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United States, North Carolina, Carrboro, English, Paul, Male, 56-60, All Music, All Food.

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Tuesday, October 07, 2003

East Is East (ImDb…NetFlix)   I don’t know why I put this movie in my Netflix queue, but I’m glad I did. It’s not your typical Pakistani Father/English Mother of 7 children fish & chips type comedy, it goes over the beloved edge. The most violent act in it is a circumcision – of the youngest boy (of six!) who frames life in a parka he never removes, even for the operation.   There are two failures of arranged marriages: The eldest boy abandons the bride at the altar to pursue a career as an artist, drawing and sculpting genitalia, and another one that frames the plot. Oh. Did I say there’s a crazed Great Dane, spotted like a Dalmatian, that attempts to force his intentions on women whenever they let their guard down? No, probably not, such a detail is by its nature forgettable. This is a hilarious movie with a serious theme.   3:44:14 PM    comment []

This adapter for 45 RPM records is $249.00! – but it’s 14K gold.               This one is $4.25. Think I’ll order it. Mark Hoback sent me 4 of his 45s and I want to dub them to CD, but not elliptically or expensively.     To see some real beauties, for classic old phonographs, go here.   1:03:45 PM    comment []

Making those lamb shanks last Sunday got me dreaming of tagines. Kinda like a tangerine dream, in more ways than you might think – both words are derived from the Moroccan city of Tangiers. Even stranger, especially for word geeks, Microsoft Word tries to correct the plural of tagine to tanginess – without even asking you! Don’t be fooled! “Tanginess” is also a noun, but it is derived from tang, which means at least these three things:   1.     A distinctively sharp taste, flavor, or odor, as that of orange juice. See synonyms at taste. 2. A distinctive quality that adds piquancy. 3. A trace, hint, or smattering.   ETYMOLOGY: Middle English tange, of Scandinavian origin; akin to Old Norse tangi, point, sting.   There’s a lot of culinary ground between Scandinavia and Tangiers, not to mention a few mountains and at least one sea, so I don’t expect to cover all that in this brief post. Instead, I’ll just direct you to this site, Tangiers Tagine, to see my favorite. Vaguely resembling a nuclear cooling tower, it performs a similar function. You cook food slowly in it and the released water condenses on the tower to drip back into the food. It’s different than cooking the food completely covered because the humidity level in the tower is lower – meaning you’re not steaming the food, just re-cooking it in its own liquid.   Liz got me a Moroccan cookbook for Christmas a few years back and we had some lamb roulade stuffed with nuts and currants, but I hit dead end with Moroccan food without the tagine (with the notable exception of developing a taste for homemade pickled lemons). At the time, the only one I could find was the Le Creuset overpriced monster with ceramic cladding destined to chip. $94.00 is too much; $38.00 ain’t too bad. I can almost imagine the tanginess of pickled tangerines simmered in a Tangiers tagine. 11:42:25 AM    comment []

This is the picture on the front page of The Guardian online.   Count the vials. 1…2…3…damn! – that guy’s thumb is in the way. Maybe he’s not a guy, maybe it’s a woman, but there are multiple vials of botulinum in the picture. We can disagree on the total count, it’s a little dark at the upper right, but we will agree there are quite a few more than one vial.   The story says they found one vial in an Iraqi scientist’s home refrigerator (Golly, all the precautions I take to keep botulism out of my refrigerator and this guy stores it there!). It goes on to say it has been there for over 10 years! What? Even pickles become suspect after a year or two, but maybe botulinum doesn’t sour. It’s already as poisonous as you can get, so I suppose nothing would grow in it. Anyway, if he kept food there too, this man is lucky to be alive.   The story itself is no big deal really. All it says is that the US and UK governments’ intense exaltation of this one vial is an exaggeration. Yawn, just another lie, where’s my TV Guide? If you want to read the story, it’s here; If you’re feeling too lazy to click, read on for the opening paragraphs. Or hit the back arrow, click “Favorites,” or whatever you do when you’ve heard the same story many times before…   The test tube of botulinum presented by Washington and London as evidence that Saddam Hussein had been developing and concealing weapons of mass destruction, was found in an Iraqi scientist's home refrigerator, where it had been sitting for 10 years, it emerged yesterday. David Kay, the expert appointed by the CIA to lead the hunt for weapons, told a congressional committee last week that the vial of botulinum had been "hidden" at the scientist's home, and could be used to "covertly surge production of deadly weapons". Since then, the discovery of the vial has been at the heart of the debate over prewar claims that Iraq had an arsenal of banned weapons. It was cited in justifications of the invasion by President George Bush and by Britain's foreign secretary, Jack Straw, who described botulinum toxin as "15,000 times more toxic than the nerve agent VX". (also see HAIL DUBYUS!) 4:12:12 AM    comment []

Why I read  BBC news.   Pentagon's 'lax' lab gear sales The US Defence Department could inadvertently be providing terrorists with the equipment to make chemical or biological weapons, say congressional investigators. They found the Pentagon was not properly monitoring internet sales of its equipment and so was unable to determine who was buying it and how it was being used. The House Government Reform Subcommittee on national security - which requested the inquiry - will examine the findings on Tuesday. "The Department of Defence should not be a discount shopping outlet for would-be-bio terrorists," said subcommittee chairman, Representative Christopher Shays. This story won’t have much coverage stateside. We are committed to mindlessly bombing anything that has even a remote connection to terrorism, but we can’t bomb the Pentagon. Therefore, this situation does not fnord exist. 3:42:34 AM    comment []