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.