Plain Old Copulation
Thanks to commenter Nic Sebastian for the link to Sarah Sloat's wine descriptions, for example:
This white is a saint of long silence, ponderous with quince and lanolin. Uncorked, dollops of fog slip from the bottle, flavors tinging the lips with blonde sugar. Cool at first, but turn the lights down a little: a flame is kindling in the robin’s throat.
Not surprisingly, Ms. Sloat is also a poet.
~~~
Some more wine descriptions I've run across: fresh violets, hint of
cassis, tobacco notes, orange blossoms, toffee and oak, cedar, chewy, fat,
flabby, focused, forward, hollow, honeyed, hot, meaty, morsellated, musty,
ponderous, precocious, pruney, stale, stalky, supple,
~~~
I
finally got the time to check out Mousavi's Facebook
page.
HuffPo and Andrew are
doing a bang-up job of keeping track of the tweets and cell-phone reports.
~~~
A signed photo of Einstein sticking his tongue out sold for $74,000
today. I
saw that on the FoxNews website. Right next to it was a picture of
Geraldo, who will provide "Live 2 Hour Coverage" of the "turmoil in Iran".
Wouldn't want to miss that.
~~~
"House, M. D." is now officially the most popular TV program in the world, with
84 million weekly viewers.
~~~
Burger of the week: WaterFrontBistro Cod filets on a giant cheesy bun,
garlic mayo, huge slice of beefsteak tomato, two grilled onion slices, a
mountain of organic greens, accompanied by
Mt. Olive kosher dill petites.
Check out Mt. Olive's "Fried Pickles Variety Platter" recipe.
~~~
I'm not very good with lyrics. Actually, I just hear whatever I want to
hear, and then go on singing it for decades. That's understandable with,
say, a RLJ song, since nobody knows what's she's saying except Tom Waits.
But, unless I'm wrong, I've watched this commercial a dozen times, and I
think they're singing about a Big Mac. Really? Singing about a
Big Mac? Huh.
~~~
I heard a very interesting discussion on NPR's Science Friday, in which a
researcher noted that scientists have been continuously finding same-sex sexual
behaviors among disparate species (since they actually started looking for
them). The current list is 450 species across many phyla, and "sexual
behavior" includes mutual egg-tending, sexual display, courting rituals, and
plain old copulation. Meanwhile, my latest SciAm has an article bursting
another anthropocentric bubble: humans aren't the only ones with
right-brain/left-brain differentiation. In fact, many species segregate
processing: frogs are better at recognizing prey from the left, whales
almost always attack food sources with their right jaw, many birds use their
left hemisphere to sort out food from pebbles, et cetera. The article
posits that this is a very efficient example of multi-processor multi-tasking.
~~~
Am I done with this damnable conversion of Chinese code to the eventual product
firmware? No, I am not, but I am making some kind of "3 steps forward, 2
steps back" progress. I think what I'm dealing with is: the hardware
isn't exactly as advertised, the base firmware is fragile, the processor/memory
is underpowered, Our Chinese Supplier's button logic isn't robust, and there's
bad juju surrounding the entire endeavor. I actually stopped billing for
two weeks to sort out whether I am slowly becoming a senile nincompoop or it's
actually a harder task than I first estimated. That didn't help The Paris
Fund or my other obligations, but what ya gonna do?
~~~
I rather like reading Rolling Stone, now that I get it every bloody week
because I must have converted somebody's airline miles to a subscription.
It's not like I didn't like Spin, I just never knew who they were talking
about. I think of Rolling Stone as an alternative source of news to
people who might actually have attended Woodstock. There's the ever-pottymouthed
Matt Tabai, who is always good for a low blow to Republicans and their ilk.
The CD reviews intrigue me as I'm not entirely certain they have any relation to
the actual sales of said CDs (and their downloads), judging from the other RS
section that lists top 10 this and that. There's a good article on what
happens when gasoline hits $X per gallon, for example, a typical small gem
amongst the retelling of broken bands and artist indictments. Here's some
samples:
$10 a gallon: Electric cars reign supreme. Disney World closes.
$14 a gallon: Walmart killed by high cost of global transport.
Asphalt costs soar, toll roads shut down.
$20 a gallon: 90% of Americans live in cities, 70% never own a car.
Nuclear reactors power everything, including cruise liners. Polyester too
expensive for clothes.