Well, maybe if the duck lobby weren't already outside, demonstrating against the foie gras on the menu. The owners declined to comment.
A modest proposal
JumboTrons and skywriters spell out some oversized marriage proposals. But aspiring groom Jeffrey Wasserman wasn't thinking big. He was thinking small. Very, very small.
When he popped the question to Jessica Kim Quijano, the message was just 21 microns wide - about a quarter the width of a human hair and visible only under a microscope.
Luckily, as an experimental physicist researching nanotechnology at Johns Hopkins University, Wasserman had access to an electron microscope. Not to mention the "cleanroom" also required to write "Marry Me Jessica" in platinum - one atom at a time - on a transparent sapphire crystal the size of a quarter.
I'm not even going to try to explain the process, but Wasserman said it involved "thermally [evaporating] precious metals heated to over 1,000 degrees Celsius inside a specialized vacuum chamber pumped out to a pressure of one-billionth of an atmosphere."
Enough to sweep any gal off her feet, even one whose professional interests - she works with Hubble Space Telescope cameras and spectrographs - run toward the way big. The wedding is March 30.
Playing harder to get: the folks at Guinness World Records. Wasserman is sure he's created the world's tiniest marriage proposal, but the book denied his claim. It's not clear to Guinness if proposals should be classified as objects or actions, so it doesn't maintain records for them.
Wasserman had better luck with the Hopkins thesis defense committee.
"Just two days ago I successfully defended my doctoral thesis," Wasserman said. "In the final slide of the defense I showed the committee the pictures of the proposal, which they enjoyed."
CONNECT THE DOTS
Milestone in WYPR's post-Steiner era: Gerry from Pikesville called in yesterday to Dan Rodricks' "Midday." ... Mayor Sheila Dixon's former spokesman, Anthony McCarthy, has resurfaced, as chief development officer for Health Education Resource Organization (HERO). The Baltimore nonprofit provides services to people with AIDS and HIV.
