Or commonly known as miracle berry. It has the amazing ability to make sour foods taste sweet. At least some sour foods. What it does is block the tongue’s taste buds from sensing sour flavors. So if the food has sugars, such as lemons or grapefruits, the suppression of the sour taste makes it seem … Continue reading Synsepalum dulcificum
The Disappearing Mouse
Longtime readers may recall that awhile back I was plagued by mice. Well, that might be overstating it a bit. But I had a problem with mice, the worst of which were the ones that managed to get up onto my kitchen counter. But for the past couple of years I’ve been mostly mouse free. … Continue reading The Disappearing Mouse
The Word Time Traveler
Merriam-Webster has a nifty (first known use 1865) site on the web called Time Traveler. You can use it to find all the words that were first recorded in print in a certain year. Such as the year of your birth, for example. The year of my birth, 1949, was especially rich in new words. … Continue reading The Word Time Traveler
Every Day a Little Death
I bought this book last year and I realized that I never wrote about it. It’s an anthology of short crime stories, each one of which is related in some way to a Stephen Sondheim song. But not simply related to a song, most of the stories are filled with sly and not so sly … Continue reading Every Day a Little Death
Can You Trust the Poles? Uh, I mean Polls
A rare instance of a second post in a day, but I thought some of the Political Bytes at E-V.com today were worth passing along: Poll Position, Part I: In our election wrap-up yesterday, we noted that the polls of the Wisconsin Democratic gubernatorial primary were way off, just like the polls of the Michigan … Continue reading Can You Trust the Poles? Uh, I mean Polls
Rooting for Rosemary
I discovered that you can get rosemary to root in water and then plant it, so that’s what I’ve done. Now I should have a rosemary bush growing inside during the cold months. And this time I’ll put it in the back window upstairs where it will get some sun. Oh, and the spearmint … Continue reading Rooting for Rosemary
Them That’s Got Shall Have
I heard this on the jazz station the other day… On an unrelated note, John Oliver has a followup to a story he did a couple weeks ago.
Eating Corn
I love corn on the cob, but it takes me so long to shuck the corn, that I don’t make it very much. I hate to get the silk in my teeth, so I have to make sure that every last bit of silk is removed. Do you have a preferred method of eating corn … Continue reading Eating Corn
Rat Race
In a recent episode of Scriptnotes Craig Mazin mentioned the 2001 movie Rat Race, which reminded me that I haven’t watched it in about 20 years. So I corrected that the other evening. It’s a totally wacky screwball comedy about greed, and you can’t find a subject much wackier than that—other than sex, of course. … Continue reading Rat Race
Picking Up the Pieces
After I flunked out of Penn State my first thought was to try to get reinstated, so I applied to take a correspondence course. Big mistake. The course I enrolled in was Economics, a subject that I had always hated and did poorly in. I figured that as Terry was an Econ major that I … Continue reading Picking Up the Pieces