An old Yiddish joke: A poor yeshiva student visits a local family every evening for dinner. Each night, the family serves him potatoes: boiled potatoes, fried potatoes, potato soup, potato pancakes, potato kugel, and so on. After a week or two of this splendid spud-fest, the student asks his hosts to tell him the correct […]
Curiosities
I admit it: I’m a worry wart. Among the myriad topics that can perturb me is the question: is it safe to eat a strawberry? Sure, strawberries are rich in Vitamin C: just eight of them contain more of the vitamin than a medium size orange, according to the California Strawberry Commission. But conventionally-grown strawberries […]
I’ve never understood how we go about ascribing character traits to animals. Every cat I’ve known fits Abstruse Goose’s checklist, but aren’t we both just making stuff up? No dog I ever had could remotely be described as “faithful” or “devoted;” they’re in it for the free lunch, period.
Heat rises, cold falls, and like a pan of soup on a hot stove, the earth boils, exceedingly slowly. The boiling is called convection: columns of heat rise from the earth’s hot core, move up through the viscous solidity of the mantle, cool at the crust, roll over and fall back down. The crust that […]
Buns are flying across the airwaves of The Last Word on Nothing: currant buns, sticky buns, cinnamon buns, steamed buns, hot dog buns–all kinds of buns, but thankfully no buns of steel (yet). The bunfight began several weeks ago with an exchange between myself and my esteemed colleague, Ann Finkbeiner, on the benefits and burdens […]
Remember that billowing cloud of ash from Iceland that floated over Britain and other parts of northern Europe this past spring, shutting down airspace from London to Hamburg and filling airports with fuming travellers? It wasn’t all bad, I discovered yesterday. In fact if you were an archaeologist, particularly a British archaeologist, that plume of […]
I’ve often had the same thought myself. You have too, haven’t you. http://abstrusegoose.com/208
I thought I’d made the case against parasitic wasps with evidence and eloquence. I thought that would be the end of it. But no: counter-arguments were made (even if insects did evolve first, Josie, I can still feel superior), gauntlets thrown down, aspersions cast (you think I didn’t notice “delicate flower,” Heather?), and lines drawn […]