Via Archiblog: the projected Walter Towers to be built in Prague. Like I needed another reason to go back there.
Food
Another sort of tower discovered through OddityCentral but you can straight to the Heart Attack Grill for more of the same. This is the quadruple bypass burger (two pounds of meat).
1. From OddityCentral, this picture an amateur took of a stingray migration which may have consisted of as many as 10,000 individuals. See OddityCentral for more.
2. From SecretDead, this poster (see SecretDead for the source).
3. From DailyDoseOfImagery, that dinner in the sky phenomenon first reported in Brussels has now made it to Toronto. See DailyDose for more images.
4. Finally from DerSpeigel a story on the ongoing Naples garbage scandal. The take here is that they are sending in “crisis psychologists” to help with the tension.
Makes more sense to send out the Mafia clowns who are most responsible for this.
The Goblin Shark. Its liver may account for up to a fourth of its weight. Found in deep sea but rare enough that little is really known about it other than its good looks.
An arresting image but no information about the type.
The Greenland Shark. Largest specimen ever caught was over 1000 kilograms. The flesh is poisonous.
So I might not want to be in the water but would love to be at this underwater restaurant in the Maldives.
The headline is slightly misleading in that the eater approach to conservation works better for plants than for small animal populations but overall worth considering. Strange to think that if left alone, many of these species will die out. Of course, on an existential note, what does it mean to be only because you are edible.
Gordon Ramsay and James May eating bull’s penis and rotting shark and then cooking…
From Timothy Hallinan’s Thailand-set novel A Nail Through the Heart
“Twenty or so years ago, in one of the first invasions by a Western brand name, Nescafé shouldered aside the much more labor-intensive processes by which the Thais made some of the world’s best coffee, replacing taste with convenience.”
“But Rose [who is Thai] grew up with Nescafé. She adores it, hot, tepid or iced. He has seen her eat a teaspoon of it, dry. … [Rafferty] takes a sip, rolls it around in his mouth like red wine, and revises his opinion. It’s an interesting drink if you don’t insist that it’s coffee.”
I suppose that might work..I do remember when down in Mexico and then later in other coffee growing lands being puzzled about the ubiquity of Nescafe.
This wonderful little gem from someone who is not entirely up on the current (or is it just North American) slang.
Cats and Dogs - One man’s pet is another man’s meal. Ghana’s Volta Region is the place to eat pussy (tastes like chicken) In Nigeria dog meat which is roasted like beef is also belived to improve your sex life.
In Cairo, the military is being put to work baking bread as rising food prices threaten to become the spark that ignites wider anger at a repressive government. In Burkina Faso and other parts of sub-Saharan Africa, food riots are breaking out as never before. In reasonably prosperous Malaysia, the ruling coalition was nearly ousted by voters who cited food and fuel price increases as their main concerns.
“It’s the worst crisis of its kind in more than 30 years,” said Jeffrey D. Sachs, the economist and special adviser to the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. “It’s a big deal and it’s obviously threatening a lot of governments. There are a number of governments on the ropes, and I think there’s more political fallout to come.”
and
The Poor Eat Mud
In Haiti, where three-quarters of the population earns less than $2 a day and one in five children is chronically malnourished, the one business booming amid all the gloom is the selling of patties made of mud, oil and sugar, typically consumed only by the most destitute.
“It’s salty and it has butter and you don’t know you’re eating dirt,” said Olwich Louis Jeune, 24, who has taken to eating them more often in recent months. “It makes your stomach quiet down.”
Commodity speculation spread long ago from standard products like oil and gold to anything edible and available for trade on the Chicago Futures Exchange. These days there are futures contracts for everything from wheat to oranges to pork bellies. The futures market is a traditional tool for farmers to sell their harvests ahead of time. In a futures contract, quantities, prices and delivery dates are fixed, sometimes even before crops have been planted. Futures contracts allow farmers and grain wholesalers a measure of protection against adverse weather conditions and excessive price fluctuations. They can also help a farmer plan how much to plant for a given year.
The Chicago Board of Trade is the nerve center for global futures contracts.
But now speculators are taking advantage of this mechanism. They can buy futures contracts for wheat, for example, at a low price, betting that the price will go up. If the price of the grain rises by the agreed delivery date, they profit.
Some experts now believe these investors have taken over the market, buying futures at unprecedented levels and driving up short-term prices. Since last August, this mechanism has led to a doubling in the price of rice — including the 500,000 tons that the Philippine government plans to buy in early May to address its own shortage.
Greg Warner has worked in the grain wholesaling business for more than two decades. His office sits a block away from the Chicago Futures Exchange. He’s an analyst with the firm AgResource, and he says what is happening now in the wheat market is unprecedented.
“What we normally have is a predictable group of sellers and buyers — mainly farmers and silo operators,” he says. But the landscape has changed since the influx of large index funds. Fund managers seek to maximize their profits using futures contracts, and prices, says Warner, “keep climbing up and up.”
He’s calculated that financial investors now hold the rights to two complete annual harvests of a type of grain traded in Chicago called “soft red winter wheat.”
Wagner is stunned by such developments. He sees them as evidence that capitalism is literally consuming itself.
UNIQUE VIETNAMESE COFFEE
EATEN and REGURGITATED BY A WEASEL
RICH CHOCOLATEY FLAVOUR!
This coffee is first eaten by Weasels which then regurgitate it, no one knows why they do this but it is then collected by locals in remote forest areas and then cleaned and roasted.
It has a unique rich chocolatey flavour and is best served as an espresso with a dash of condensed milk, just as they do in Vietnam.
CIVET COFFEE
THE RAREST COFFEE IN EXISTENCE
UNIQUE DELICATE FLAVOUR AFTER FERMENTATION IN THE CIVET’S DIGESTIVE SYSTEM
ONLY 500 KG’S OF THIS COFFEE ARE FOUND EACH YEAR
This is the rarest and definately most extraordinary coffee in the world! This coffee has been selected for us by Paradoxurus Hermaphroditis. Better know as the Common Palm Civet Cat. It prowls the Sumatran coffee plantations at night, choosing to eat only the finest, ripest cherries. The stones (which eventually form coffee beans) are then collected by cleaning through the droppings by the natives who collect it.
Kopi Luwak as it is known, is considered to be the world’s finest coffee by Native Sumatrans. This coffee has an Intense but delicate flavour and no aftertaste, which is unique in coffee. This flavour is due to the fact that the coffee has been partially fermented by passing through the system of the Civet. Only about 500 KG’s of this coffee are found each year.
Puked up or crapped out; they both sound so good. Who knew there so many variations to yum!!
“You read Rolling Stone and you don’t see rock stars curse like this,” said the chef ,Tom Colicchio, the lead judge of “Top Chef.” “And it’s recent, too. It’s something you’ve seen just in the past year.”
Worth reading, all about keeping the bleeper busy for the ratings to stay high. Ramsay is so known for his tirades that it was news a while back that he could calmly show you how to stove top a steak without losing it. He passed for normal, and that was news.
Being vegetarian-inclined is like a sorority pledge claiming that they still believe in their virginity and sobriety even after having a drunken tryst with Todd, the Sigma Kappa who got them into the mixer at no charge. It’s a nice thought that may let folks sleep easier at night. But let’s be clear - there’s already a word for someone who is ‘vegetarian-inclined’. It’s called an “omnivore” and it represents 96.8% of the rest of the country.
This one is fun because it led to quite the little comment flurry rightly castigating the writer for not acknowledging that there was a world of difference between someone who ate meat once a month and someone who ate it a few times a day.
