A food meme

Chad Orzel has a food meme up on his blog. This is the usual list style meme where you bold the items that you have experienced.

1. Venison (deer and elk)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (maybe, I never pass the cheese samples in the market without tasting)*
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl (I've had them each separately)
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects (yes, but not intentionally. Eating mosquitos in your dinner is part of camping)
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin (I'm not sure what this means. The only kaolin I know is a type of clay used in ceramics and pharmaceuticals. I have taken pills with kaolin clay in them. There is a mental illness called pica that involves compulsive eating of dirt. Some soils are used in traditional medicines. And, of course, no childhood is complete with a certain amount of dirt-eating.)
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash (In Budapest, no less)
88. Flowers (Nastutiums, roses, artichokes, lavender)
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa (I've had regular harissa)
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox (I prefer the stronger, dry style smoked slamon from the Northwest)
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake


That's 59; not very impressive. Items not on the original list, but that I think I deserve credit for:

101. Moose
102. Bear
103. Caribou
104. Retsina
105. Ćevapčići
106. Postum
107. Fried halibut cheeks
108. Cracklin
109. Injera
110. Home brewed wine or mead

What belongs on your list?

* It would be possible to do separate memes just to name all of the types of cheese a person has tried, or spices, or animal species (fish, fowl, and mammal), or animal parts. Another possibility is how many of the items on the list have you cooked.

Obsolete Skills I

Coturnix's Obligatory Readings of the Day for yesterday included a link to a list of obsolete technical skills. Both sites have interesting discussions and the concept has spawned, not one, but two wikis on the subject. I had most of the skills on the list at one time, but can't guarantee doing some of them anymore without poking someone's eye out. However, among thew amazing skills I can claim are:

• Dialing a rotary phone
  
• Counting change
  
• Changing the ribbon in a typewriter
  
• Threading a 16mm projector
  
• Cuing a track on a vinyl record
  
• Running a mimeograph machine
  
• Doing long division
  
• Trimming the tip on a quill pen
  
• Tuning the picture on a television set

What amazing technical skills do you have?

The real me

Mustang Bobby started this. Thanks to HeroMachine 2.5, camera-adverse bloggers can create a reasonable facsimile of what they look like in their minds. In real life I'm shorter and dumpier, my head is larger than my fist, and the cat would be hiding behind my leg.


Michael of Musing's Musings is also playing and much more interesting than Bobby or me. If we can get one more to play, we'll have enough for a set of blogger trading cards or a meme.

I'm number one and you are, too

David Ng at The World's Fair has created a great meme. He calls it the "I rank number one on Google" meme. The rules are much simpler than the last meme. Find five statements, which when typed into Google, will return your blog as the number one hit.

So far I have found four on archy but, taken together, I think they display such synergistic power that they are worth at least six and a third.

1. "Nazi Yeti in flying saucers"
   
2. "Nazi mammoth"
   
3. "frozen mammoth penis"
   
4. "nude photos of Ann Coulter"

As you can see, I run a classy and very intellectual blog.

I am rather cheesed to find out that I am not number one for "balloonosphere" since I invented that word.

So, dear friends, what search terms give you a number one?

I'm glad we settled that

From PhysOrg.com.

Science marches on

I noticed today the announcement a new high profile scientific journal, Chocolate Pudding Letters Review.

CALL FOR PAPERS!

We are now accepting papers for the 1st issue of CPLR! DO NOT MISS THIS OPPORTUNITY! Leading scientists anticipate that CPLR will become the premier outlet for major breakthroughs in the study of chocolate pudding (CP) and other viscous edible creations (VECs).

Specific topics of interest include, but are not limited to, 1) theoretical reviews, 2) empirical works, 3) recipes, 4) novel appropriations of/ways to smear CP/VECs, 5) interesting pictures of CP/VECs, 6) implications of CP/VECs for genetic research, 7) mirror neurons and CP/VECs, 8) and the localization of CP/VECs in the normal adult brain.

It's about time that this important subject finaly got the attention it deserves.

Yearning for lost cookies

Mustang Bobby's Question of the Day involves shopping habits and brand loyalty. This brings up lots of interesting possible digressions. Here's mine.

Every year the food industry launches thousands of new products. In the fight for shelf space most don't make it. Other products are retired by their producers after a while due to styles changing or other business reasons Is there a particular failed product or lost brand that you especially miss?

It seems that whenever someone releases a fruit pastry product, blueberry is the first test flavor to be withdrawn. Apple and raspberry never go away. But I love blueberry. The cruelest of these was Blueberry Newtons. Nabisco released and withdrew them twice, once when they initially tried alternate flavors to fig and once when they launched "low fat" Newtons. They're just playing with my feelings.

In the early eighties I read a story about Harlan Ellison. The company that manufactured his favorite candy went out of business, so Ellison went to the local distributor and bought up all of their remaining stock. He had refrigerators full of the stuff, which he carefully rationed out to last years.

Has there been any lost food in your life that you wish you could have done that for? Green cakes left in rain don't count.

Maybe we are that bad

It's an article of faith among the religious right that the US is a godless society where they are regularly persecuted by the likes of me and my friends not saying Merry Christmas. We usually laugh at their claims, but now comes some evidence that the US might really be a godless land--or at least a goddessless land.

Until last week, ten year old Sajani Shakya was the living goddess of Bhaktapur, a village in Nepal.

A Kumari is chosen between the ages of two and four, always from the same Buddhist clan. Tradition holds that she must hold 32 attributes, including thighs like those of a deer and a neck like a conch shell.

She lives a confined life, only coming out of her palace three or four times a year until she reaches puberty when another Kumari must be found.

This main outing coincides with a festival of thanks to the local rain god and as always, her feet must never touch the ground unless there is a red carpet beneath them.

Being a goddess means she is a local celebrity. And being a celebrity can only mean one thing these days. That's right, she had to come to the US on a tour promoting her movie. The local elders did not like her visiting our godless land and decided that being exposed to us had so tainted her that she was no longer a goddess. If you think your two to four year old daughter is the most divine thing ever, there is a village in Nepal with a job opening for a goddess.

So there you have it, just being in the same country as PZ Myers is enough to destroy the divinity of a goddess. We're bad.

(Oddly, the BBC, who carried this story, don't mention the name of her movie.)

Awww

Today seems like a good day for a baby animal picture.

Indah, seen here, is... an eight-week-old binturong on display at the Taronga Zoo in Sydney, Australia. The fledgling—the first binturong bred in captivity at Taronga since the species went on display there in the 1950s—was introduced to her new enclosure on Wednesday, May 30.

Though they are often called bearcats because of their appearance, binturongs are actually tree-dwelling, nocturnal mammals more closely related to civets. Native to Southeast Asia, Malaysia, and Indonesia, binturongs are becoming increasingly rare as their forest habitat is cleared for timber and cropland.

Here's a few more facts gleaned from Wikipedia: Like pandas, binturongs are members of the order carnivora who have adapted to a mostly vegetarian diet in the forest, in their case fruit. They are a little bigger than a housecat and have a fully prehensile tail. The scent of binturong musk has been compared to warm popcorn or cornbread. That sounds like they would be ideal candidates for exotic pets, but closeup pictures show that they have some very serious canine teeth and, as tree dwellers, they would probably destroy your curtains and bookshelves heading for high ground. It's probably best to appreciate them from afar.

Cross cultural onomatopoea

Josh Rosenau at Thoughts from Kansas has a post up on the difference between the Yiddish "oy" and the American "argh." Are they the same? Are there better equivalents? In the comments, others have brought up the Japanese and Australian "oi" and the piratical "arrr." This is becoming a truly international discussion. If have strong feelings about onomatopoea (and who doesn't?), you'll want to rush over and add your yadda yadda.

Mary Cheney gives birth to hammerhead shark

Or something like that.

Built to last

Here's a nice story about a new archaeological find in Greece. It's on the island of Kefalonia, which is on the west side of Greece facing the heel of the Italian boot.

Archaeologists on a Greek island have discovered a large Roman-era tomb containing gold jewelry, pottery and bronze offerings, officials said Wednesday.

[...]

The complex, measuring 8 by 6 meters (26 by 20 feet), had been missed by grave-robbers, the announcement said.

Archaeologists found gold earrings and rings, gold leaves that may have been attached to ceremonial clothing, as well as glass and clay pots, bronze artifacts decorated with masks, a bronze lock and copper coins.

The vaulted grave, a house-shaped structure, had a small stone door that still works perfectly -- turning on stone pivots.

I'm not sure why they sound surprised at that last bit. Don't these people watch movies? Stone doors in ancient tombs always open easily. I think it's a law. It doesn't matter if the door is Roman, Egyptian, Aztec, or Atlantean; all you need is the sacred brooch, which functions as a key, and the door opens automatically. You don't even need WD-40.

I have a theory about these locks and hinges that don't corrode or even get clogged with dust over thousands of years. They were actually the cause of the collapse of ancient civilization. Once they had perfected small mechanical things like this and installed them in their tombs, along with fiendish death traps, they couldn't get any repeat business and their economy collapsed. Fortunately, we've perfected built-in obsolescence, so our civilization will last forever (or until the giant squid discover fire).

Time passes when you're having fun

Four years ago today, I mowed my front yard while fuming about the war that our appointed president was about to start. As soon as the bombs started dropping, it would mean the end of an international order of diplomacy and law that had taken sixty years to build. One petulant little twit's ego was about to return the world to the days of gunboat diplomacy.

I had started to write a long note to my friend David, hoping he would post it on his blog, but I was starting to feel guilty about imposing on him to give me space to express my opinions. I thought about starting my own blog, I even had a name chosen. But I hesitated. Every diary or journal I have ever started has started with a bang and fizzled out about ten days later. Surely I was too old for that kind of pitiful display.

But I kept getting back to the war. This was too big of a moment to let pass without saying something. And there were those other things I wanted to talk about. Most of my grad school friends had moved away, so all of the little observations about culture, conspiracy theories, history, science, and crabgrass just piled up in my head. Maybe if I just got the free blog and tried to keep it up for one month. If I could keep writing for thirty days, I thought, maybe I could do more. No grandiose plans this time. Just thirty days...

Four years, this is my 1,429th post. Archy has had 101,487 visitors, 2,106 comments, currently has a Technorati ranking of 35,160, and a TLB ecosystem rating of 3528. That means, I'm a medium sized blog. I have nowhere near the traffic or productivity of the big kids, but I like my little niche.

I had a big fourth season cliff-hanger ending planned, with mammoths, Nazis, colliding planets, and the lovely Cockroach Dancers doing a line dance to "Archy Blarchy Heart." But the out-of-print book I needed to fact check my post still hasn't arrived, even though I ordered it three weeks ago (they are so not getting a good review). I guess that gives me something to use for my special two hour fifth season premier.

Balloonosphere

This is wierd. I was just checking out my blog statistics and found out that someone from Johns Hopkins University came here while Googling for the term "balloonosphere." As far as I know, I invented that word to describe a horrible peril facing humanity, more dangerous than transfats, Karl Rove, and reality teevee combined. This blog is the only place on the internet where it appears. I wonder what they were looking for.

I go pogonotrophy

Over at PZ's, we get our word of the day:

Pogonotrophy (po-guh-NAW-truh-fee) noun [From Greek pogon (beard*) + -trophy (nourishment, growth).] The growing of a beard.

From this, we get lots of cool related words: pogonophilia, a healthy love of beards; pogonophobia, an irrational fear of beards; pogonology, the study of beards; and pogonotomy, a fancy word for shaving.

With only a few interruptions, I've had a beard since I could grow one. That was about thirty-three years ago. Several of those interruptions were demanded by my employers in the seventies who didn't want their employees to look like dirty hippies. This was a rather odd attitude to take in Alaska in those days, when the Republican governor sported a full beard, as did many members of the legislature and respectable leaders of business all over the state. Beards are an inseperable part of Alaska's self image as a rustic, frontier territory. Anchorage's mid-winter festival, the Fur Rendezvous, has always included a beard contest.

As a student of history and all things old, I came up with an anthropological defense of beards and critique of shaving. According to my theory, shaving is an attempt by aging males to look younger, as in a beardless youth. I even had some historical evidence to go on, since the fashion of shaving in classical Greece was mostly a result of men imitating the appearance of the boy-general Alexander. But, since a beard is a secondary sexual characteristic that comes with puberty and sexual potency, shaving carries a negative subtext. The shaver makes himself appear pre-pubescent, or not yet sexually potent. Therefore, shaving is an act of symbolic castration and I was having nothing to do with it. I still don't.

That goes double for body waxing.

* Not "opposum" as some might expect.

For those keeping score

The Herald & Review of Decatur, Illinois just became the eighth newspaper to cancel the column written by Ann Coulter, who, by the way, I have no nude pictures of.

The hidden epidemic

This link is up on CNN's front page right now.


A qiuck jump over to the US Census population clock tells me that our current population is 301,349,664. That means 99.3 percent of the US population suffer from celiac disease, "but most don't even know it." Actually, another quick jump, this time to the story, shows that only three million Americans are esimated to have celiac. Our silent epidemic isn't one of celiac; it's one of bad reading comprehension.

Happy birthday, old squid (with updates)

Tomorrow, March 9, will be the 50th birthday of Dr. Paul Myers the University of Minnesota at Morris, Biology Department, better known to the blogging community as PZ of Pharyngula. We're going to celebrate this august occasion in the only way bloggers know, by having a blogfest. Whether PZ has been a friend, role model, or fierce debating partner, we hope you'll join us in recognizing him for his contributions to our corner of the blogosphere. All day tomorrow, Grrlscientist, Coturnix and I will be posting links to PZ's birthday greetings.

If you have a post for PZ on your blog, pictures of calamari, glowing tributes, haiku, dedicated posts, or simple best wishes, let us know and we'll add you to the linkfests. Our e-mails are: grrlscientist at gmail dot com, coturnix at gmail dot com, or archymarquis at aol dot com. If you don't have a blog, add something to the comments at any of the linkfests and Mrs. PZ will make sure he reads every one (note: prayers for conversion and angry denouncements will be disemvoweled on sight, so don't bother).

After you send your best wishes, hang around and read the others, join the virtual party, have some virtual cake, help us keep Coturnix away from the virtual punchbowl (we don't want a repeat of what virtually happened last year).

Check back in as the day progresses. There will be more fun and surprises all day. I'm saving my contribution for last (mostly because I'm not finished with it)

Update 1: It looks like Coturnix has the first linkfest up already. Since I'm on the West coast, I'll probably have the last one tonight. The real rush begins tomorrow morning at Grrlscientist's.

Update 2, Thursday midnight: The clock just rolled over into the new day, which means it realy is PZ's birthday here in the time zone of his birth. So, let the bells toll and let us celebrate with this linkfest.

The man himself admits it.

The world's best known atheist starts us out with a poem, dashing several stereotypes in one shot.

Migrations

Bad Astronomy

Sean Carroll at Cosmic Variance.

Discovering Biology in a Digital World

Corpus Callosum

Nonoscience (it's a trick post, try highlighting it)

Strange Fruit

Decorabilia

Hot Cup of Joe

Medlar Comfits

Skeptico

Afarensis

Evolving Thoughts has a Gilbert and Sullivan moment.

Living the Scientific Life (Scientist, Interrupted)

Toast442

Dynamics of Cats

Neurophilosophy

Invasive Species

Update 3, Friday, late morning: PZ has noticed that something is happening in the blogosphere, and the links continue.

Aardvarchaeology

Omni Brain

Sandwalk

Newton's Binomium

Neural Gourmet

Greg Laden

Socratic Gadfly

Sharp Brains

Evolutionblog

Cocktail Party Physics

Olio

Halfway There

Pro-science

John Wills Lloyd

Reed Cartwright at Panda's Thumb

Pen Elayne

Terra Sigillata

3 Quarks Daily

The Two Percent Company

Memoirs of a Skepchick

Action Skeptics

Geoff Coupe's Blog

Maryannaville

Archaeoastronomy

Zen Curmudgeon

Update 4. Later, that same day:

Retrospectacle

Galactic Interactions

The Questionable Authority

The Island of Doubt

Respectful Insolence

The Voltage Gate

Chaotic Utopia

The Modulator

Science Made Cool

The Daily Transcript

Rev. BigDumbChimp

Aurora Walking Vacation

The Disgruntled Chemist

Dubito Ergo Sum

Another History Blog

Laelaps

Thoughts in a Haystack

Broken Springboards All the Way Down

The Thermal Vent

Ron’s Blog

Dave at The Galloping Beaver shares the same birthday.

Sunbeams from Cucumbers

Update 5, End of the birthday day: It's almost midnight in the timezone of PZ's birth, but if any more contributions show up, I'll post another update tomorrow morning.

Adventures in Ethics and Science

Thomasburg Walks

Brent Rasmussen at Unscrewing the Inscruitable

Astroblog

Faded Flowers

The Greenbelt

Red State Rabble

The Inoculated Mind

Bioephemera

Wanderin' Weeta (With Waterfowl and Weeds)

I suppose it's not the worst way to go

Yet another quiz.

You'll die from an Unlikely Illness (like the plague).

You will unfortunately succumb to a random and unlikely disease. Only to find out after death that eating more broccoli would have cured you.

'How will you die?' at QuizGalaxy.com

I'd rather have made it further on the young/old scale, but if I have to go, mysteriously is the way to go. I'm hoping it's such an unlikely and mysterious disease that they will have to name it after me.

(via Pharyngula)

Almost as cool as the Junior Woodchucks

I was a lifer in the Cub Scouts and went further than it is even possible to go nowadays (there were four levels them, but only three last time I looked). I tried the Boy Scouts, but they beat me up, so I quit. I've applied for membership in the Order Of The Science Scouts Of Exemplary Repute And Above Average Physique*, an organization whose main function seems to be awarding merit badges to science geeks. Maybe this will wipe out the trauma and shame of my retreat from the BSA without any badges.

So far, I think I'm already entitled to:

• The "talking science" badge
  
• The "I blog about science" badge
  
• The "arts and crafts" badge
  
• The "I'm pretty confident around an open flame" badge
  
• The "inappropriate nocturnal use of lab equipment in the name of alternative science experimentation / communication" badge
  
• The "sexing up science" badge
  
• The "I can be a prick when it comes to science" badge
  
• The "will glady kick sexual harasser's ass" badge
  
• The "has frozen stuff just to see what happens" badge (LEVEL I)
  
• The "has frozen stuff just to see what happens" badge (LEVEL II - dry ice)
  
• The "I work with way too much radioactivity, and yet still no discernable superpowers yet" badge
  
• The "I've done science with no concievable practical application" badge
  
• The "I know what a tadpole is" badge
  
• The "experienced with electrical shock" badge (LEVEL I - shocker)
  
• The "experienced with electrical shock" badge (LEVEL III - shockee)

I'm working on:

• The "MacGyver" badge

* I feel safe claiming a right to join as long as they don't actually define the average physique against which we're being measured.