Mmmm, brains.

It's not what you think.

We had our office holiday lunch today at Bistro d'Oc.[1]
Brains were on special.
I got to say to Johanna, "Do you want to split some brains?" to which she replied, "Yeah, that would be great"--not one of your more usual conversations, I think you'll agree. (Well, outside the context of a zombie invasion, obviously.)
They were lamb brains with lemon and capers and noisette butter, and they were a fine thing indeed.
Johanna cheerfully admits to suggesting Bistro d'Oc for the holiday lunch "because they serve offal." I was most impressed that several of our less-culinarily-adventurous coworkers tried a little bit of brains ("Can I taste your brains?"). I don't think they'll ever order them on purpose, but they didn't spit them out or anything. (Hilariously, later in the meal, I did have to spit out a little bit of fig spread. I'm twitchy about figs at the best of times, and I was expecting it to be tapenade. Blick.)

[1] I'm kind of mystified by the online reviews of Bistro d'Oc, many of which are savage. We had a 12-person holiday lunch (reservations for 14, but two couldn't make it). When we arrived, the room was set up with two tables--one of 6 and one of 8. Our executive director asked the waiter if he could rearrange the tables so we could all sit together. He did so. He recommended gorgeous and inexpensive wines and described them accurately. He knew what went into everything on the menu. It's a bistro, and it does it well. It's not a high-end haute cuisine celebrity chef experience, but if you know your charcuterie and succulent cheeses and duck confit, it's good for what ails you . I feel as though a lot of the reviewers don't understand what a French bistro is; either they don't like French food, or they were actually looking for a bar.

New respect for flying rats

Yesterday on my walk I noticed an explosion of pigeon feathers on the lawn of the Ellipse. It wasn't gory, but it was impressive. Definitely a whole pigeon's worth. "Huh," thought I, "I wonder what's hunting the pigeons?" Red-tail hawk was my first thought. Then mere minutes later as I was crossing the Washington Monument grounds, I had my answer: Two birds came haring into my field of vision, right on top of each other, flying all rickety in what looked like close formation, until one veered off suddenly to safety among a little copse of (I think) old cherry trees, and the other swooped up to take a scanning perch on a much taller tree at the edge of the lawn. Not a red-tail; a peregrine falcon. Very pointy. Wings almost like a seagull at first glance. Knowing that a pigeon can outmaneuver a peregrine in (pretty much) level flight gives me new respect for pigeons.

Macrobeauty

High-speed photography of colorful water droplets. I'm not sure where the color comes from (lights? paint?) but they sure are cool. Thanks to Will for the heads up. (Oh, upon further investigation: it is paint.)

Eerie.

While taking my pulses this morning, my Chinese doctor (hereinafter referred to as JPG, which are his initials, not a file extension) asked me if I had a cold. "Mmmaybe," said I. "Not a cold, I don't think. Just the sniffles."
During my lunchtime walk I was meditating cheerfully on the pleasingness of the expression "the sniffles". All onomatopoeiac and quaint, like "the ague." Plus it's fun to say. Sniffles.
Now I'm pretty sure I do have a cold. All kinds of sneezing and nose-blowing and itchy throat. Booooo. But good on JPG for being able to tell me I had a cold eight hours in advance of me becoming aware of it.

Humor!

I'm not generally a big humor-forwarder on the tubes, but Darth Vixen sent me this "Font Conference" and I thought I'd pass it on.

Disappearing Ducks!

They're gone.
All the ducks in Lafayette Park are gone.
The grounds-crew there is in the process of cleaning out the eastern pond, presumably as part of Inauguration Day preparations (which are messing with my lunchtime walk bigtime).
The pond is empty.
I want to know where the ducks went.

Optimism as a revolutionary act

I'm not talking about Obama.
I was thinking about Lloyd Dobler (because Ehren confessed during our "favorite movies" staff meeting that Lloyd Dobler is his role model).

Ducklings, hope, and gambling

There are ducks in Lafayette Park. I am looking cheerfully forward to the spring, when I imagine there will be ducklings.

My favorite thing about the election results is that I feel they are a triumph for hope over fear, for optimism over doomsaying, and for dreams over nightmares.

My least favorite thing about the election results is that Maryland voters approved the slot machine referendum. I've been getting gradually more disapproving about gambling, including lotteries and slot machines. I feel like they are an amusement for the rich and a tax for the poor. Since much of the slot machine revenues are supposed to go into school coffers, I hope the schools teach kids enough math that they grow up to never risk their grocery money on slots.

Compliant?

At acupuncture this morning my Chinese doctor said I was "very compliant." I initially let it pass, but honestly I was a bit hurt. Crestfallen. Insulted, even. Compliant, me? No! I am belligerent and sturdy! Compliance is weak and sheeplike. I object to being expected to comply with things, because so often the things I'm complying with make no practical sense and have no positive effect. Compliance to me implies complicity, tacit acceptance of a corrupt and/or irrational system.
So I asked him what he meant, and said "Oh--I meant that you're not doing this halfway. You're actually following my suggestions very thoroughly. I said to eat fish, rice, and vegetables for a week, and that's what you've done--you didn't give up after three days because you really wanted a burger."
"Oh," said I, mollified. "That's not compliance. That's commitment."

Walk today

2.0656 miles, according to gmaps pedometer (which, FYI, has a really old satellite photo; it's from before Pennsylvania Avenue was closed to traffic, which happened in 1995).
Saw a white squirrel with a dark undercoat.
There are no mailboxes in that 2 miles, but there are at least 4 water fountains.

Sidewalk rant

I took it into my head this afternoon to try to walk all the way home from my doctor's office, it being a beautiful day. I was pretty sure the walk was less than 4 miles, and I got out of my appointment just before 4pm, and I was wearing sturdy shoes. So I set out.
Problem: once you get past the Grosvenor Metro station on southbound Rockville Pike, the sidewalk ends. Sort of. Not definitively. There are bits of sidewalk, enough that I tried going a couple of different ways before I gave up and took the path of least resistance, which was Beach Drive to the Rock Creek trail. I asked a fellow walker if she knew where it let out, and she told me that it hits Cedar Lane. I expressed my dismay that I had been unable to walk to Medical Center from Grosvenor along Rockville Pike, and she expressed sympathetic outrage. "It's like we're not supposed to be walking." So I found Cedar Lane, walked up hill and down, past Stone Ridge to Rockville Pike.
It was a lovely walk, but it was 5.25 miles instead of 3.8 (thanks to the Gmap Pedometer), and I didn't have any water and I felt a bit panicky not always knowing where I was or how much longer it would take me to get home.
There should be sidewalks. Or there should be big giant signs saying that the sidewalk is ending and to go another way. Or preferably, a sign at the Grosvenor Metro pedestrian access point that says "no thru pedestrians to Medical Center".

Outrage, skepticism, and joy

Outrage, courtesy of my Chinese doctor[1]: A really interesting BBC television program about modern politics, specifically U.S. Neoconservatives and Islamic Radicals and their insidious mythmaking, called "The Power of Nightmares". (It's 3 hours in total; I'm only linking to the first episode.)

Skepticism, thanks to Conall: It's very sweet, but I'm not sure it's a hedgehog.

Joy: There's a foundation for toast!! Well, toasters, actually. People who want to make a museum about toasters. But still, it's a "Choose Toast" thing.[2] (I read about this in Saveur yesterday.)

[1] He's not Chinese. He's English. But he's my healthcare provider who uses Chinese herbal treatment, acupuncture, and various kinds of bodywork. It's his fault that I'm driving myself crazy trying not to cross my ankles (which is my default sitting style but is apparently a big part of why my knees hurt most of the time).

[2] About 5 years ago, some reports came out about carcinogens that get created by various high-heat cooking methods, including roasting, grilling, and toasting. (You can Google it yourself.) I was pretty outraged at the thought of people choosing to avoid the joys of the best foods around, like grilled meat and toasty toast. (I have always prefered toast to bread. Even lousy bread can make OK toast. Good bread makes fabulous toast.) So I wanted a bumpersticker that said "Choose Toast", because it would confuse other people and express something I hold dear, namely, that fear of death shouldn't interfere with enjoyment of life.

The joy of variety

Tiny Garnet sweet potatoes are much, much yummier than big ol' Beauregard sweet potatoes.
Also, re. the "yam" vs. "sweet potato" question: This has bothered me for ages, and this is a summary of my informal research:

YAMS (from Wolof "nyam" meaning "to taste") are a food plant grown across Africa, Latin America, Asia, and Oceania. The tubers involved are often ginormous, and they have oxalic acid (an irritant) in their skins. They don't look anything like sweet potatoes to me, except for the general shape and starchiness.

SWEET POTATOES are a food plant grown across Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, North America, Asia, and parts of Oceania. Some varieties (mostly the very-orange ones) are colloquially called "yams" in the U.S. and Canada; speculation is that this is a linguistic transfer from kidnapped Africans who stuck the word "nyam" on the closest parallel big starchy tuber widely grown in the American South.

So, it's not wrong to call a sweet potato a yam; it just might get you the wrong thing if you're in an international market.

Not Pandora's best day.

Tell me, friends:
Are any of these what you would consider Celtic music?

• Something accordion-heavy called Chicago Cajun Aces
• A fingerpicked guitar piece called Resolucion. The cover of the album has our guitarist standing in front of the Golden Gate Bridge.
• A bluegrass version of the Moody Blues' In Your Wildest Dreams (really, I couldn't make this up).

Me neither.
I need direct access to the algorithms...

Roughage

Two things:
(1) Three cups of raw shredded cabbage takes a really, really long time to eat. It has yummy dijon vinaigrette on it, but it's just a lot to chew through.
(2) I think Mead has discontinued my preferred notebook for journaling. My needs are very specific: non-snaggy double wire spiral binding, cardboard or fabric cover, 3 subjects, at least 100 pages, 9x6 not 8.5x11, and pocket dividers. I've been journaling for twenty-eight years (!) and I know what I want in a notebook. Snaggy bindings piss me off. Journals that you can't fold completely in half piss me off. The backing has to be sturdy enough to write on. The pockets are necessary for corralling random notes and letters and pertinent emails and rough drafts of poems. I have looked in every office supply/school supply store around (ooh, except Bruce Variety, I should check there...) and I can't find what I want. I am tempted to order a lifetime supply online, but I'm waiting to find out from Mead if the notebooks in question are made in China, because that pisses me off too. (It's an outgrowth of the whole ecoguilt thing, plus the whole human rights thing. I know it's very hard to avoid Chinese products, but the little I've read about untraceable organ transplants makes my "Boycott now!" upbringing rear its head.)

From sexy Vikings to sexy monsters.

It somehow came up following our staff meeting this morning that vampires are sexy. (Work morale has been a lot better the past few months, have I mentioned?) This started us on a fairly lively discussion about how other monsters generally are not sexy. (We did decide that werewolves can be sexy too, depending on how they are portrayed.)
This of course led to some musings on what constitutes a "monster" vs. a "non-monster", e.g., are faeries/goblins monsters or not? Because if monsters, then they can belong in the "sexy" column (e.g., David Bowie's Jareth in Labyrinth (technically a goblin), Roiben in Tithe).
So, I know Macromediocrity doesn't have a lot of readers, but I'm looking for nominations of "monsters that are sexy besides vampires", with the above caveat that we don't have a very stable definition of what a monster actually is.

Stupid sexy Vikings.

Recent theory about the placement of Viking brooches has gotten all sexed up by some newspapers. This blog has the best [1] article I've ever seen about Viking sexiness.

[1] Okay, so it's the only article about Viking sexiness I've ever seen. But it made me laugh out loud.

I guessed wrong!

I was walking down Old Georgetown Road this morning and passed a newspaper box for the Montgomery Gazette, and I started wondering if "Gazette" was a newspaper name in the same way as "Mirror"--e.g., if "gazette" was some kind of archaic word for mirror, like "little gazing glass". I liked the idea, but I was completely wrong. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it's because of magpies, and coins.

Three things.

1. I have somewhere to go if I'm ever in Cincinnati.
2. There's plaid collar crime.
3. I had a needle stuck an inch and a half deep into my rotator cuff yesterday, and I feel fine about it.

HFCS rant.

Here's my contribution to the massive blogospheric response to the "Sweet Surprise" pro-high fructose corn syrup ads. HFCS is not a food choice I would make. I think that "food" should be "something you can figure out how to make yourself, in a normal kitchen, starting from pieces of plants and/or animals." (Admittedly, I don't know how to make baking soda, but then, I use it mostly as a cleaning product.)

I also feel strongly that food should be artisanal, not industrial. I was waiting for a freight train to pass at the intersection of Seminary Road and Capital View, and I was watching the cars go by, and I got a bit alarmed at one point by the progression of petroleum product-petroleum product-some kinda sulfate-some kinda sulfate-petroleum product-corn syrup-corn syrup. Just kinda freaked me out.

This is a "best of all possible worlds" rant. I'm not naive. I know I'm privileged beyond the dreams of most humans ever in history in terms of the options available to me in choosing food. I don't think everyone in the world (or even everyone in my neighborhood) has regular, affordable access to fresh fruit and vegetables and protein sources; I just think they should. I'd rather see social changes to encourage that than corporate profit-driven monoculture schemes to feed the burgeoning masses as cheaply as possible, and the stockholders as richly as possible. It's a giant weird Malthusian/Hieronymus Bosch nightmare to me, the way economics and agriculture have twisted around each other.

The ads say it's "made from corn".
Well, yes, in a way.
But it's not made from corn in the same way as, for example, maple syrup is made from maple trees.
Maple Syrup:
Step 1- Tap tree.
Step 2- Boil sap.
Done.

Corn Syrup:
Step 1- Mix dried corn kernels with water and sulfur dioxide for a day or two.
Step 2- Grind up the corn.
Step 3- Separate the germ (oily part) from the pulp (starchy/protein/fiber part) using a centrifuge.
Step 4- Filter off the fiber with some more milling and screening.
Step 5- Centrifuge the remainder, to separate the gluten from the starch.
Step 6- Keep diluting and centrifuging the starch mixture up to 14 times to make sure you've got just starch. (I'm pretty sure I could handle this recipe myself up to this point, but I don't have the right screens and I don't know where to get sulfur dioxide.)
Step 7- Get some bacteria (Bacillus sp., but I don't know what the sp. stands for) to make some alpha amylase (that's an enzyme that occurs naturally in saliva and pancreatic juices).
Step 8- Mix the alpha amylase with the starch. This breaks it down into polysaccharides. I guess if you were trying to do this at home, you could spit in it.
Step 9- Get some aspergillus fungi to make you some glucoamylase.
Step 10- Mix the glucoamylase with the polysaccharide solution. This gets you glucose.
Step 11- Get some D-xylose isomerase. (I don't know where you get this, or how it's made.)
Step 12- Mix the D-xylose isomerase with the glucose. This gets you a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose (and some other sugars).
Step 13- Using liquid chromatography, get your fructose level up to 90%. (I don't think you can get a liquid chromatograph setup for the home kitchen. Not even at Sur La Table.)
Step 14- Blend some of your 90% fructose with the 42% fructose/52% glucose so you have a 55% fructose solution. (SAT mixture problems, anyone?)
Done.

So, corn syrup is sort of made from corn. But I'd argue that it's made from corn even less than Velveeta is made from milk. (Acknowledged: Beer and cheese are produced in multi-stage processes involving bacteria and/or fungus, too. Also acknowledged: I don't know what liquid chromatography is, and it probably isn't scary.)

And it makes rats' hearts get really big. (I couldn't find a proper scientific study that actually says their hearts exploded, but this study says "fructose feeding induced significant increases in...left ventricular weight.")

Giant Art Crush

Lanea, Anubh, and I had a great time performing at the Pennsylvania Celtic Fling, thanks in large part to the primal ecstasy that is Albannach. I have a big crush on them.

Articles and geography

In the movie we saw last night about Bela Fleck taking the banjo back to its African context (which was very moving and deserves more than the off-hand mention it gets here), it struck us that the country we thought of as "Gambia" is actually "The Gambia". Which led to a brief bit of research into what other countries have a "The". Officially, just The Bahamas. Unofficially, Ehren decided, it should be all countries that start with "United", plus all plural island chains.

Ecoguilt parameters, continued

Eating local good; eating veggies better.
This article from Science News discusses the various sources of greenhouse emissions in the farm-to-table chain.
Sadly, the online version does not include the fab pie chart from the print version, but you'll get the idea: eating less beef and dairy does more to reduce your ecoguilt total than only buying local.
I guess it's time to start phasing out the lattes...

Outraged, and mollified

Outraged: What happens to unsold books.

Mollified: Inspired, even. These people were outraged too, and look what they did. (I think their domain name is a little bit of a stretch, though.)

The Mysteries of Google, continued

Google has changed its favicon in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. [1]
Puzzling.
In IE it's still the boxy capital G we're all used to.
In Firefox, it's suddenly the lower-case g ("good girl's glasses").
Weird how such a small thing can be such a big distraction.
(Not unlike corn in Italian wedding soup.)

[1] Is this a geek badge?

Bad Timing.

From the schadenfreude file:
FranklinCovey just sent me an email about a huge sale.
My LLBean Traveler convertible backpack finally bit the dust last week after a hard ten years of use. [Digression: to my deep annoyance, particularly following on Aveda's recent decision to discontinue the best shampoo of all time, I discover LLBean has redesigned the bag, and there's no convertible-backpack option, so I find myself considering a $300 handmade Italian bag instead, but that's another rant].
FranklinCovey has nice totes.
Big FranklinCovey email.
Huge Sale.
Tell everyone, said the email.
Shop now, said the email.
I tried.
I clicked through.
Their site is down for "scheduled maintenance."

I don't think so. I don't think anyone schedules maintenance for the same time as the "everyone come to the big giant sale" email is going out.

The mysteries of Google

Google is keeping me awake.
They apparently updated the page rank system a couple weeks ago. There's a lot of panicky chatter about it on the webmaster forums. (Mystifying, too. Many people are "quoting" Google as saying that PageRank has no effect on Google listing results, which makes no sense to me.)
My personal Google resume, while still largely referring to me, is quite different than it was last time I checked it. Also, weirdly, it now includes things I recently sent out through Constant Contact. Apparently the new ranking system favors newsletter aggregators (unless those aggregators are new, which I admit is possible).
My professional website's Google listings are extremely pear-shaped. I don't even know where to start.
It's exciting, in a grumblecakey-awake-late-geeky kind of way.

James Burke has been busy.

James Burke, who wired my brain when I was 7 with his show Connections, is busy working on this piece of crazy beauty.
There are lots of ways to help, from buying his books on Amazon to researching and writing grants. I can write grants. I hate it, but for James Burke and what he's trying to do, I think I'd be willing.
(Because I don't have enough hobbies. Guess I'm just trying to fill those four pesky free weekends between now and December...)

Slacker.

Many people claim to be the winners of a Slack Blogger Award, but I'm not sure they deserve it.
Ehren has now officially passed the one-year mark since his last post in this blog.
I'm just sayin'.

Inanity to the nth

Guess how many teams are in The Big Ten?
You can tell by looking at their logo.
*blink?*
I'm not sure where to start.
Probably best that I don't.

(Ehren would have posted this but he decided to email it to me instead, which earns some kind of demerit from the posting committee...)

Owl-faced night parrots: Not dead yet!

I'm watching David Attenborough's Life of Birds, and was moved to do some checking on the status of the incredibly endearing and extremely endangered kakapo. There are still under 100 of them, but seven chicks were hatched this year. Most touching detail: They all have names. All of them.

The denizens of YouTube

When I found that recording of Braes o' Balquhidder on YouTube I was happy.
I'm irrationally happier now to know that there are multiple YouTubers who are devoting themselves to uploading video of gramophone recordings. At least five. Possibly dozens, or scores.
(Discovered this thanks to Will's tip about Forty-Seven Ginger-Headed Sailors.)

Ecoguilt Calculator

Patagonia has made me feel a little less crazy.
They have a proto-ecoguilt-calculator on their website (thanks to Jeanne for the tip).
I've wanted an ecoguilt calculator for a while, and the Patagonia tool is a good start.
It doesn't do everything I want.
I want to know exactly what karmic burden I am accepting when I buy a product.
I don't just care about my carbon footprint, although here's a nice carbon footprint calculator.
I want to know about:

• Carbon footprint (including materials, production, and shipping)
• Virtual water
• Support of local economies
• Physical safety (in terms of working conditions, solvents, pesticides, other chemicals) of the people involved in production
• Degree of admirable-ness/ethicalness of the labor practices in the entire supply chain (good marks to living wages; big demerits for child labor, forced labor, or slavery)
  
• Whether any animals are involved in production (either as materials or power) and whether those animals are treated well
  
• Organic production methods for any agricultural products

I want to be able to compare (for example) these bamboo towels to these organic cotton towels and know which ones are more virtuous overall. Patagonia makes me feel less crazy for wanting to know this stuff. (Not that I need any high-performance outerwear. Really, right now it's about towels and patio furniture. I have finally accepted that a linen or cotton patio umbrella isn't practical, so I'm trying to at least get a used one from FreeCycle.)

Pandora!

Pandora Radio![1]

I have three stations already built and I've only known about this for 15 minutes, thanks to a tip from Shital [2]. I am agog at the fantastic potential for time-suckage and serendipity and other forms of pleasant weirdness that result from what could (I suppose) be looked at as a simple replacement for the tyranny of MediaPlayer. I'm anticipating that not only will the music be enjoyable and absorbing, but that the process of training the music stream as to my likes and dislikes will be a source of great joy and outrage. I'd like to apologize to Ehren in advance for the about-to-increase exclamations of "What the hell is this supposed to be? Don't you know anything??!!"

I'm looking forward to getting the taxonomy for the music I like. (Right now it's " folk roots | great musicianship | acoustic sonority | demanding instrumental part writing | intricate melodic phrasing | thru composed melodic style | minor key tonality | melodic songwriting | a prominent mandolin part | acoustic rhythm guitars | solo strings | an instrumental arrangement. (np: Chris Thile, "Big Sam Thompson")

So I will permaybehaps not need any CDs at work ever again. Now I just have to solve the car-music problem. I've been listening to the wireless since my 8-track died. (Just kidding. It was a cassette deck. Yes, I do know there's such a thing as an iPod. Whippersnappers. Get off my lawn.)

[1] Seems kind of an inapt name. (Is inapt a word?) Memorable, sure, but I'm not getting the metaphoric connection to, you know, Pandora who opened the box, or jar, full of either evil or gifts, depending on who you believe. Her. The Greek Eve, the opener.

[2] Shital never updates her own blog, so I don't know why I thought she might post here ; )

Where are the avocados of yesteryear?

I have had very bad luck with avocados lately. The last six seeds I tried to sprout have been duds. My next attempt will be with a non-Haas avocado. But apparently, all avocado seeds are by definition recalcitrant, so I don't feel so bad.

Too busy to blog

Bunch of quick notes:

• Outdoor birds indoors: I'm in favor. Sparrows in Costco, sparrows in National Airport. "Wild hawk in loading dock!" at my car dealership. More power to them.
• Blue candy: Generally, I'm against. Blue m&ms, blue sour skittles, wrong wrong all wrong. Exception: Blue Cadbury's mini eggs. Perfectly fine. Probably because they are a blue that occurs in nature, as opposed to "blue raspberry slush puppy" blue.
  
• Pralines: I'm in favor. Especially when there's a nice cup of cafe au lait to go with.
• The Vieux Carre: In favor, except I think I'd like it best when there wasn't much going on. I couldn't live there, because I would hate the tourists.
• Virtual water: um, neither pro nor con. It's just another thing to figure into the eco-guilt equation.
• Voice mail: You know how when you call your cellphone voicemail, there's 15 seconds of "instructions" you don't need? That costs us $100 million dollars a year. $100M we're paying to the cellphone companies for "You have eight new messages. To listen to your messages, press one... to listen to new messages, press one..."
  
• Cellphone 411: Never again. Send your questions as txt to 46645 .
• 50% of U.S. households don't have high speed Internet. That. Sucks.
  

Mystery meat

This bit of oddness came across my tribe's listserv today: lab-grown meat.
I'm really not sure what to make of it.
Especially the bit about having to exercise the tissue to make it meaty.
It gives me an uncomfortableness.

Shame on you, USPS!

As Simone mentioned, I recently ordered stamps through USPS' Postal Store. Yes, I was lazy. I didn't want to waste a whole lunch hour standing in line just to buy the stamps for my wedding invites that I have yet to send. And, since I do almost all of my other shopping online, I figured I should branch out and do my postage stamp shopping online, too.

Never again--or at least not until USPS changes their shameful, wasteful ways.

I purchased 21 booklets of stamps (14 booklets of 26¢ stamps and 7 booklets of 41¢ stamps) and each individual booklet came wrapped in cellophane with a cardboard insert three times the size of the stamp booklet. Note: on neither the cellophane nor the cardboard are there recycling instructions. Additionally, the excessive packaging--which I originally thought was for the benefit of stamp collectors--actually is printed with the notice, "PKG NOT SUITABLE FOR PHILATELIC ARCHIVING." Seriously?!?


To further demonstrate the wastefulness, I actually used a kitchen food scale to measure the weight of the actual products (the stamps) versus the weight of the waste (cellophane and cardboard). The 21 booklets of stamps weighed 1.5 ounces while the waste weighted 12 ounces! The waste weighed EIGHT times as much as the product! And, as you can see, the volume of the waste was also many times more than the volume of the product.


Boo, USPS. Boooooooo.

USPS packaging shocker!

Johanna ordered some stamps online, because she didn't feel like waiting at the post office. Good so far. When her dozen-or-so panes of stamps arrived, each pane was backed with a piece of cardboard about 6 times bigger than the pane, and then individually wrapped in plastic. We can see how this would be good practice when mailing stamps to collectors, but we feel it is outrageously wasteful otherwise. There should be a "minimal packaging" box we can check. This knowledge makes me very unlikely to ever order stamps online.

(I've invited Johanna and Shital to blog here too, what with Ehren scoring an "opportunity for improvement" on his blogging since May.)

More with the breathtaking.

Another bit for the "More things in heaven and earth" file: lenticular clouds.
Jawdropping.
Ooh, and here's a cute animation explaining how lenticular clouds happen.
(Which leads to the question "South Georgia Island?", but that's for another inclement lunch hour.)

Breathtaking

You know that whole "fly to Europe and take a break in Iceland" concept I'm so fond of?
Here's a good incentive.

Things to Do

Do too.
(In response to Ehren's comment just now that "we don't have a science museum in DC.") This sure sounds like a science museum to me.

Sweet (like a wren, not like "Dude, Sweet!")

I was poking around on Panoramio in my very limited lunchtime today. Making my way up the Welsh coast. Disappointed to find no pictures of Llangrannog, where Michelle and I recovered from our character-building Pembrokeshire Coast Path adventure. So I went looking, and found the very sweet Llangrannog website. Don't you just want to pinch its cheek? I do.

That's a little more than I wanted.

So, you know how the packaging on the (admittedly very delicious) Saphara Tea makes me crazy with the wastefulness? I was just going to give them a piece of my mind when I discovered this:
They have music for each kind of tea.
Music.
Downloadable music.
From the "Saphara World Music Player."
In case you need a more multi-media tea experience.


It's gone too far.

Oh, and apparently "Saphara offers an exclusive combination of premium teas and social responsibility. The packaging is composed of 100 percent recycled paperboard, which includes 35 percent post-consumer material. All printing is done with 100 percent vegetable-based inks for full biodegradability, and the pyramid bags, strings, tags, overwrap and carton are all made from biodegradable materials to minimize impact on the environment."

The fact that "some trash" has higher environmental impact than "no trash" does not seem to have sunk in. I'm going to do that piece-of-mind thing now.

A retraction, and a recommendation.

Retraction: I'd like to take back the mean thing I said about tilapia the other day. Not the "bamboo of fish" part; the "I'd rather eat tofu" part. On Monday I made a dredge out of ground flax seeds and coriander (seed) and orange peel, and dipped the fish in egg white and then in the dredge, and baked it, and put it in the fridge. Yesterday I heated/crisped it up in a frying pan and ate it over a spinach and grapefruit salad, and it was very very delicious. Also, a tilapia filet is a very nice convenient 4-oz portion.

Recommendation: Need any really cool animals made out of junk?

I'd just like to point out...

...that Ehren has not posted to this blog since May.
I'm just sayin'.

It's not like a rollercoaster.

Just got back from Cloverfield at the Uptown. I'm almost not-queasy enough (an hour after the movie ended) to think about maybe being able to drink a glass of water.
While it's true that I can ride rollercoasters all day and not feel sick, the experience was a bit more like trying to read in the car (as a passenger, I mean.) Only the car and everything around it is being blown up/shot at/consumed by an earthquake, and every once in a while you get a glimpse of a pretty cool monster.
I had my eyes closed for most of the movie, but weirdly don't feel that I wasted my $10 on the ticket. The soundtrack gives good clues of when there's monster action, and overall it was an entertaining experience. I just can't truthfully say that I've seen it. I saw maybe twelve minutes of it. My neck kinda hurts now, from the tension.

Things I Discovered at Lunchtime

1. There's a pizza-by-the-slice place at 17th and G (it's called Ecco Cafe).
2. McReynold's Liquor on G Street between 17th and 18th has a "10% off all single malts" sale every Thursday.
3. Brewood Engravers has moved to 17th and Pennsylvania. (They used to be at 17th & I, and I lamented their disappearance.)
4. The "nondescript government building name" Ehren was talking about earlier today is the Office of Thrift Supervision.

And I saw a woman riding a unicycle. (She wasn't performing. She was going somewhere.)

Unlike the Immortal Sablefish?

"It is a slow-growing species, extremely vulnerable to mortality,'' says Leonard.

*blink?*

As opposed to all those immortal fishes??

Sure, he's saying that a species with lots of fast-growing, fast-to-reproduce individuals have less of a problem with mortality, as a species. That's why no-one is complaining about the overfishing of krill. It just struck me as funny. What with pretty much every known species being vulnerable to mortality, as far as I know.

How this happened: I was in Whole Foods yesterday looking for halibut (because it's high in magnesium and therefore good for my joints), but halibut's apparently out of season, and I got suckered into buying some Chilean sea bass because it had a "sustainable fisheries" sticker on it and looked the most like halibut of anything there. Then I felt guilty because of the whole fishing thing in general and the Chilean sea bass thing in particular, so I looked it up and found the above quote which, perversely, made me feel better about the whole thing. I feel guilty about buying fish, generally. Except for the ultra-sustainable tilapia (which I think of as the bamboo of fish). But who wants to eat tilapia all the time? Bland. Not so much with the Omega-3s. A bit on the pointless side. May as well eat tofu. (In fact, I'd usually rather eat tofu than tilapia.)

Plus, today I discovered that despite halibut being at the very top of the "high in magnesium" foods list, there are no other fish on there at all. So the whole magnesium justification is out, and I should just eat spinach instead.