home), Saudis (here to study before returning home) and the occasional Libyan or Turk.

---