Category: Web

Be sure to check out this interview of Chowhound.com co-founder Jim Leff: LINK

This one is for our Tenri University classmate, now First Secretary at the Kenyan Embassy in Tokyo:

Peasant farmer Daniel M’Mburugu was tending to his potato and bean crops in a rural area near Mount Kenya when the leopard charged out of the long grass and leapt on him.
M’Mburugu had a machete in one hand but dropped that to thrust his fist down the leopard’s mouth. He gradually managed to pull out the animal’s tongue, leaving it in its death-throes.

I, myself, would have tried appealing to the leopard’s sensitive side and pleaded for my life, and that having failed, wept pitifully. He ripped out a leopard’s tongue with his bare hands. That’s a REAL man.
Read the full story here: LINK

Following along the culinary lines of yesterday’s show-and-tell where I revealed the amazing blowfish hand axe, here’s an interesting link about common kitchen myths.
Some of the myths themselves are amusing: Are there really so many people that believe cold water (or previously boiled water) boils faster than warm water?
On the other hand, nobody will ever convince me that electric ranges are better than gas, even with the 240 volt models overseas… I mean really, is “simmering” even a worthy point of contention? It’s not exactly something that people who like cooking even think about, in my mind. In fact, I would theoretically worry more about simmering on an electric range because of the heat retention of the heating elements/surface for the first few moments.
As far as an electric range being faster for boiling a large pot of water, wow. I concede the honor.
And as for escaping heat and energy efficiency, I consider this to be the tradeoff for being able to cook better-tasting food, which is the standard by which nearly all cooking comparisons should be based on anyway; I have never seen BTU ratings specified in a recipe.
One other nit I must pick for Queen (and not my) Country:
You can heat a cup of water in the microwave. You can put a teabag in it. However, the average Joe would be surprised to find out that the result is actually not a cup of tea. “Why,” you ask: It’s an Oreo “biscuit” thing, baby.

Oh, man. I think I just stumbled onto the Big Hominid’s second home: DISGUSTING, DEPRAVED, TOILET-RELATED LINK

Put down that drink and shield your monitor: Triumph takes on fans outside the Michael Jackson trial

This is a good story about thinking outside the box: TO MEASURE THE HEIGHT OF A BUILDING WITH BAROMETER

What could even hope to match the Goonies 20th Anniversary Celebration? (my sister actually attended it!)
Only one thing: The Napoleon Dynamite Festival

Dammit, they really should be marketing this stuff as the perfect Father’s Day gift: High Performance Duct Tape, Nuclear Grade

Over at the NY Times: Turn On, Tune In, Veg Out

The first “Star Wars” movie 28 years ago was distinguished by healthy interplay between veg and geek scenes. In the climactic sequence, where rebel fighters attacked the Death Star, we repeatedly cut away from the dogfights and strafing runs – the purest kind of vegging-out material – to hushed command bunkers where people stood around pondering computer displays, geeking out on the strategic progress of the battle.
All such content – as well as the long, beautiful, uncluttered shots of desert, sky, jungle and mountain that filled the early episodes – was banished in the first of the prequels (“Episode I: The Phantom Menace,” 1999). In the 16 years that separated it from the initial trilogy, a new universe of ancillary media had come into existence. These had made it possible to take the geek material offline so that the movies could consist of pure, uncut veg-out content, steeped in day-care-center ambience. These newer films don’t even pretend to tell the whole story; they are akin to PowerPoint presentations that summarize the main bullet points from a much more comprehensive body of work developed by and for a geek subculture.

There’s something about this article that got me thinking about the Metaverse from Stephenson’s classic, Snow Crash. About how Julia became more famous than the rest of the programming team because she worked on the faces of the avatars inhabiting the Metaverse, to which peopled turned out paying most attention.
Or the way the barons of bandwidth and media controlled the seething masses… It’s happening right before your eyes, at this very moment! Run away!

In a way, hearing these breakbeats over the Imperial March was better than the entire second trilogy.