Natalia Cecire: Citations: Useless and Boring

Natalia Cecire: Citations: Useless and Boring takes down Mark Taylor's idiotic Op-Ed in the NYT. I add a few thoughts at my other place.

Grant Achatz is blogging

For the Atlantic

Bad Prawn Hawkers!

Prawn Hawkers suspended

Stall No 43 at Newton Hawker Centre overcharged a band of American tourists who ate there last Saturday night.
Now, Tanglin Best BBQ Seafood will pay the price: It must shut down for three months from April 1, and the worker who served the Americans cannot work there for one year.

$239 for 8 prawns does seem a bit steep. And that was less than half the $491 bill for a meal for six at a food court.

Prawn libido lacking

Brisbane Times

Queensland University of Technology life sciences researcher Gay Marsden spent two months filming prawn behaviour when the sun went down after it was discoverd captive-reared Tiger prawns had no sex drive.

Chet Edwards and PMA

Congressional Quarterly shows my Congress critter as one who has obtained earmarks and campaign contributions from the lobbying firm just raided by the FBI.

Prawn cocktail offensive

The Times(UK) on what made New Labor new

A key part of the creation of new Labour was the repositioning of the party as being on the side of business rather than the unions.

Senior figures spent years on a “prawn cocktail offensive”, culminating in Peter Mandelson's declaration that Labour was supremely relaxed about people being “filthy rich”.

Oddly, I don't think of shrimp cocktail as being for the filthy rich in the US. Is prawn cocktail in a different class?

Prawn gives science victory!

Faifax Connection:

Two seniors at Thomas Jefferson were among 40 high school seniors named Finalists for the IntelScience Talent Search 2009, a program of the Society for Science and the Public. The competition is America's oldest and most prestigious pre-college science competition. Finalists will travel to Washington, D.C. in March to compete for $530,000 in scholarships, with the top winner receiving a $100,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation. Each Finalist will receive at least $5,000 in scholarships and a new laptop.
...
Alexander "Alex" Kim, 17, of Fairfax Ridge was selected for his project, "Morphological and Molecular Phylogeography of a Giant American River Prawn, Macrobrachium carcinus." He is the son of Duckju Kim, an artist, and John Kim, a computer networking engineer.

For his project, Alex looked at the variations of the body form and DNA of the largest freshwater shrimp in the Western hemisphere — the Giant American River Prawn. He said he was inspired by the book, "The Crayfish," by Thomas Huxley, which he read at age 13. He's also been involved in independent science research since his freshman year. He worked with the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History and had a student travel grant to visit Puerto Rico and San Marcos, Texas, to collect specimens and take measurements of the shrimp. And yes, he says he likes eating shrimp, too.

Milestones in crotchetyness

I have a letter in today's BCS Eagle

Hover bacon

Disturbingly catchy

Prawns in disguise

Shrimp cracker makers suspected of disguising foreign shrimp as local prawn

"The tiger prawn has swallowed my house"

Not literally.

39.69 minutes

A new unit of time?

Edwin Van der Sar's goal has gone 1,032 minutes without being breached.

Now 1,032 minutes may sound a long time but a United fan told me that in real terms it's only about 26 prawn sandwiches.

I think this is connected to this, but not sure how.

This is Texas

Smoking is bad for you. Second hand smoke, at minimum, makes your clothes stink, and probably is bad for you. But compared to what? This is Texas.

• We go out in the sun
  
• We have an economy built on the petrochemical industry
  
• We eat tasty burnt meat
  
• We have a State Fair contest for the best fried food
  
• We invented chicken fried bacon
  

I'm supposed to worry about second-hand smoke from spending a couple of hours in a bar? In Texas? Give me a break.

Repeal the ban

Tonight was perhaps the last meeting of "choir practice", a Friday evening gathering of friends at a local bar for relaxation, conversation, and good company. What's going to break up our weekly convocations? Some of the group are smokers, and starting on Sunday, the city ban on indoor smoking extends to bars.

I've already blogged my intention to vote against all the incumbents who voted for the ban. Tonight, the conversation was about how to organize to get rid of the council nannies. But it would take years to get rid of all of them, thanks to the staggered 3-year terms (pdf) of the members. But there's still time for another approach: referendum.

Section 84. The electors shall have power to approve or reject at the polls any ordinance passed by the City Council, or submitted by the City Council to a vote of the electors, such power being known as the referendum, except in the case of ordinances zoning or rezoning property, authorizing the issuance of bonds, or making the annual tax levy. Ordinances submitted to the City Council by initiative petition and passed by the City Council without charge shall be subject to the referendum in the same manner as other ordinances. Within twenty (20) days after the enactment by the City Council of any ordinance which is subject to a referendum, a petition signed by qualified electors of the city equal in number to at least twenty-five (25) percent of the number of votes cast at the last preceding regular municipal election may be filed with the City Secretary requesting that any such ordinance be either repealed or submitted to a vote of the electors.

On the order of 5500 people voted in the 2008 municipal election based on adding the votes for the two candidates for each seat. The new rule passed the council on Jan 22. 20 days from then is Feb 11, if I'm doing the calculation right. Could anti-ban people organize a petition and get ~1200 signatures by then?

The previous posts

...were based on things found by searching Google News for "prawn". The results for "risotto" and "farce" were not as interesting... at least to me.

Waxed meat?

Headline:

Restaurant offers creative dishes using waxed meat imported from Hong Kong

The lede

WAXED meat enthusiasts can partake in this delicacy at the Concorde Hotel Kuala Lumpur this Chinese New Year.

Not a fish

According to a court in India:

Prawn is not fish. That is what the Madras High Court has said in a very recent judgement[1]. The context was whether export cess was applicable for prawn as it was applicable for fish under the Agricultural Produce Cess Act, 1940. The High Court said that prawn is not fish and so the cess is not leviable.

Sukumar Mukhopadhyay takes exception. Although biologically prawns aren't fish, he argues that in South Indian culinary parlance, they are... based on reasoning that I don't quite get:

There are famous stories in Bengali of how a widowed lady was made to eat prawn without her knowing which resulted in her getting hugely embarrassed. From all these it doubtless that in common parlance prawn is regarded as fish in India .

The argument that prawns are sold in fish shops is a bit stronger, I suppose

Throw the bums out

KBTX reports:

Ultimately the city council agreed with those in favor of the smoking ban, and passed it in a unanimous 6-0 vote. The ban not only includes smoking in restaurants and bars, but in any workplace in College Station.

The current smoking ordinance required smokers to be at least 20 feet from the entrance to a bar. The new ordinance reduces that to only 10 feet.

Here are the names of the local fascists Council members:
Ben White, Mayor -- John Crompton, Place 1 -- James Massey, Place 2 -- Dennis Maloney, Place 3 -- Lynn McIlhaney, Place 4 -- Lawrence Stewart, Place 5 -- David Ruesink, Place 6

I'm voting against all of them the next time they come up before they get the chance to ban something else.

Why Prawn Risotto Farce anyway?

The name actually comes from a minor scandal/kerfuffle about Tony Blair from 2004:

A British Airways jet carrying Tony Blair back from his whirlwind diplomatic trip to Africa made a 1,450-mile round trip to stock up on prawn risotto, asparagus mousse and cheesecake.

The Boeing 777 flew from Addis Ababa to Nairobi and back while Mr Blair was holding talks in the Ethiopian capital to pick up a consignment of in-flight food ready for his return trip to London. Downing Street staff and press were happy with the hot dinners after they boarded the plane on Thursday, but others were not so sure.

Stephen Tindale, the executive director of Greenpeace and a former adviser to Labour, said: "He should have eaten Ethiopian food, sourced locally. The more we fly, the more people will die from climate change, and Africa is in the front line."

Trying blogger again

I just set up a new blog for phage biologists, which led me to revisit blogger.  I set this blog up a couple of years ago to experiment with blogger, so I thought I'd post to it again to play with the many changes that have been implemented since then.

Might even add some substantive content too...