Popcorn

It is very hard for me to go to the movies without ordering a big bag of buttery popcorn. This Thanksgiving weekend was no different.

While I chomped down on the fluffy, yet crunchy goodness, I wondered how popcorn became so popular in America. At that moment, I knew I had found another MUSE!

After the movie, I went back to my writer’s studio to research POPCORN. Don’t’ tell anybody, but I popped another bowlful when I got there. I munched and munched while unraveling the history of this popular snack. Here is what I found:

The oldest ears of popcorn were found in a cave in New Mexico. These ears are believed to be around 4000 years old.

Native Americans were the first to eat popcorn. Some believed that little spirits lived within the corn, and when heated, the little spirits became angry. They would pop out of their little homes and disappear as a tiny cloud of steam.

Some Native American tribes also used popcorn for ceremonial use. The Aztecs wore headdresses adorned with popcorn. They would also decorate statues of the corn god with popcorn.

Traveling closer in time, Charles Cretors invented the first mobile popcorn popper in 1893. People could cart this machine around to fairs and expositions and make a good profit.  This led to increasing popularity of popcorn in America.

During the Great Depression (1930’s), popcorn stayed relatively inexpensive compared to other “luxury” type foods. A struggling family could usually afford the five cents a bag of popcorn would cost.

During World War II, Americans tripled their popcorn indulgence. Since sugar was sent to the U.S. troops overseas, there was less sugar to make candies and other snacks. Popcorn became a quick alternative.

Popcorn was already enjoyed at movie theatres before the invention of the television. Soon, Americans made the habit of eating popcorn while watching their favorite shows and movies at home, too. And with the invention of the microwave and microwavable popcorn, popcorn consumption rose even more dramatically!

Today, Americans eat 17 billion quarts of popcorn each year. That is an average of 54 quarts per person. I’m sure I eat at least double that! (snicker…snicker)

So, how does Popcorn pop, anyway?

Each kernel of popcorn contains a tiny drop of water. This water is stored inside a circle of soft starch. A hard outer hull bundles this soft starch.

When water is heated, it starts to expand. At 212 degrees, the water turns to steam and turns the starch into a gelatinous goop. After the contents reach 347 degrees, the pressure inside causes the kernel to POP!

The gelatinous starch spills out and cools very quickly. This causes it to harden into the fluffy shape we are familiar with. The kernel is now up to 50 times its original size!

While researching, I also found out that most of the world’s popcorn is grown in the great Midwestern state of Indiana! Indiana is also home to the most famous popcorn man, Orville Redenbacher! I’m sure you have seen his brand of popcorn in the aisles of your local supermarket. Here are his most famous lines:

“My gourmet popping corn pops up lighter and fluffier than ordinary popping corn. Mine is blowing the top right off the popper. Mine eats better, too. Try my gourmet popping corn. You’ll taste the difference, or my name isn’t Orville Redenbacher.”

With this new knowledge, what kind of story could you write? Maybe these “what if” questions will help you get started:

WHAT IF my main character had a magic popcorn kettle? With some magic words, the kettle popped an endless supply of popcorn.

WHAT IF your main character lived on a popcorn farm in Indiana? One night he sees a spaceship land in one of the fields. What do the aliens want with his popcorn???

WHAT IF the ghost of Orville Redenbacher knocked on your door? Would you give him some popcorn to go away? Or would you invite him in to stay a while? What would your main character do?

The possibilities are endless, and please leave your own “what if” question in the comment section below. I’d love to see what you come up with.

So, grab a cup of hot cocoa, a pencil and a piece of paper, and let’s begin. With your imagination, we can go anywhere. I look forward to seeing where you take us!

With Imagination,

Professor Watermelon

The word of the day is “gelatinous”. Here is the definition: having the nature of or resembling jelly or gelatin.

Frankenstein By: Alex K.

Once upon a time there was a man. The man loved monsters. He got invited to a science club. The man learned that if you have enough energy to shock a brain of a dead person, it would live again.
Five years later he built himself a castle. One night he heard a sound that was coming from the basement. He went downstairs to take a look. He saw a dead person in bars. It was saying something. It said “I want to live”.

So, he got a medal bar and stuck it through the dead guys head. He got two balloons and rubbed them together. Just then, a lightning bolt shot out of the balloons. The dead guy hopped up and did the tango with the man.

Then the dead/alive guy said, “Pumpkin!”

One minute later they were watching TV and NASA said that an asteroid was coming towards Earth. So the dead/alive guy got some rocket boots and a ray gun and went into space.

He blew up the asteroid with the ray gun. He went back down to Earth, and a whole crowd was cheering for him. He was very popular. He got a nickname called Frankenstein.

Frankenstein

After eating so many Granny Smith apples last week, I couldn’t get the color green out of my mind. And with Halloween around the corner, FRANKENSTEIN pushed Granny Smith and her apples out of the front seat and demanded to be the MUSE this week!

So, why is this giant, green monster such a popular Halloween character? I decided I would do a little research and electrify you with some fun facts!

First of all, to my astonishment, Frankenstein was not giant, he was not green, and he was not a monster. Frankenstein was the scientist who created the monster. Victor Frankenstein is the protagonist of Mary Shelley’s classic horror book, Frankenstein, published in London in 1818.

During a vacation to Lake Geneva in Switzerland, Mary Shelley began writing what she thought would only be short story. She used her surroundings as a setting and the concept if galvanism as a MUSE. Do you want to know what galvanism is??? Are you sure???

Galvanism was an experimental science used in the 1800’s. Scientists believed that if the right amount of electrical current was shocked into the brain of a dead body, the body could come back to life. Of course, this type of science proved to be unsuccessful in real life (as far as I know… wink).

But Mary Shelley’s protagonist was successful at galvanizing a corpse to life – the corpse is what we know as Frankenstein’s Monster. And this monster wreaks havoc throughout the pages of Shelley’s story. Unfortunately, the gory details are a little too much to share on this platform, phooey!

Over a hundred years later, Mary Shelley’s story had not died, Muah hahahaha! Universal Studios in Hollywood created a series of movies starring Frankenstein’s Monster.  Some of these films include: Frankenstein, The Bride of Frankenstein, and The Son of Frankenstein.

With the popularity of these movies, Frankenstein’s monster became a huge icon of the horror genre. And this is when people began using the image and character of the monster as a Halloween icon as well. Frankenstein’s monster became known simply as “Frankenstein.”

So, look out for the giant, green monster on greeting cards, holiday decorations, and reruns of old movies. If you are lucky, Frankenstein might even ring your doorbell this Halloween demanding, “Trick or treat!”

With this new knowledge, what kind of story could you write? Maybe these what if questions will help you get started.

WHAT IF your protagonist used galvanism to bring a dead cockroach back to life? FRANKENROACH!

WHAT IF Frankenstein wanted a pet to keep him company? What would it be?

WHAT IF Frankenstein was your protagonist’s dad? What kind of life would your protagonist lead? What does your protagonist want more than anything? Does he/she just want normal dad without green skin and bolts in his head?

The possibilities are endless, and please leave your own what if questions in the comment section below. I’d love to see what you come up with.

So, grab a cup of hot cocoa, a pencil and a piece of paper, and let’s begin. With your imagination, we can go anywhere. I look forward to seeing where you take us.

With Imagination,

Professor Watermelon

The word of the day is “genre”. Here is the definition: of or pertaining to a distinctive literary type. Examples: science fiction, fantasy, magic realism, horror, comedy, etc.

Who is Granny Smith, anyway?

I was walking through Pike Place Market this weekend, and I saw a beautiful pile of bright green apples displayed at one of the several fruit stands. Written on a sign in bright red letters, the apples were advertised as “Granny Smith” for $1.99 per pound.

I have spent my whole life enjoying the sweet, yet tart deliciousness of the Granny Smith apple, but whose grandma is this apple actually named after? I wanted to shout right then and there, “Can the real Granny Smith please stand up!?”

But I didn’t. However, I had found my MUSE! I bought a pound of the bright green fruits and headed back to my writer’s studio to research. Here is what I found.

Maria Ann Sherwood Smith of Sussex, England is the real Granny Smith. She was born in 1799 to a farm laborer. (A farm laborer is a person who works on the farm but does not own it. That would be the farmer or planter.) She later married a farm laborer herself, Thomas Smith.

The couple had eight children before they decided to leave England with several other farming families to New South Wales, Australia. They boarded the Lady Nugent and arrived in Sydney on November 27^th, 1838.

The couple had another child, and in the mid 1850’s, Thomas purchased 24 acres of land for the family’s first orchard.

And as the story goes, around 1868 Maria found some seedling apple trees growing along a creek bank on her property. She figured they had come from a variety of French crab apples. She kept working with the seedlings and finally developed the crunchy, sweet and sour cultivar we know today as the Granny Smith apple.

Sadly, Granny Smith did not live to see her apples reach commercial success. But her legacy lives on today for developing one of the best cooking and desert apples of all time. It wasn’t until 1935 that the Granny Smith was cultivated in England (her homeland). And in 1972, the Granny Smith was introduced to the United States.

Granny Smith died in 1870, and while she had several grandchildren of her own – she is the only woman known to the whole world as Granny Smith.

With this new knowledge, what kind of story could you write? Maybe these what if questions will help you get started.

WHAT IF your main character developed his/her own apple cultivar? Maybe this apple gives people invisibility if they eat it.

WHAT IF the ghost of Granny Smith was haunting the apple orchard in your story? What does she want? What will she do to get it?

WHAT IF you used James and the Giant Peach as your inspiration and wrote a story about a character and a giant apple. How could you make the story unique from Roald Dahl’s classic tale?

The possibilities are endless, and please leave your own what if questions in the comment section below. I’d love to see what you come up with.

So, grab a cup of hot cocoa, a pencil and a piece of paper, and let’s begin. With your imagination, we can go anywhere. I look forward to seeing where you take us.

With Imagination,

Professor Watermelon

The word of the day is “cultivar”. Here is the definition: A variety of plant that originated and persisted under cultivation. This means that the plant did not originate in the wild. Humans have altered the plant to produce a better taste, a more desired color, higher yield, etc.. The Granny Smith apple is a cultivar. It never existed in the wild.

Lobsters

While shopping at the supermarket, I passed the seafood counter and noticed a dead lobster in the lobster tank. As a creative writing professor, I knew I could not let this opportunity pass. I asked the attendant if she would donate the dead lobster to a good cause.

“You want a dead lobster?” she repeated.
“Well, you see, I’m a teacher, and this dead lobster will make the perfect MUSE for my students,” I told her.

“Let me call my manager,” she said.

Eavesdropping on her conversation, I heard her say to the manager, “Sir, I have a very strange request from a man who claims to be a teacher. He wants us to donate a dead lobster for a class project.”

The conversation lasted two or three minutes. When the attendant hung up the phone, she walked back over to the counter.

“You can have the dead lobster,” she said. “But you must write and sign a note stating that if anyone eats this dead lobster you take full responsibility.”

“Deal!” I said, a little too excited, probably.  

While I wrote and signed the “contract”, the attendant fished the dead lobster from the tank.  We traded lobster for contract, and I thanked her dearly.

JEEPERS CREEPERS, I had found another MUSE!

When I returned from the supermarket, I placed the dead lobster in a Ziploc and packed him in the deep-freeze. It was time for me to research lobsters. Here is what I found:

The lobsters we find in the supermarket or at restaurants are closely related to their freshwater cousins, the crawfish. I prefer to call them crawdads. In fact, if you look at these creatures, they truly look like miniature lobsters.

Lobsters, crawfish, shrimp, and crabs are all crustaceans. Crustaceans are a group of arthropods that all have exoskeletons (hard outer shell). Humans have “skeletons”, which is the opposite. Our structural foundation is on the inside. Crustaceans are all set apart from other arthropods because they have two-parted limbs, in most cases “claws”.

When lobsters are not hiding out in a crevice or burrow, they slowly crawl along the ocean floor looking for food. If they are spooked, they flip their abdomen (we call it their tail) back and forth to flee. Sometimes they can reach the speed of 11 mph.

Like snails and spiders, lobsters have BLUE blood. This is due to the copper in their blood. Our blood is red, due to the iron.

Lobsters possess a unique ability to produce a special enzyme that repairs their DNA. Some scientists believe that lobster could live almost forever, if they were not hunted, trapped, or if they did not contract a disease.

Lobsters are omnivores, which mean they eat both plants and animals. Their diet consists mainly of fish, mollusks (clams), other crustaceans, worms, and some plant life. Lobsters have been known to be cannibalistic in captivity.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records, the largest lobster ever caught was 44 pounds. This monster was caught off the shores of Nova Scotia, Canada.

The commercial lobster industry brings in over one billion dollars a year.

With this new knowledge, what kind of story could you write? Maybe these what if questions will help you get started.

WHAT IF your main character went swimming in the ocean and was encountered by a lobster three times his/her size?

WHAT IF your main character was a lobster trapper and he/she trapped the world’s only rainbow lobster. Maybe this lobster has special powers. What are they?

WHAT IF your main character was a lobster that was trapped and lived in the lobster tank at a supermarket. How does he/she escape?

The possibilities are endless, and please leave your own what if questions in the comment section below. I’d love to see what you come up with.

So, grab a cup of hot cocoa, a pencil and a piece of paper, and let’s begin. With your imagination, we can go anywhere. I look forward to seeing where you take us.

With Imagination,

Professor Watermelon

P.S. The word of the day is “arthropod”. Here is the definition: any invertebrate in the phylum arthropoda, having a segmented body, jointed limbs, and usually a chitinous shell that undergoes moltings, including the insects, spiders, and other arachnids, crustaceans, and myriapods.  

Indiana Bat

Last weekend I spent the night at my grandparent’s cabin in Owen County, Indiana. The cabin is situated next to a small lake and is in the middle of a wooded area.

Having spent much time at “the lake” during my childhood, I have always been ready to encounter the wild side of nature. Frogs, lizards, snakes, spiders, opossums, raccoons, and beavers are just a few of the critters one might encounter.

But this visit was a bit different. It was around midnight, and I was talking to my sister in the family room. All of a sudden, I saw a small black shadow dart between us. Back and forth it flew as my sister and I ducked our heads out of the way.

Soon, I realized we were cohabitating with a BAT! Yes, a real, live BAT!

After a minute or so, the little fur ball flew toward the ceiling and held tight to the wooden wall. And that is where we left our tiny friend. When we woke up the next morning, the bat was gone. Hopefully it had left the same way it had come in.

 One thing I knew for sure is that I had found another MUSE! And I couldn’t wait to do some research!

The bat I had witnessed was most likely an Indiana Bat. Yes, Indiana has its own species of bats. The reason they are called Indiana bats is because more than half of this species’ population hibernates in the caves of Indiana.

Sadly, I found out that the Indiana bat is endangered. This is mostly due to human disturbances. When people go caving they may spook the bats out of hibernation. This causes them to use too much of their stored energy, which causes them to die. So, please, stay away from caves during the hibernation months of bats.

The Indiana bat is tiny. It grows about two inches long, although its wing span can reach up to nine inches. Most Indiana bats weigh about one ounce.

At dusk, you can witness these little guys darting around hunting insects. The Indiana bat eats only flying insects including moths, beetles, and mosquitoes. YAY! Chow down, my friends!

Female bats give birth to one “pup” in late June. The pup will be able to fly after one month.

With this new knowledge, what kind of story could you write? Maybe these “what if” questions will help you get started.

WHAT IF your main character found people intentionally disturbing bats during their hibernation? Maybe they are trying to capture the bats to sell to pet stores. What would your main character do about this?

WHAT IF Indiana bats were mythical creatures in disguise? Instead of a vampire, what do Indiana bats morph into?

WHAT IF an Indiana bat landed on your main character’s shoulder and spoke something in his or her ear. What would it say, and how would this advance your plot?

The possibilities are endless, and please leave your own “what if” questions in the comment section below. I’d love to see what you come up with.

Grab a cup of hot cocoa, a pencil and a piece of paper, and let’s begin. With your imagination, we can go anywhere. I look forward to seeing where you take us.

With Imagination,

Professor Watermelon

P.S. The word of the day is “hibernation”. Here is the definition: to spend the winter in close quarters in a dormant condition, as bears and certain other animals.

Stag Beetle

I arrived to my best friend’s house after dark. His patio light was on, and as I approached the back door, I saw a gigantic bug latched onto the screen of the kitchen window.

I LOVE BUGS! And I knew immediately what kind it was. When I was a kid, we called them “pinching bugs”, but I learned the correct name is “stag beetle”. Once again, I had found a MUSE!

I collected the specimen and took him inside to get a better look. He had two extra large mandibles (pinchers) that looked like the antlers of a deer – hence the name “stag beetle”. And he was nearly two inches long. Although my best friend was not excited about having a gigantic bug inside his house, I kept the creature overnight.

The following day, I collected some dirt, rotting wood, and some leaves to make my new friend a habitat. And today, I plan to take him to my creative writing class at the Orchard School here in Indianapolis. There, I will have my students give our friend a name. Maybe he will even become the class mascot. After class, we will release our friend back to the wild (smile).

But before I take Mr. Stag Beetle to class, I think I should do a little research on his kind. This way I can answer some questions if some of my students are inspired to write a story featuring stag beetles.

Here is what I found:

Stag beetles go through complete metamorphosis. This means they grow from egg, larva, pupa, to adult. The female lays eggs on rotting wood. When the egg hatches, the larva feeds on this rotting wood. This stage can last for several years.

Once the larva is finished eating, it will burrow into the ground to pupate. Eventually the adult beetle will dig itself out of the ground and search for a mate. The adult beetle will live for one to two years.

Male stag beetles use their large mandibles to fight other males, and the strongest one gets the girl (wink).  

Adult beetles like to eat leaves and sap. The beetle I found has been feasting on a rotten apple. I hear they like any type of rotting fruit. YUMMY!

Stag beetles are not at the top of the food chain. Lizards, raccoons, snakes, toads, weasels, skunks, and even centipedes like to dine on the stag beetle.

And no, stag beetles are not considered a pest like termites. They are considered a beneficial insect because they promote the healthy decomposition of fallen trees in the forest.  Rotting trees decompose into fertile soil for new trees to grow.

By the way, stag beetles CAN fly.

With that new knowledge, what kind of story could you write? Maybe these “what if” questions will help you get started.

WHAT IF your stag beetle character preferred chocolate cake instead of rotting fruit. And what if this led to your stag beetle character opening his/her own bakery?

WHAT IF your stag beetle character entered into the “Ultimate Pinching Bug Fight”? What could he win? What could he lose?

WHAT IF you wrote a story about a stag beetle that didn’t think he/she was a stag beetle. Maybe he/she actually thinks he/she is a ninja, princess, a moose, or a rooster.

The possibilities are endless, and please leave your own “what if” questions in the comment section below. I’d love to see what you come up with.

Grab a cup of hot cocoa, a pencil and a piece of paper, and let’s begin. With your imagination, we can go anywhere. I look forward to seeing where you take us.

With Imagination,

Professor Watermelon

P.S. The word of the day is “mandible”. Here is the definition: either of a pair of mouthparts in insects and other arthropods that are usually used for biting and crushing food.