Checking out alternative chili recipes we found a recipe calling for a chayote. Not knowing what it was, I went to wikipedia. The entry may have the best opening line of any wikipedia entry I’ve found: The chayote (Sechium edule), also known as sayote, tayota, choko, chocho, chow-chow, christophine or merliton, is an edible plant …
Continue reading “There is actually a real food called chow-chow”
Yes, it’s cold here like everywhere north of the south, and when the weather is this cold, it appears to be actually interesting to talk about. I am fond of telling people that it got down to -40 when I interviewed for this job and I actually liked it. I stayed over the weekend and …
Fagstein has an excellent post on the end of analog TV signals in the US, and the same fate that will fall upon Canadians in 2011. I say what I’m about to say as someone who enjoys watching my HDTV on a regular basis. The switchover from analog to digital TV is one of the …
Sometime in December I mentioned some politics in the National Communication Association (US) around the San Diego conference. Beyond the whole Horowitz silliness, there was the fact that the Hyatt was in the middle of a labor dispute and was funneling money into the campaign to oppose Prop 8. This YouTube video isn’t exciting but …
it’s all in our minds. We just need to snap out of it. Like Y2K. Sure, that’s true to a point, but the more frightening prospect is that all the prosperity that people felt coming up to the crisis was also in their minds, largely fictional, and therefore incredibly dangerous. I know it was just …
In an earlier post, I discussed the evacuation of meaning from the term “interdisciplinarity” and some forms that I consider to be more authentic attempts to get beyond limits of traditional–and nontraditional–disciplines. One question often left unasked is why universities are now so interested in fostering certain kinds of interdisciplinarity. When I was first learning …
The joy of New Year’s is that it’s the most obviously arbitrary of holidays (as opposed to all the rest which are less obviously arbitrary), but that’s also its downfall. People always complain that New Year’s Eve always has too much pressure to have fun and not enough fun. That’s probably true. Nevertheless, we are …
