NYT: Blind Detective

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Boycott Saigon Grill

Le Monde published an article about the restaurant I used to patronize "Saigon Grill" on University Place. Since March, the delivery "boys" are on strike, challenging the dismal $1.60 per hour salaries, no lunch breaks, $300 fine for a no-show, and $200 dollars for late delivery complaints from clients. Wow! Glad it made its way all the way to the French newspaper.
Please boycott all Saigon Grills, there are four of them in the city!

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Istanbul: Trip to Haydarpaşa

Photos by Valera Meylis 2007

Istanbul: Hagia Sofia

Photos by Valera Meylis 2007

New Leaning Tower for Guinness

Depuis cinq siècles, son air penché lui valait une notoriété que l’on aurait pu croire éternelle. Mais voilà que la tour de Pise (Italie) serait détrônée par un clocher du nord de l’Allemagne. Telle est du moins la constatation faite par les auteurs du Livre mondial des records Guinness. Le clocher de cette église du XVe siècle dans le village de Suurhusen mesure 25,7 mde haut et penche de 5,070. C’est là que se trouve le « record », car l’angle d’inclinaison de la tour de Pise ne serait que de 3,970, selon Olaf Kuchenbecker, auteur de l’édition allemande du Livre Guinness. Cependant la tour de Pise reste inégalée en hauteur, en beauté architecturale et par sa place dans l’histoire : c’est là que Galilée fit la plupart des expériences et découvrit que la Terre n’est pas au centre de l’Univers. Elle fait aussi partie d’un ensemble de constructions romanes des XIe et XIIe siècles en Toscane, une des plus belles régions de l’Italie.

Listening to: Christophe Maé

Un artiste de talent très rare, avec la voix un petit peu ètrange au debut, mais très belle et expressive quand on l'ècoute attentivement. Le style musical a l'air de Gerald de Palmas, mais moins précis et raffiné. Alors, on ecoute!
Sur son site il y a des videos et des morceau sonores pour l'apprécier.

Le Singe a été cloné

Même si elle n'a mené à aucune naissance, cette expérience montre que rien, techniquement parlant, ne s'oppose à ce que le même résultat soit obtenu dans l'espèce humaine. C'est une première mondiale qui devrait rapidement connaître de nombreux rebondissements : une équipe de biologistes travaillant au Centre national américain de recherches sur les primates de l'Oregon vient d'annoncer avoir réussi à créer des embryons de singes macaques rhésus à partir de la technique du clonage par transfert de noyaux prélevés sur des cellules d'animaux adultes. Dirigée par Shoukhrat Mitalipov, biologiste d'origine russe, l'équipe a soumis ses travaux pour publication à l'hebdomadaire scientifique britannique Nature.

Просмотрено: Русская игра

Just Seen: 3:10 to Yuma

What a great movie! Based on a short story by Leonard Elmore, the film achieves a rare unity of thematic coherence with the steadiness of action. Of course, having two great actors helps immensely create the tension and strife within each scene. The neverending battle(s) of good and evil portrayed here is pretty much clear from the very beginning - and there are quite a few battles going on at the same time. As with all Elmore's writing, the plot is very straightforward but the dialogues and the conclusions rarely are.
Hurray for Christian Bale!

NYT: Neanderthals were Redheads

Other than some general anatomical features of Neanderthals — a large nose and heavy brow among them — not much is known about how they looked. Just bones exist of this hominid species, which lived in Europe and Asia and became extinct
30,000 years ago. But by analyzing DNA from some of those old bones, European researchers have helped fill in the picture. Some Neanderthals, they suggest in a study published online by Science, were fair-skinned and redheaded.
Carles Lalueza- Fox of the University of Barcelona and Holger Römpler of the University of Leipzig in Germany and colleagues report the finding.
They discovered a variation in a fragment of a Neanderthal gene that regulates pigmentation of skin and hair through melanin production and saw that it had effects similar to those from variations in the gene in humans.
The study suggests that redheadedness would have evolved separately in Neanderthals and humans, at different times and through different genetic variations. The conditions that drove the evolution were likely the same. Fair skin would have
been advantageous in northerly latitudes because it
would have let more sunlight into the skin to manufacture vitamin D. In the north, large amounts of melanin were not needed to protect skin from ultraviolet light.

90 years of the Revolution

At 11pm November 6, 90 years ago, a tragedy, perpetuated by the few Bolsheviks funded by the Germans, occured in Petrograd. A blank shot by the cruiser "Aurora" announced that a very small number of the Bolshevik soldiers would disarm the guard at the Hermitage, arrest the ministers. The rest of Petrograd had no clue of what was happening at the moment, the trams were running as usual, Shaliapin was singing at the Narodnyi dom, John Reed, the author of the Ten Days That Shook the World, was having a nice dinner nearby.

Отношение народа к вождям и их монументам честнее всех выражают голуби.

More of Armstrong and Miller

Clip 1 Serial Killer	Clip 2 Channel 4	Clip 3 Math is Good
Clip 4 Job Interview	Clip 5 Christmas Card	Clip 6 Detention
Clip 7 Nude Practice	Clip 8 Failure	Clip 8 Nazis

Coney Island at Sunset

Photo by Valera Meylis

On Film "Black Gold"

Smell the coffee
Vices of coffee trade and coffee house: exploiting the growers, sleeping in Starbucks, quackery and gabbling

by Bee Wilson

review of EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY COFFEE-HOUSE CULTURE
Markman Ellis, editor, 4 volumes 1,840pp. Pickering and Chatto. £350.
978 1 85196829 9

The film Black Gold begins with a horrible sound, a nasal rasp like pigs snorting at a trough. This sound is being made by a rare breed of American coffee tasters, slurping tiny tastes of hundreds of different espressos and giving them very precise ratings – 89.5/100, for example. These experts, who are nerdish and decadent all at once, are like the Robert Parkers of coffee. They seem to labour under the impression that their palates are brilliant computers, capable of distinguishing flavour within a micropercentage. One of the tasters stops slurping for a moment and turns to the camera. “There’s one coffee here that is probably the best coffee that I’ve ever tried. Beautiful!” Halfway through the film, we hear a different sound. It is the animal wail of a child in Sidamo, Ethiopia. She has been brought to a health clinic to be treated for malnourishment. Her legs are like twigs. To her mother’s distress, the clinic refuses her treatment. Although she is indeed malnourished, there are others in a still worse state who need more urgent care. This is a coffee-growing region, and no one has enough to eat, because the farmers cannot get anything approaching a decent price for their beans.
The contrast is neither clever nor original – no Western consumer can be entirely ignorant of the iniquities of the coffee trade – but the film-makers, brothers Marc and Nick Francis, bring home the injustice of the entire economy of coffee with a force that makes it seem fresh. There is none of the visual tricksiness of Supersize Me, Morgan Spurlock’s attack on McDonald’s, nor is it needed. Throughout Black Gold, affluent Western coffee drinkers are relentlessly juxtaposed with African coffee farmers, who receive less than 1p of the nearly £2 that is now the standard price for a regular (ie, gigantic) cup of coffee from the major chains in the United Kingdom. We see a worker in New York idly sipping a frappuccino, which she will probably not manage to finish, so oversized is it; and we see desperately poor African farmers begging God to raise the coffee price. Because of the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement – which regulated prices until 1989 – coffee prices in Africa have reached a thirty-year low. Twenty-two cents a kilo is now the market rate for unroasted beans. “If we could get fifty-seven cents”, says one Ethiopian, “we could soar far above the sky.” Yet it would take twice that to provide a “good life” for the farmers – which does not mean a life with such luxuries as electricity, but merely clean water, clean clothes and the ability to send their children to school.
Two billion cups of coffee are drunk every day, globally. Coffee is now the second most widely traded commodity, after oil (the original black gold). The total value of all coffee traded last year has been estimated at $140 billion. The farmers harvesting their Mocha beans in Sidamo are sitting on a gold mine, but one whose value they are powerless to realize.
The film lays much of the blame for this with the New York Trading market, a “destructive mechanism” for the coffee producers, since the market price of coffee is sometimes now set below the amount it cost to produce. The world economy in coffee is controlled by four big multinationals – Kraft, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble and Sara Lee – who are largely able to determine the price of coffee to their own advantage. The farmers – most of whom have tiny family farms – cannot sell direct to this market, but must go through middlemen – exporters who themselves take another sizeable chunk.


see the trailer here

More from Armstrong and Miller

Clip 1 Why did Grandma die?

Clip 2 Polish Workers

Clip 3 At the dentist

Clip 4 At the store

some excerpts from a new season of the veteran BBC series "The Armstrong and Miller Show". BRILLIANT!
Clicking a thumbnail will open a video clip a new window

Vatican and the Templars

Umberto Eco's line that you can tell if someone is mad "by the fact that sooner or later he brings up the Templars" has heen given added weight by Da Vinci Code mania. According to Dan Brown's novel, the Templars' suppression in 1308 was the result of connivance between the Pope, Clement V, and the King of France, Philip IV. Last week, facsimiles of documents relating to that process, rediscovered in 2001 in the Vatican Secret Archives, went on show, and on sale. They contain the Chinon parchment, a transcription of a secret trial of the Order in which a team of papal inquisitors in fact absolved the knights, accepting their explanation that rituals such as spitting on the Cross were enacted as preparation for potential capture hy Muslim enemies (though the Templars had left Syria and Palestine in 1291). The facsimiles can only reinforce the impression that, as reported in the TLS in 2004, "the Templars were destroyed not because they held any special secrets or treasure but because th ey were rich, inflexible, naively led and vulnerable". A limited edition of 799 copies is published by the Venetian press Scrinium, priced at €5,990 (an 800th copy has been reserved for the current Pope).

6 most disgusting food items...

Escamoles are the larvae of ants of the genus Liometopum, harvested from the roots of the agave (tequila) or maguey (mezcal) plant in Mexico. In some forms of Mexican cuisine, escamoles are considered a delicacy and are sometimes referred to as "insect caviar". (See video about cooking escamoles)

Casu marzu (also called casu modde, casu cundhídu, or in Italian formaggio marcio) is a cheese found in Sardinia, Italy, notable for being riddled with live insect larvae. Casu marzu means "rotten cheese" in Sardinian and is known colloquially as maggot cheese.
Derived from Pecorino Sardo, casu marzu goes beyond typical fermentation to a stage most would consider decomposition, brought about by the digestive action of the larvae of the cheese fly Piophila casei. These larvae are deliberately introduced to the cheese, promoting an advanced level of fermentation and breaking down of the cheese's fats. The texture of the cheese becomes very soft, with some liquid (called lagrima, from the Sardinian for "tears") seeping out. The larvae themselves appear as translucent white worms, about 8 mm (1/3 inch) long. When disturbed, the larvae can jump for distances up to 15 cm (6 inches), prompting recommendations of eye protection for those eating the cheese. Some people clear the larvae from the cheese before consuming; others do not.

Lutefisk (lutfisk) (pronounced /lʉːtəfɪsk/ in Norway, /lʉːtfɪsk/ in Sweden and the Swedish-speaking areas in Finland) is a traditional dish of the Nordic countries made from stockfish (air-dried whitefish) and soda lye (lut). In Sweden, it is called lutfisk, while in Finland it is known as lipeäkala. Its name literally means "lye fish", owing to the fact that it is made with caustic soda or potash lye.
Preparation
Lutefisk is made from air-dried whitefish (normally cod, but ling is also used), prepared with lye, in a sequence of particular treatments. The first treatment is to soak the stockfish in cold water for five to six days (with the water changed daily). The saturated stockfish is then soaked in an unchanged solution of cold water and lye for an additional two days. The fish will swell during this soaking, attaining an even larger size than in its original (undried) state, while its protein content decreases by more than 50 percent, producing its famous jelly-like consistency. When this treatment is finished, the fish (saturated with lye) has a pH value of 11–12, and is therefore caustic. To make the fish edible, a final treatment of yet another four to six days of soaking in cold water (also changed daily) is needed. Eventually, the lutefisk is ready to be cooked.
In Finland, the traditional reagent used is birch ash. It contains high amounts of potassium carbonate and hydrocarbonate, giving the fish more mellow treatment than sodium hydroxide (lyestone). It is important not to incubate the fish too long in the lye, because saponification of the fish fats may occur, effectively rendering the fish fats into soap. The term for such spoiled fish in Finnish is saippuakala (soap fish).

see the rest on www.cracked.com