Archive for December, 2011
|Chicken Shawarmageddon & 13 Other Ways The World Might End In 2012
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 31, 2011 by admin in Holidays
Saturday, December 31st, 2011Go ahead and get yourself in a tizzy about the Mayan calendar. Me, I’m more concerned about Chicken Shawarmageddon and the Aporkalypse.
 Shawarmageddon Is Near |
One strange side effect of growing up in the era of the DVD and Roland Emmerich films
Best Politician Of 2011
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 26, 2011 by admin in Politics
Monday, December 26th, 2011One thing you may want to avoid if you ever go into politics is getting on our annual Best Politician list. Of last year’s contenders, two are dead, one was ousted by crazed bankers from his Caligula-like Videocracy, two are facing civil unrest on a scale not seen in Russia since the early 80′s, and one was terribly disfigured during his transformation into a Sith Lord.
One thing you may want to avoid if you ever go into politics is getting on our annual Best Politician list. Of last year’s contenders, two are dead, one was ousted by crazed bankers from his Caligula-like Videocracy
The Horrors of Cheese
[ Comments Off ]Posted on December 11, 2011 by admin in Lifestyle & Culture
Sunday, December 11th, 2011What’s in a name? Well, a LOT, when the name is something like “Stinking Bishop” Never mind your milk, these cheese facts will make your BLOOD curdle.
As much as I love cheese, I’ve always figured the first person that ate it must have been in the same frame of mind as the first guy that ate lobster. You know, the old joke about how hungry he must have been to be walking down a beach, see a lobster, and think to himself “Mmmm! That looks yummy!” There’s something similar going on with the cheese story. Sure, we all derived our first nourishment and comfort from the milk of our mothers’ bosoms, but let’s face it. Once you’ve moved on from all that, it’s kind of a weird stretch to look at a cow’s dangling doohickeys and decide to give it a go. And the weirder part is that having done so, someone then had to leave the results of their efforts laying around long enough to curdle, look at it and smell it, and say to themselves “Mmmmm. This will be DELISH”. A rather disturbing series of choices, if you ask me. I mean, while it’s not THAT hard to rationalize the whole milking of mammals thing, even the pastoral tribes of East Africa, who subsist only on the milk and blood of their herds (yup, you read that right, the BLOOD), wouldn’t THINK of eating cheese. And apparently never have; they don’t even have a word for the stuff. Similarly, it’s only in certain parts of Asia that people eat cheese. The distaste for cheese amongst Asian people can in fact be fairly intense; for instance, if you want to make your Japanese guests make a subtle “vurp” face, bring out the cheese platter. I learned this years ago when I lived in San Francisco. I often took the bus up Columbus Avenue with a Japanese friend I worked with. One day, I made the observation that as the bus progressed through Chinatown and more Asian passengers boarded, it smelled more and more like seafood with each passing block. He asked if it bothered me. “No”, I said, “I actually kind of like it”. He replied that he wished he could say the same about the bus leaving Chinatown, clarifying his thought by saying “because you know what it smells like when the bus fills up with white people? CHEESE”. So cheese, it seems, is sort of a defining aspect of western culture. And “culture” is the keyword here; it takes a lot of bacteria and hard work to create the plethora of moldy, discolored, and lumpy biological phenomena around the globe collectively known as “cheese”. We’ve rounded up a few of the more amusing and disturbing examples of the world’s dairy experiments below. Read the rest of this entry »