that sucking sound in the kitchen
I know Jennifer's done a couple of posts on molecular gastronomy, the branch of culinary science wherein foam plays a large part. She's actually eaten …
Chemistry
melamine: good or evil?
I was listening to a number of news reports lately in which melamine was described as “the industrial chemical melamine”. “Industrial chemicals” are, not surprisingly, …
a spark in the dark
One wouldn't expect the 17th century English philosopher Francis Bacon to have much of a sweet tooth; he always struck me as a rather curmudgeonly …
up close and personal with paper
I'm here! Where's the beer? Oh, right, it's a virtual cocktail party. *waves* Hi, folks; me again, your friendly neighborhood, er, whatever. If you've been …
a nation of winers
Thomas Jefferson may well have been America's first great wine connoisseur, according to a 2007 article in The New Yorker about the growing epidemic of …
pretty poison
[NOTE: The Spousal Unit and I are off to Vegas for the next five days. It's book research, I swear! Well, mostly…. Here's an uber-long …
burn, baby, burn
It’s only a matter of time before C.S.I. and its various spinoffs warrant their own channel, along with the Law and Order franchise. Until then, …
the toad and the pufferfish
One day in 1980, a man claiming to be called Clairvius Narcisse showed up in a rural Haitian village. This came as something of a …
mummy sings the blues
Jen-Luc Piquant has been on a bit of a mummy craze this past week, ferreting out such online gems as a downloadable Mummy Maze Game; …
drive me crazy
In the 1992 film, Singles, Campbell Scott plays Steve Dunne, an earnest, idealistic transportation engineer keen on solving Seattle’s traffic woes by building a "Supertrain": …