Lunch in the Financial District is big business. Whilst the Wall Street traders might not be able to take their eyes off the screen for a second, everyone around them needs more than money to get them through the day, and naturally we’re all far too busy to actually bring anything in ourselves.

Every chain is represented, from Chipotle and Five Guys down to Popeye’s and Subway, with a plethora of semi-independent businesses and food carts mixed in amongst them. Half-hearted establishments might survive a for a couple of months on the whim of tourists who don’t know any better, but competition is harsh and I’ve seen a fair amount of places close in the 8 months or so I’ve been here.

The latest, however, is one that saddens me. Disregarding the nihilism and machismo of the smartly dressed and dead-inside traders and professionals that populate this area between the hours of 8 and 6, there sits a new-wave beacon of light, Little Lad’s Basket.

For five years, Little Lad’s, marked only by a handwritten sign, has occupied a windowless, underground corner of the Equitable Building on Broadway.

Rhubarb tarts lie alongside DVDs filed into categories like Foods That Kill and Aspartame: Sweet Poison, and a television in the corner screens Vaccine Nation, a documentary that posits a link between government vaccines and autism.

~ Vegan Purity in the Maw of Capitalism, The New York Observer, 2010.

From the unpretentious plastic trays and plates to the Amish girl walking around offering everyone free ice-cream, there’s nothing about this place that isn’t completely simple and designed to be positive. I’m not sure I’m a complete convert, despite the many reasons they offer up in favour of a vegan lifestyle: that cows have four stomachs to break down cow milk, we do not; that the reason meat needs to be so thoroughly cooked is that it is basically just excrement with food colouring; and that vegan food can be really, really tasty.

They’re closing in just over a week, ostensibly because the building’s management has other plans, but I do have to wonder if it’s really a viable business model down in the Financial District to serve unlimited vegan food for $4.98 – I’m sure I eat more than that in fruit alone;- to ask customers to ‘self-report’ at $1 a time if they go for seconds; and to tell them to ‘pay next time’ if they don’t have cash.

I’m guessing it’s not. And that makes me sad.

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Steak chicken-fried steak chicken-fried steak.

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I go through life in America trying to simply avoid comment on most of the non-sequiturs I perceive around me. I don’t want every conversation to be a discussion of cultural differences or a drawn-out explanation that Oxford and Cambridge are not, in fact, concurrent areas of London.

Fortunately, my education doesn’t suffer from this approach, as my housemates are quick to inform me when I’m doing something wrong (always) and tell me the correct, American way of doing things. If I (unwisely) disagree with their conclusion, we take a vote in which I lose 2:1 and we resolve on the reliable “fuck you this is America.” It’s a fantastically effective approach to teaching.

Let’s see an example.

One early morning many months ago, as I stumbled to work with a hangover, I decided to stop off and get some breakfast. Being a particularly bad hangover, I decided that pancakes wouldn’t suffice, and aimed for a comforting bacon sandwich. Lo and behold, I soon found myself outside a purveyor of breakfast sandwiches. Not bothering to consult the menu to find the price of the most basic staple of such a shop, I simply approached the counter and ordered.

Can I get a bacon sandwich please?

What?

Clearly I’d mumbled my first audible words of the day.

A bacon sandwich please.

A…bacon sandwich?

Please. Just ketchup.

I think I say please more than Americans are used to.

You want a bacon and egg sandwich?

No, just bacon.

Ok…toasted right?

No thanks.

You want anything in it?

…bacon. And ketchup.

You want a bacon and egg sandwich with no egg, untoasted, extra ketchup?

Finally, we’d gotten somewhere; albeit via a rather circuitous route, but with the imminent prospect of a bacon sandwich on the horizon, I wasn’t going to complain. A look of dismay and confusion from everyone in the vicinity later, I took my bacon sandwich (poor quality, no accompanying tea) and left, promptly forgetting the matter.

Fast forwarding past the ice and snow of that day to this sunny morning, I stood at the kitchen counter and kindly asked if the girls would like a bacon sandwich, as I was making one.

…you mean like, a B.L.T.?

I shook my head, somewhat in negation, but mostly in resignation: I could see from the looks in their eyes that this was one of those occasions I’d done something terribly, terribly wrong and needed to be educated.

A breakfast sandwich, I learned, is what I – in a euphoria of stupidity – have always called a McDonald’s breakfast. At the outer edges sit an English muffin, a biscuit (not to be confused with a tasty digestive) or a hard roll.

Within is generally to be found sausage (not to be confused with a sausage) or bacon (not to be confused with Danish bacon, which is known as Canadian bacon here,) cheese (seriously) and an egg (the egg’s just an egg.)

Contrast this with my traditional ideal of Danish bacon sitting between two slices of fresh white or – joy of joys – within a bap, topped with ketchup and atop a thin layer of butter, and you’ll see quite how different the two dishes are.

Or, in the words of the girls: “that’s disgusting, all your food is disgusting, you’re making me never want to live in London which I’ve wanted to do my entire life.”

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It has been remarked upon, that I am not very observant. To combat this, I’ve taken to saying “your hair looks lovely” at regular intervals in an attempt to avoid the molten wrath of girls who’ve recently spent a staggering amount of time and money on a haircut when I have absolutely no inkling that their hair was ever, at any point in the many years I’ve known them, any different to how it currently looks.

But, if I ever do say that to you, it’s because your hair really does look beautiful at the moment I say it.

It should come as little surprise, therefore, that it took me 8 months to notice that paper over in the USA is wrong. I’d like to be generous to my new home and say different or alternately sized but I can’t bring myself to do it. Paper in America is simply wrong. Allow me to elaborate.

A sheet of standard American letter paper has the short, squat dimensions 215.9mm × 279.4mm. An alternative to this travesty is available: they also believe in such as thing as legal paper at an inordinately lanky 216mm x 356mm. Now that my eyes have been opened to this fact I’m unable to even look at a sheet of paper here without feeling slightly nauseated; it’s a real boon for the environment.

I’ve created the below image of pink letter paper sitting atop blue A4 paper to show the problem:

But surely, you say, surely this is a mere difference, not a problem or a mistake. Read on.

Firstly, there appears to be no rhyme nor reason to the dimensions set by the Americans. The American Paper Association – who appear to be accepted as the authority in the history of these choices – in their engaging guide to paper sizes claim that the length of letter paper, 279.4mm, is a quarter of the length of a 17^th century Dutch vatman’s arms. No corollary claims are made regarding the width and/or aspect ratio of letter paper and no claims at all regarding the origins of legal paper. The best full answer to be found is that some government committees debated the matter and Ronald Reagan unilaterally settled their disputes.

ISO 216 (publication 216 by the International Organisation for Standards, an organisation that set a bewildering standard for the abbreviation of its own name) specifies the standards used by the rest of the world, namely the A- and B- standards. A sheet of A0 paper is of area 1m² and has an aspect ratio of √2.

From this aspect ratio, it follows that any sheet of A0, cut along an edge midway along its long side and parallel to its short side, will produce two sheets with the same aspect ratio and half the area of the original sheet. In this case, that paper size would then be known as A1. Cutting a sheet of A1 in the same manner would produce a sheet of A2 and so on until we reach the ubiquitous, aesthetically pleasing and sublime A4 sheet of paper — the cornerstone of modern society even in this digital age.

Considering, as you no doubt now are, the ISO 216 set of paper sizes (A0: 841mm × 1189mm; A1: 594mm × 841mm and so on) and mentally calculating the areas of each sheet of paper size, you’ve no doubt already reached the conclusion that something is not quite right here: there’s been some rounding going on. I’ve taken the time to calculate the actual aspect ratios of common sheet sizes and their variance from √2.

I don’t have a spare 66 Swiss Francs to get an original copy of ISO 216, so I can only hope that the luminaries behind the document knew full-well the crazy and dangerous implications of the varying aspect ratios they were setting. May God have mercy on their souls.

The ideal √2, though aesthetically pleasing, endures the unfortunate circumstance of being an irrational number: an unending decimal, if you prefer. It will always be suborned in the popular imagination to its prettier and better dressed irrational counterpart, π, but it’s been my personal favourite since the Babylonians first approximated it on a rock in ~1850BC. Let me tell you just one brief reason why.

If one were to remove the largest possible square from a rectangle with ratio 1:√2 (such as a sheet of ISO 216 paper) they would be left with a rectangle of proportions 1:√2-1, which, naturally, you will recognise as the silver ratio δS. A silver rectangle, as such a shape is known, corresponds exactly to the inner dimensions of the of a split regular octagon. If such an octagon is split into two isosceles trapezoids and a rectangle, then that rectangle is a silver rectangle with an aspect ratio of 1:δS, and the 4 sides of the trapezoids are in a ratio of 1:1:1:δS.

With such mathematical beauty at the heart of the ISO 216 paper sizes, I think you’ll agree that the Americans, much though I love them, are in this case simply wrong. And so, I long for the day that they learn to make steak & ale pies, and adopt the international standard for paper sizes — on that day, I can truly be happy here.

For further information, I recommend A.A. Dunn’s thorough 55 page guide (printed on ISO A5 paper,) Notes on the Standardisation of Paper Sizes.

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It was my birthday. Happy Birthday to me. For my birthday, I watched one beautiful housemate perform in a show, flew back to Britain, stayed out too late drinking with some wonderful people back there, came back a week later and found the other beautiful housemate making me a birthday cake.

Specifically, I found Bridget making me a traditional British birthday cake – a Victoria sponge – despite having never actually seen or tasted one in person. She had, however, been doing her research, and I’m pretty sure she now knows more about the thing than anyone I know back in the UK.

Did you know, for example, that (apparently) there exists a deeply ingrained and highly localised set of opinions as to whether the strawberry comes above or below the butter icing in the centre of the cake? Or that such a thing as Double-Devonshire Cream is, despite the poorly placed adjectival modifier, believed by people on the Internet to be the Holy Grail of fatty dairy products and highly recommended for use in making butter icing?

I don’t claim to be an expert in the baking of birthday cakes. My last attempt resulted in a drunk cat and my speciality is licking the mixing bowl clean, rather than making up the batter. I wasn’t much use in the process beyond “does this taste good to you?” and as a result, I’m not entirely sure the end result can be called authentic.

It is, however, absolutely delicious. And the fact that Bridget spent hours trying to work out how to recreate a British tradition with American ingredients and some low-res images from the Internet makes it twice as nice.

Leave your recipes & tips in the comments section.

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Having come back to Britain for a week, two common questions have recurred regarding my New York (Geek) adventures. Firstly, what the hell is hashing all about and; secondly, what did I actually get up to on that night in the library.

Whilst no-one is ever sober enough to truly convey the intricacies of an evening spent hashing, it seems that Stan Friedman was perfectly able to capture both the spirit and the specifics of Find The Future in the cover story of this month’s Library Journal.

My invented sport of Zombie Tag even gets a brief mention ;)

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