Oct

28

Cadbury Is Too Cool For School.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 28, 2009 | 2 Comments

For some reason Cadbury bars, which are, I think, as synonymous with chocolate in Britain as Hershey bars are here, are kind of hard to find around here. About the only time I see anything made by Cadbury is either in the “imports” section of the grocery or around Easter when they start selling crème [...]

Oct

20

Rude For Thought.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 20, 2009 | 2 Comments

In the September 2009 issue of Travel+Leisure, Peter Jon Lindberg considers The World’s Rudest Restaurants. He does mention a few restaurants that are actually known for their rudeness, places where rudeness is part of the décor, such as London’s Wong Kei. It’s a Chinese restaurant where, so he claims, you can expect to be greeted [...]

Oct

6

WTF?!?

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 6, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Sometimes jokes go too far. The Wisconsin Tourism Federation, which, as Chris Matyszczyk reports, created its name “30 years ago, when the Web was not even a thought in the mind’s eye of an engineering spider” has had to change its name because some bloggers have been having fun with the acronym. The new name [...]

Sep

21

What Kind Of Farm Is It?

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

September 21, 2009 | 3 Comments

A co-worker of mine just held up a copy of the September 14th, 2009 Times (London) with the big scary headline 20,000 children put at risk by dithering at E. coli farm. While I don’t want to laugh at at-risk children, I had to laugh at the use of the word dithering. It makes it [...]

Sep

16

The Way The Cookie Crumbles.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

September 16, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Here in the United States we call them cookies. Across the pond, in Britain, they’re called biscuits, and biscuit comes from the French word biscuit. Spelled the same, but it sounds differently, which the Oxford English Dictionary calls “a senseless adoption of the mod.Fr. spelling, without the Fr. pronunciation.” Maybe that explains why millions of [...]

Aug

7

Going To The Dogs.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

August 7, 2009 | 2 Comments

Having a soft spot in my heart for dogs I couldn’t help finding an article in England’s Sun about wild dogs riding Moscow’s Metro bittersweet. On the one hand it’s sad that there are wild dogs scavenging to get by, but, on the other hand, the article makes it clear that these dogs are ingenious–if [...]

Jul

15

Slice Of Pizzzza.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

July 15, 2009 | 1 Comment

Several years ago Pizza Hut ran an ad with Mikhail Gorbachov. Russians sat around a Pizza Hut debating whether Gorbachov’s rule had been good or bad for the country. Wait, was it really a Pizza Hut? On the sign, which is glimpsed only briefly in the commercial, it looked like it was a ПИЏЏА ХАТ. [...]

Jun

23

Lost And Found.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

June 23, 2009 | 1 Comment

The April 2009 issue of National Geographic Explorer reported that the remains of Everett Ruess had possibly been found. An artist, poet, explorer, and naturalist, twenty-year old Everett Ruess came into Escalante, Utah, one of the most remote places in the United States, in late 1934. He stayed a few days, watched Death Takes A Holiday with [...]

May

21

Havana Manana.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 21, 2009 | Leave a Comment

One of the nice things about working in a library is being surprised not just by new books but old books too. Sometimes really old books, like George Washington Carleton’s Our Artist In Cuba, a short little book of fifty funny sketches published in 1865 which a co-worker brought to me. You can see the [...]

May

19

The Meaning Of “Sri”.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

May 19, 2009 | Leave a Comment

Somewhere, I don’t remember where or even when exactly, I heard that the Hindi word “sri” meant “indescribably beautiful”. From what I’ve heard, and from even many pictures I’ve seen, that would describe Sri Lanka, even though the island was known for a very long time by its Tamil name, Ceylon. My fascination with Sri [...]

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