Take the survey and pass it on...
The Omnivore's Hundred (which originates at Very Good Taste)
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you've eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating
1. Venison (I know this as 'lu rou' at hawker centers, lol...)
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart (you can't really have lived in New York without having this)
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava (order this with alarming frequency...)
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut (had this in Berlin, home of the sauerkraut; see also: currywurst)
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects
43. Phaal
44. Goat's milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth US$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald's Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine (I just had this in Montreal!)
60. Carob chips (this sounds super familiar, but I'm not sure...)
61. S'mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs' legs (I don't really trust a Singaporean who hasn't had both of these - frogs' legs and durian...)
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (Had beignets and funnel cakes in New Orleans)
68. Haggis (Just looked this up and it sounds disgusting, but I suppose I'd give it a try...)
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette (I think kway chap counts)
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill (eeeee! Like, raw???)
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant (damnit. I thought "Babbo" was a three-starrer, but apparently it's only one. *sob*)
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare (rabbit counts!)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake (hahahaha, thank you, NS!)
Went with a friend to Mario Batali's "Babbo" today. Batali is one of the Iron Chefs on Iron Chef America, and generally recognized as one of the best Italian chefs in the world.
We got the traditional tasting menu, which is eight courses-long. Each course comes with a glass of wine, so I'm pretty much thisclose to being smashed now. But the food was fantastic; really strange combinations but all good.
...okay I'm going to go lie down now.
for a great summer. This has honestly been one of the best.
that the two things I am most interested in are: clothes and books.
Politics, television, et cetera, I try to keep abreast of - and am sometimes moved to passion by - but, as far as steady interest goes: clothes and books, books and clothes.
I packed up my Singaporean belongings today. My family has been considering a move early next year, so I decided to preempt any throwing out of my stuff in absentia. Minus my clothes, everything I considered of value was boxed.
In the end I had three boxes - and two were filled with books.
Like I told Lk, I wasn't sure how to feel about this. On one hand, one box seems a miserable showing for twenty-two years of living (I'm not counting the New York years). On the other hand, my friends and I have never been the type to give and give a lot.
Of course, I'm also missing the items that were sold, casualties of the period I was addicted to gambling and in massive debt. Cash Converters made a bundle off me in this time; I remember selling, variously, a DVD player, a pair of speakers from Mel, and a camera that was a group gift from my bunch of closest friends. That period - which stretches years - is a part of my life that's definitively over, but I didn't quite realize until today the losses I incurred.
I think in its aftermath I simply lost interest in items. Actually, to consider it, the five years post-secondary school was a long renunciation of things: things I gave to Calvin in junior college and to two crushes in the army, each gift only reminding me, in the end, of their horrible futility; things given to me that I kept only to convert later to bet slips; phantom things that I stopped considering because they were beyond my shrinking means.
A long period of poverty will do that to a person, I think: because I could no longer afford to buy gifts, I stopped attaching value to giving things altogether, store-bought ones because they were out of reach, and hand-made ones because they were proof I couldn't give otherwise.
And I think even after I got the scholarship - and stopped gambling - a variation of that thinking remained: I simply lost interest in things altogether. Sure, I still love me some presents, and my spending has never been more outrageous, but I don't feel much attachment to the physical fruit of my or others' money: I could live without just as easily, because I've already been there. Come to think of it, that probably explains my frequent losing of things post-SPH.
(This is not meant to offend those of you who have spent time and money on your gifts; as that classic line goes: it's not you, it's me.)
And so, considering my complicated history with things, perhaps I shouldn't be so surprised to find myself with only one box of them. Besides, I'd like to think I carry the things I lost and sold in my head (probably not true, but comforting nonetheless).
And in the time I've taken to write this, it has also occurred to me that the best presents given to me didn't involve any thing at all.
I can't box the memory of playing SNES with Mel and Lun, no more than I can box the memory of these past weeks spent playing Wii with Jm, Wh, Mel and Janus.
And all those coma-inducing nights of supper (and more)? Can't box any of them either.
I think my current philosophy, as evolved from those early days of bric-a-brac, is that things are ultimately only a means to an end. If they've been used properly, it doesn't matter if you lose (or sell) them, because the memories they'll have generated by then should be enough.
And anyway I'd like to think that, if I get hit by a bus tomorrow, I'll be judged by the things I've done and been, not by some box left in a corner of my room.
So one box really isn't all that bad. In fact, it's not bad at all.
...now go buy me a MacBook please.
Raising the bar
Jul 17th 2008
From The Economist print edition
A rare slip-up in court by Singapore's elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew
MEMBERS of Singapore's government are notorious sticklers for legal exactitude. So it has been interesting to watch the reaction after the country's elder statesman, Lee Kuan Yew - a British-trained lawyer before he became a politician - gave inaccurate testimony in the trial of two opposition leaders.
In May Mr Lee testified in a hearing to decide damages against Chee Soon Juan, the leader of the Singapore Democratic Party (SDP), and his sister, Chee Siok Chin, for defaming the former prime minister and his son, Lee Hsien Loong, who is now prime minister himself. Mr Lee senior claimed that after the London-based International Bar Association (IBA) held its annual conference in Singapore last October, its president sent a letter to the Law Society of Singapore praising the country's justice system. It has since emerged that there was no such laudatory letter.
Mr Chee (who along with his sister was briefly jailed for contempt for accusing the judge in his case of bias) tried unsuccessfully to have the hearing reconvened in the light of Mr Lee's incorrect testimony. Mr Lee's counsel, Davinder Singh, wrote to the court on July 9th admitting that his client was wrong about the letter but noting that the IBA's president, Fernando Pombo, had praised Singapore's "outstanding judiciary" in a speech at the start of the conference. Mr Singh argues that what matters is that the IBA did praise Singaporean justice, not whether it did so in a speech or a letter. Mr Chee says there is a difference: the speech was made before the conference, where criticisms of the justice system were aired. Mr Lee was claiming, in effect, that the IBA was still impressed after this.
By coincidence, on July 9th the IBA's Human Rights Institute issued a report criticising the use of defamation suits by the ruling People's Action Party (PAP) to silence the opposition and the press, and expressing concerns about the independence and impartiality of Singapore's judges. The law ministry has rejected the IBA's report, pointing out that Singapore's legal system has won excellent ratings in other international surveys. Indeed, in cases not involving the country's leaders, there is no dispute about its quality. As for the IBA's worries about cases involving PAP figures, the law ministry claims that the IBA failed to substantiate its "grave" allegations with evidence, though its report does discuss several worrying cases.
America's State Department, which is in rather less danger of being sued by the PAP than are the opposition or newspapers, has expressed concern about judicial independence in political cases in Singapore. In its latest human-rights report, in March, the department noted that the PAP's consistent success in defamation suits against critics "led to a perception that the judiciary reflected the views of the ruling party in politically sensitive cases."
According to the Straits Times newspaper, Mr Lee on July 11th accused human-rights organisations of "a conspiracy to do us in". He said that they saw that Russia and China had been studying Singapore's success, and hence regarded it as a threat. Mr Lee and the government argue that doing things their way has made Singapore prosperous, orderly and corruption-free, and has earned international respect. The threat of defamation proceedings may make opposition politicians weigh their words more carefully than they do elsewhere. But Singaporean voters continue to buy the PAP's argument that such constraints are a price worth paying so far.
Some people REALLY need to stop talking. A conspiracy? Between Russia and China? Really? Because somehow I suspect China is less than concerned about Singapore, particularly in any economic way.
So. "White Teeth" and "White Fang"? Totally not the same book. Read the former, people! It's great. I'm only sorry I had them confused for so long.