Giving in to Doritos: The Quest
Well, the Frito-Lay marketing ploy worked for a second straight summer. Today was grocery-shopping day. I hadn’t bought a bag of Doritos in over a year, not since the X-13D Flavor Experiment . . . which of course turned out to be the oddly compelling but ultimately quite gross Cheeseburger flavor. Now, today, I couldn’t […]
Purple potatoes, Sparks, Martini Ranch music video
This week a guy I know was walking around with a bowl of purple potatoes for lunch. I don’t mean purple-skinned potatoes, but the radioactive-looking purple-all-the-way-through kind. The only question is whether he was eating a normal, terrestrial species of potato/yam (Peruvian or similar) or perhaps somehow got hold of a starchy product of the […]
Miniature disasters and the Democratic nomination
Today this blog turned six years old. I’ll take a cake with marzipan icing, please (but hold the marzipan babies). Mmm . . . sugar-almond paste. Yesterday was a weird day of accidents in Corvallis. Driving to work in the morning, I was forced to stop because the westbound lanes of Philomath Boulevard had been […]
Flavor tripping with miracle fruit (and Snuff)
Interested in flavor tripping? Try the miracle fruit. It’s a cranberry-sized West African berry (Synsepalum dulcificum) that numbs your sour and bitter tastebuds for a couple of hours after eating it, making certain foods taste weirdly sweet. Flavor-tripping parties are being held in New York City and San Francisco. The New York Times reports on […]
WebVisions 2008 in review: Part one
On Thursday and Friday, May 22-23, I am attending the WebVisions 2008 conference at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland. (Also see my review from WebVisions 2007. I didn’t compose a write-up when I attended in 2005 and 2006.) Below is a quick (read: marginally coherent) overview of all five sessions I attended on Thursday, […]
Cats and ducklings: Part one
Happy Mother’s Day! I was going to hold off posting about all of our recent cat and duckling experiences for a bit longer, but I’ve been inspired by Google’s avian-themed logo doodle for Mother’s Day. It looks like they’ve got a white pekin duck mothering two mallard ducklings. Hooray for adoptive parents. Unless that’s a […]
da Vinci Film Festival and Moro blood oranges
The ninth annual da Vinci Film Festival starts next Friday and runs through the weekend, April 18-20, 2008. This weekend is the da Vinci Fast Film Project, in which participants write, shoot, and edit a film in 48 hours. The goal is to make a short of 10 minutes or less using the prop and […]
USO All-Stars and Chuck Norris in Iraq
I flipped through a friend’s April issue of Maxim magazine the other day and found that Scarlett Johansson has taken it upon herself to battle al-Qaeda! Well, actually, it was more like she did a five-day United Service Organizations (USO) tour of Kuwait, but whatever. There wasn’t much to the article, really, but it did […]
Barack Obama, Bill Gates retires, habanero salsa
On the heels of Hillary Clinton’s huge comeback win in the New Hampshire primary over Barack Obama, ESPN columnist Bill Simmons reports that he is “leaning toward voting for the Clintons (and really, they’re a package deal)” for the following three reasons: They’ve been in the office before and made all their mistakes the first […]
Happy Holidays: UNICEF, pecans, Google, magicJack
Happy Holidays, everyone! Yesterday we had some snowy driving when returning from Washington on I-84 (in between The Dalles and Hood River), but that was nothing compared to the beating the Midwest has been getting this December. Reminds me of why I moved to the Mid-Willamette Valley and out of the freezing snowlands. You need […]