Category Archives: Posts

Hef the Hefty

By E | Posted on: August 16, 2007
So the girls of the Playboy mansions are back on television and, incredibly, they are engaging in events that I haven’t yet seen, despite having seen the thing close on (sssh) twenty times. This time they were celebrating Hef’s (x) birthday, and as “Hef” likes to do every year, there was a Casablanca extravaganza in [...]
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Stocktake

By E | Posted on: August 15, 2007
So stuff just happens and suddenly it’s another month, or day, or year, and you’ve forgotten to remember some of the nice things in between. Like a well executed Kung Pao chicken, or, in Pei Mei’s phrasing, Chicken with Gongbao sauce. Pei Mei is my favourite Taiwanese kitchen companion at the moment, not only because [...]
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Don’t worry, be Danish

By E | Posted on: August 7, 2007
So, it’s official: Danes are among the happiest people in the world. And how do you stay happy when you pay up to 80% tax? Just be ordinary. That’s the secret, according to sources in The Times, at least, who maintain that ‘the celebration of ordinariness is a recipe for contentment’. It all sounds fairly [...]
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Curling papers and toes

By E | Posted on: July 30, 2007
My favourite new toy is the Google translator – a wonderful resource if you need to translate a whole thesis into Greek, or Japanese, in ten minutes. It’s also useful for recipe research, particularly with French terminology that you can’t remember the English for and don’t have the Gastronomique handy to look it up with. [...]
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What’s square about a meal?

By E | Posted on: July 22, 2007
The philosophe asked me that question that other day and, being in the doubly uncomfortable position of not having a good answer (I suggested the four components of protein, starch, fats and …?), and getting nowhere with my work today, I’ve done a little research. According  to Gary Martin of The Phrase Finder, there are [...]
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That 80s Show

By E | Posted on: July 11, 2007
One of the most difficult things about growing up in deepest darkest Africa (a.k.a. Swaziland) was that good licorice was hard to come by. When I say good I mean salty. (There is a time and place for Allsorts, but that stuff is not good licorice). Fortunately I had access, on an almost yearly basis, [...]
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Monkeytime

By E | Posted on: July 8, 2007
It was to celebrate the acquisition of a fine pair of boots that the executive body of signwithane.com (that would be me, and my webmaster-philosopher-betrothed) went off for the night to the valley of monkeys, situated close to one famously long beach in Cape Town. We saw no live monkeys, but we did park next [...]
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Temporomandibular joint disorder

By E | Posted on: July 5, 2007
It’s been all the rage in New York over the last few days. What it is? Some version of a stuck jaw (apparently following wisdom tooth extraction), and its victim none other than the six-time world champion of competitive hot-dog eating, Takeru Kobayashi. He started by posting some complaints on his blog (!), and the [...]
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What’s ambiguous about this sentence?

By E | Posted on: July 2, 2007
‘What’s new about process cheese?’ So reads the heading of a press release from Dairy.com, which details the new move (in the US, of course) to introduce flavoured cheese to get the kiddies to eat more of it: ‘Most consumers think of process cheese as orange American slices. But it may soon come in red, [...]
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Gourmet Spectacle

By E | Posted on: June 27, 2007
So, it ain’t enough to keep us glued to the screens with lowly popcorn anymore. No siree. The latest trend in not-so-gourmet America is the cinema eatery, where you can have a whole meal (guess which kind) while Bruce Willis shoots a helicopter with a car. The most telling comment comes from Ross Melnick, a [...]
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