Thursday 16 July 2009
give me a bouncy C
Wednesday 15 July 2009
keening
Lately, H and I have been regularly patronizing the latest affiliate of a multi-national, multi-verse chain of home furnishing store that opened in a town close to home. We swept down on this local outlet for some quick and dirty shopping sprees. I just get a kick out of the whole store culture hanging off of it—the nomenclature and the mobbing and the hugeness of it all that makes one feel on a separate astral plane. I have heard that the founder of the company started with the cute names because of struggles with dyslexia and an inability to cope with numbers. When H and I next visit Sweden, I think we should speak a pidgin that’s entirely composed of the names home dรฉcor. Holmbo bestรฅ vika kivsta ekarp Stockholm? Is it jibberish, sweded? I knew a waitress from there once who thought the Swedish Chef from the Muppetts was the funniest thing in creation. I wonder if it is at all intelligible. I wonder if my houseshoes, named Njuta, are in any way suggestive of houseshoes.
Friday 10 July 2009
spice like us
It strikes me as strange that the drug Rapamycin was first isolated in the soil of Easter Island. This substance, touted annually as a potential fountain of youth that could extend life into extreme old age, was uncovered in a barren and remote place and not found in the leaves or bark of some exotic tree on the verge of being lost forever to deforestation or human encroachment. Instead, it is found on far-flung spot of tree-less land, long since depleted and with a collapsed ecosystem. It reminds me of the spice melange, which can only be found on the planet Arrakis called Dune. Apparently, the drug (also known be several different trademarked names) can extend life, however curtailing the immune system, by mimicking the benefits of what physicians call "caloric restriction"--that is, eatting just enough and not more, without actually eatting less. Maybe life just seems longer then, when one is always hungry. Maybe that's what brought about the destruction of the island's indigenous population--over-fed super-centarians.
Tuesday 7 July 2009
bread and circuses
Thursday 2 July 2009
off-colour elephant
Wednesday 1 July 2009
ersatz
Quite possibly it is acceptable, from time to time, to fool Mother Nature. Either manifested as these great fly-swatters in the desert or as a non-descript kiosk about the size of a bank of public toliets, environmental researchers are developing a pretend tree of sorts--one that can snatch and sequestir stray carbon in the atmosphere. It doesn't seem like a great improvement from the original design, at first, since trees rather just happen and one only has to take care not to cut them down. These synthetic trees, however, grab carbon dioxide from any source (though it's not as if real trees are discriminatory and insistent on taking carbon dioxide only exhaled from the lungs they gave oxygen to) year round (trees only breath-in for half a year) and inside of producing wood pulp or fruit, the carbon collected can be compressed and liquified for other uses.
In other ugly plant news: the EU has lifted a regulation governing the aesthetics of produce on grocery shelves. The headlines read praise all-around for lifting the almost 20 year ban on wonky fruit and veg. Apparently, there was a law stipulating that 26 varieties of fruits and vegetables ought to be show-bread material, defining roundness and uniformity standards, while perfectly edible knobby carrots and lumpy tomatoes were wasted. This is a good thing, to not associate nutrition with the ideal apple or pear. Maybe shoppers were just averse to finding suggestive plant bits in their shopping carts--a great phallic cucumber or hinder-shaped apricots like H and saw at the super market, yesterday, just hours after the ban was rescinded.
catagories: ๐ต