Glonous History

For those of you out there who are partial to a common form of Americanized Chinese cuisine, and have been for at least a little while, you may be familiar with the archetypical example of what is sometimes (unflatteringly) called "Engrish," to wit: The Chopstick Instructions.

For those who can't read past the glare, it says, "Welcome to Chinese Restaurant.  please try your Nice Chinese Food With Chopsticks the traditional and typical of Chinese glonous history.  and cultual."

While I cannot speak to the typicalness of its glonous history, I did just find out that "cultual" is an actual word.  It means "of or relating to cult or worship."

Given the excessive number of posts and images on the web about this particular chopstick exemplar, I have to admit the word may not be completely ill-chosen.

Give them the finger (no, the other one)

As a rule of thumb (ha ha), in men the index finger is shorter than the ring finger, and in women the index finger is longer than the ring finger.

This appears (at least in preliminary experiments with other mammals) to be due to hormonal balances in utero, to wit androgen, testosterone et al..  This means that many other sex-linked traits (biological ones, not cultural) can be correlated to finger length-- for example, one study* supposedly found that women with shorter index fingers (normally a "masculine" trait) were less likely to get lost.

*I don't have a reference; the Scientific American article just said "studies have found" and went on from there.  And now that I look at it, I'm REALLY damn skeptical.  I couldn't track down the actual study, but Wikipedia, funnily enough, does have an impressive list of links to other studies involving second/fourth finger ratios, such as this one (http://www.ehbonline.org/article/S1090-5138(99)00026-4/abstract) investigating musical ability.

Five Guys

I finally got around to trying a Five Guys burger.

Short version:  Burger's good; fries not so much.  Although they gave us a LOT.

I got a cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, and "grilled" mushrooms.  Two patties, with decent beef flavor and texture, with a satisfying amount of cheese, lettuce, and tomato.  The mushrooms were kind of buried, sadly, and I didn't really taste them.  I think they might be better with less accompaniment, or possibly with a double order (will they do that?  I should try asking next time)*.  The patties were interestingly unevenly shaped, which led to a burger with a lot more character than I was expecting, although it was a little awkward to eat at times, with unexpected promontories and fissures in the beefular topology.

My wife got a bacon cheeseburger with lettuce, tomato, and mayo, and declared it decent.  The bacon wasn't outstanding, but it added the requisite salty/crunchy/smokiness.

The voluminous French Fries did appear to be hand-cut, as advertised, uncoated, and nicely potato-y.  A little light on the salt, which I actually appreciated (it's much easier to add a bit more than otherwise), but they seemed to be single-fried, which isn't bad per se, but results in a less crispy fry.  I like my fries very crispy.  Next time, I might skip the fries entirely, or share an order with someone else.

And, of course, the free roasted peanuts were free.  Hard to screw that up.

*They were probably griddled instead of grilled, but everyone uses that sense so I can't really hold it against them.  On the other hand, they might have been steamed for all the character that they had.  Limp, not very browned.  Should have stayed on the griddle for a bit longer.

Abortive Food Post

I started to write a post about my latest attempt at making pizza dough completely from scratch, but I realized that I still don't know what went wrong with the first attempt, or what went right with the second, or what's still going wrong now.  Which means that I can't really claim to have learned anything, can I?

So I'll just let you all know that homemade pesto on fresh corn on the cob doesn't quite work as well as I would have hoped.  I think it's the nuts, personally-- everything else in there ought to go with the corn, right? Somehow it just wasn't as good as straight up butter and salt.

Word(s) for the Day-- #%(#

This post is for all of you out there who are still 13 years old, no matter how many years you've lived.

These are (I believe) all of the words from Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged that refer to the "droppings/dung/excrement" of specific animals.  Not just generic euphemisms for poop; I have no doubt that would be another 80 or so*.  No, these are the entries that name specific creatures, or at least specific classes or types of creature, and their respective leavings.

album graecum (dogs/hyenas, especially when used in tanning)
argol (camels, especially as used for fuel)
buffalo chips  (buffalo, natch)
buttons (sheep)
casson (cattle)
cast (earthworms)
cow pat (cows)
cowshard (cows)
cowsharn (cows)
crottels (hares)
fiants ("fox, wolf, boar, or badger," which is delightfully specific and various at the same time)
frass (insects)
fumet/fewmet (deer, or dragons if you're a fan of Madeline L'Engle)
guano (bats)
horse apples  (horses, of courses)
horseshit (horses)
lesses ("beast of prey"; the OED has "the dung of a ‘ravenous’ animal, as a wild boar, wolf, or bear")
mute (bird)
ornithocopros (birds)
pellet (mouse or rabbit)
shard (cow)
spraints (the winner! Defined in its entirety as "otter's dung".)
whitewash  (birds)

*Remind me to share my list of English words that can be used to mean "snow" at some point.  I'm up to 78 of those so far-- far more than the Inuit (three or four base words plus modifiers).

Dem (bird) bones

Bird bones are hollow.  This is a previously known thing, and something that many people know about birds.  They have to fly, after all, so weight reduction blah blah blah.

But nature, being what it is, abhors a vacuum, or at least an unused empty space.

Many of these hollow spaces in the bones are actually filled with a number of small air sacs that are directly connected to the bird's respiratory system.  When I first heard this, my first thought was that this must mean that when a bird inhales, it could use its bones as auxiliary lungs!  As it turns out, it's a bit more complicated than that.  

When the bones are being formed, the connection to the respiratory system allows the sacs to inflate, moving bone material out of the way and forming the hollow cavities.  Once the bones are fully formed, the sacs retain their connection, but do not have the parabronchi (analagous to the mammalian alveoli) found in the lungs, so they cannot exchange oxygen and carbon dioxide.  Instead, they serve strictly to hold and move air around, ultimately giving the bird a greater "lung" capacity and higher efficiency.

Hot hot hot

A couple of heat-related tidbits today.

According to the FAQ on the Ferrarra Pan website, the heat in Atomic Fireballs comes not from the cinnamon, but more prosaically from good old-fashioned capsicum-- the spice in chili peppers.  Apparently a typical Fireball is about 3500 on the Scoville heat scale, putting it at about the level of a mild jalapeño.

In other news, the Lan Chi brand of Black Bean Sauce turns out to actually be Lan Chi Chili Sauce with Black Beans and Chili.  And Chili.  Yow.  I got a jar as a replacement for the Lee Kum Kee Black Bean and Garlic Sauce, which was for many years a staple of my stir-fry flavorings and has recent departed from the shelves of my local grocery store.  It's, um.  Not quite the same.  My mouth is still a little tingly an hour and change later.