August 23, 2012
A blooming onion is a dish consisting of one large onion which is cut to resemble a flower, battered and deep-fried. It is served as an appetizer at some restaurants. The dish was created by chef Jeff Glowski in New Orleans and first appeared on the menu of Russell’s Marina Grill in that city as ‘Onion Mumm.’ The owners of Scotty’s Steak House in Springfield, New Jersey also claim to have invented this dish in the 1970s.
It was popularized nationally when it appeared as ‘Bloomin’ Onion,’ a charter feature of the Outback Steakhouse when that national chain opened in 1988. The dish remains prominent on its menu. Its popularity has led to its adoption as an appetizer at various other restaurant chains, most notably Lone Star Steakhouse & Saloon, where it is known as the ‘Texas Rose.’ A single blooming onion with dressing contains approximately 3,000 calories and 134 grams of fat, including 44 grams of saturated. When it existed, the similar style ‘Awesome Blossom’ at Chili’s was ranked ‘Worst Appetizer in America’ by ‘Men’s Health’ magazine in 2008.
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August 23, 2012
The phrase, ‘proud member of the reality-based community‘ was first used in 2014 to suggest the commentator’s opinions are based more on observation than on faith, assumption, or ideology. Some commentators have gone as far as to suggest that there is an overarching conflict in society between the reality-based community and the ‘faith-based community’ as a whole. It can be seen as an example of political framing.
The source of the term is a quotation in ‘The New York Times Magazine’ by Ron Suskind, quoting an unnamed aide to George W. Bush (later attributed to Karl Rove): ‘The aide said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ ‘…That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”
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August 23, 2012
Waze is a free GPS application featuring turn-by-turn navigation, developed by the Israeli start-up Waze Mobile for mobile phones. Waze differs from traditional GPS navigation software as it is a community-driven application and learns from users’ driving times to provide routing and real-time traffic updates.
Additionally, people can report accidents, traffic jams, speed traps, police and can update roads, landmarks, house numbers, etc. Waze also helps users find the cheapest, closest gas station around them or along their route. Waze is available for download and use anywhere in the world, but some countries have a full basemap, whereas other countries still require users to record the roads and edit the maps.
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August 23, 2012
The Point! is a fable and the sixth album by American songwriter and musician Harry Nilsson about a boy named Oblio, the only round-headed person in the Pointed Village, where by law everyone and everything had to have a point. According to Nilsson:
‘I was on acid and I looked at the trees and I realized that they all came to points, and the little branches came to points, and the houses came to point. I thought, ‘Oh! Everything has a point, and if it doesn’t, then there’s a point to it.” There have been, so far, at least three different renditions of The Point!, each featuring songs written by Nilsson to accompany the story, including an animated film, an album, and a stage musical.
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August 23, 2012
The Moth is a non-profit group based in New York City dedicated to the art and craft of storytelling. It was founded in 1997 by poet and novelist George Dawes Green, who wanted to recreate the feeling of sultry summer evenings in his native Georgia, when moths were attracted to the light on the porch where he and his friends would gather to spin spellbinding tales. George and his original group of storytellers called themselves ‘The Moths,’ and George took the name with him to New York. The organization now runs a number of different storytelling events in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, Detroit, and other American cities, often featuring prominent literary and cultural personalities. Previous notable storytellers have included Margaret Cho, Ethan Hawke, Malcolm Gladwell, Darryl ‘DMC’ McDaniels, George Plimpton, Al Sharpton, Moby, Lili Taylor, and Sam Shepard.
The organization also holds ‘StorySLAM’ events, storytelling competitions open to everyone. The Moth also runs a community program that offers storytelling workshops free of charge to high school students and underprivileged New Yorkers. The Moth offers a weekly podcast, which provides free audio of stories from all types of Moth events. In 2009, the organization also launched a national public radio show, ‘The Moth Radio Hour.’ Andy Borowitz became the Moth’s primary host in 1999. The organization’s annual fundraising event is called the Moth Ball, where the annual Moth award is presented. The 2008 Moth Award was presented to Salman Rushdie.
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August 23, 2012
Pocket dialing (also known as butt dialing) refers to the accidental placement of a phone call while a person’s mobile phone or cordless phone is in the owner’s pocket or handbag. If the caller remains unaware, the recipient will sometimes overhear whatever is happening in the caller’s vicinity. Typically, the call is caused by objects in a person’s pocket or bag poking buttons on the phone. Because of typical sequences of button presses, the accidentally dialed number is often one that has been recently called from that phone, or one near the beginning or end of the phone’s contact list; a consequence of this is that people whose names begin with letters near the beginning or the end of the alphabet sometimes receive more accidental calls.
The keypad lock feature found on most mobile phones is intended to help prevent accidental dialing. However, it is still possible to forget to activate this lock (if the phone does not automatically activate it after a timeout), or to deactivate it accidentally. Many phones allow the emergency number to be called even when the keylock is active. In addition to the inconvenience and embarrassment that may result from an erroneously dialed number, the phenomenon can have other consequences including using up a phone user’s airtime minutes. Apps to prevent pocket dialing exist for smartphones. Several are available for Android based phones such as Call Confirm.
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August 23, 2012
Sprites are large scale electrical discharges above the earth that are still not totally understood. They occur high above thunderstorm clouds (cumulonimbus), giving rise to a quite varied range of visual shapes flickering in the night sky. They are triggered by the discharges of positive lightning between an underlying thundercloud and the ground. Sprites appear as luminous reddish-orange flashes.
Sporadic visual reports of sprites go back at least to 1886, but they were first photographed in 1989 by scientists from the University of Minnesota. Sprites are sometimes inaccurately called upper-atmospheric lightning. However, sprites are cold plasma phenomena that lack the hot channel temperatures of tropospheric (lower-atmospheric) lightning, so they are more akin to fluorescent tube discharges than to lightning discharges. Several years after their discovery they were named sprites (air spirits) after their elusive nature.
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August 23, 2012
Heterocyclic amines [het-er-uh-sahy-klik uh-meen] (HCA) are chemical compounds containing at least one heterocyclic ring (a ring-shaped molecule that has atoms of at least two different elements) plus at least one amine (functional groups that contain a basic nitrogen atom with a lone pair). The biological function of heterocyclic amines can range from those of vitamins to carcinogens. Carcinogenic heterocyclic amines are created by high temperature cooking of meat, for example. HCAs form when amino acids and creatine (a chemical found in muscles) react at high cooking temperatures. Colorectal, pancreatic, and breast cancer are associated with high intakes of well-done, fried, or barbecued meats.
People who eat medium-well or well done beef were more than three times as likely to suffer stomach cancer as those who ate rare or medium-rare beef. Other sources of protein (milk, eggs, tofu, and organ meats such as liver) have very little or no HCA content naturally or when cooked. Research has shown that an olive oil, lemon juice, and garlic marinade cut HCA levels in chicken by as much as 90%. Six hours of marinating in beer or red wine cut levels of two types of HCA in beef steak by up to 90% compared with unmarinated steak.
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August 23, 2012
Hebrew National is a brand of kosher hot dogs and sausages made by ConAgra Foods, Inc. The Hebrew National Kosher Sausage Factory, Inc. was founded on East Broadway, on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in 1905. The company was founded by Theodore Krainin, who emigrated from Russia in the 1880s. In a 1921 article, Alfred W. McCann writing in ‘The Globe and Commercial Advertiser’ citied Hebrew National as having ‘higher standards than the law requires.’
McCann wrote the article during a crusade for commercial food decency standards, in which ‘The Globe’ was prominent. He wrote ‘More power to Krainin and the decency he represents! Such evidence of the kind of citizenship which America should covet is not to be passed by lightly.’ Hebrew National ‘served the Jewish neighborhoods of immigrants from Eastern Europe and Germany and soon developed a favorable reputation among the other Jewish residents of New York City.’
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August 23, 2012
A hot dog is a sausage served in a sliced bun. It is very often garnished with mustard, ketchup, onions, mayonnaise, relish, cheese, chili, and/or sauerkraut. Claims about hot dog invention are difficult to assess, as stories assert the creation of the sausage, the placing of the sausage (or another kind of sausage) on bread or a bun as finger food, the popularization of the existing dish, or the application of the name ‘hot dog’ to a sausage and bun combination most commonly used with ketchup or mustard and sometimes relish.
The word frankfurter comes from Frankfurt, Germany, where pork sausages served in a bun similar to hot dogs originated. These sausages, Frankfurter Würstchen (‘little sausage’), were known since the 13th century and given to the people on the event of imperial coronations, starting with the coronation of Maximilian II, Holy Roman Emperor as King. Wiener refers to Vienna, Austria, whose German name is ‘Wien,’ home to a sausage made of a mixture of pork and beef (the word ‘hamburger’ also derives from a German-speaking city, Hamburg).
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August 23, 2012
Abba-Zaba are taffy candy bars with peanut butter centers, made by Annabelle Candy Company in Hayward, California. The first Abba Zaba bars were manufactured beginning in 1922 by Colby and McDermott. Before Annabelle Candy Co. started manufacturing Abba-Zaba, the packaging featured imagery which some now consider to be racially biased.
A favorite snack of a young Don Van ‘Captain Beefheart’ Vliet, it lent its name to a song that appears on his 1967 ‘Safe as Milk’ album. In fact, the album itself was originally to be entitled ‘Abba Zaba,’ changed only when the company would not allow the usage of their trademark.
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