:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 8.30.2004 ::
:: So Weird ::
From Chuck Shepherd's News of the Weird
LEAD STORY
Among the ice cream flavors offered recently at Ice Cream City in Namco Nanja Town in Tokyo's Toshima-ku (and posted on the Web site of the English-language Mainichi Daily News) are these: spinach, garlic, tomato, seaweed, oyster, red wine, goat, chicken, lettuce and potato, wheat, shark fin, and something called "raw horse flesh." Each flavor's package is shown, mouth-wateringly photographed. [Mainichi Daily News Web site, 6-29-04]
Update
News of the Weird has reported several times in the last 12 years on Kopi Luwak, the ultra-expensive coffee derived from beans that have been eaten and excreted by civet cats in Indonesia. In July Massimo Marcone of the University of Guelph (Canada) published his examination (in the journal Food Research International) of how taste is affected by the beans' journey through the civet. First, the civet instinctively chooses only the ripest beans. Then, digestive biochemicals penetrate the outer layer of the bean as it passes through the GI tract. Internal fermentation by digestive enzymes adds a unique flavor ("earthy, musty, smooth and rich with jungle and chocolate undertones"). Also, proteins are leached out during digestion, thus removing a source of coffee's bitterness. (On the other hand, Kopi Luwak doesn't particularly distinguish itself from other coffee in human blind taste tests.) [Montreal Gazette, 7-29-04]
Readers' Choice
Landscape contractor Blair Davis, who lives in a Houston suburb and whose own yard's flora includes the Texas Star hibiscus, was the object of a SWAT-type raid by the Harris County Organized Crime and Narcotics Task Force in July. A neighbor had reported Davis as having drugs, in that the Texas Star hibiscus somewhat vaguely resembles the marijuana plant, and the prestigious Task Force didn't know any better. Davis said that an agent also asked him warily what he planned to do with the watermelons and cantaloupes that were growing in his back yard. [Houston Chronicle, 7-29-04]
Send your Weird News to Chuck Shepherd, P.O. Box 18737, Tampa FL 33679 or WeirdNews@earthlink.net
posted by me
:: 8:49:00 AM [+] ::
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