Thursday Roundup

Buenos Dias.

First, an article on some new names for Crayola crayon colors from www.mcall.com:

Gone is wild watermelon. Now it will be called awesome. That's just one of the name changes of eight colors in the Crayola 64 box that was announced earlier today at the Toys R Us in Times Square in New York City. The newly named colors are aimed at appealing to a new generation of children, more than 20,000 of whom picked the names in an online poll...Here are the other old names followed by the new names: laser lemon, super happy; wild tangerine, fun in the sun; screamin' green, giving tree; beaver, bear hug; turquoise blue, happy ever after; hot magenta, famous; orchid, best friends.

Apparently, the new generation of children to whom Crayola wishes to appeal will no longer be able to describe color nuance, like orchid vs. peach vs. apricot. No, they will just know that a pinkish color is "awesome!" In other words, think of the cool crayola vocabulary (my three year old knows the word and color "cerulean") lost to dreck like "awesome." I'm hoping that this will be like "new Coke" and get phased out within the year. For the love of God, leave the naming to Ben and Jerry.

Next, an older article about one man's attempt to be anonymous in today's technological world: "In 2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker. So he did background checks. He pulled his credit file. He looked at Amazon.com transactions and his credit-card and telephone bills. He got his DNA analyzed and kept a log of all the people he called and e-mailed, along with the Web sites he visited. When he put the information together, he was able to discover so much about himself—from detailed financial information to the fact that he was circumcised—that his publisher, concerned about his privacy, didn’t let him include it all in the book...So when this magazine suggested I try my own privacy experiment, I eagerly agreed. We decided that I would spend a week trying to be as anonymous as possible while still living a normal life. I would attempt what many believe is now impossible: to hide in plain sight." Don't click if you don't want to be freaked out: www.popsci.com

Next, the ten most hated people on the internet, via popehat

So that's all I got for ya today. I'm still in manic-no sleep-prednisone land, so my to-do list is getting longer by the minute, and time's-a-wastin'. Tonight's dinner is kedgeree, an old Victorian-era Days of the Raj dish wherein English people took a fantastic and delicious Indian dish, and--oh how dreadful dahling--made it British. Only, my version is from the voluptuous and amazing Nigella Lawson, so she's using salmon instead of haddock and actually keeping in the coriander and all the stuff that made it, you know, Indian (as well as adding some Thai flavor too). I got the idea after going through all of the family old photos, meaning the black and white and sepia ones, and found some that my grandfather took in India while there as a 17 year-old soldier during WWII. For being a bit of a racist (is that like being a "bit" pregnant?) for as long as I knew him, his remarks on the backs of the photos reflect a great deal of respect for the beauty of the country as it was being revealed to him during his stay. One in particular, a photo of the Nilgiris Valley, expressed emotion I never heard him express in real life, about how it looked just like Scotland and how he missed home but felt more and more at home in India every day.

Anyway, for those of you interested in kedgeree, here's Nigella's recipe: http://uktv.co.uk

For those of you who know me and are wondering who has hijacked this blog, you can keep on checking the skies for flying porcine creatures as my drug-induced domesticity continues unabated.