Eight and Nine
Produce, which has a five-number PLU code prefixed by an eight, has been genetically modified; while produce with a code prefixed by nine is organic. IFPS PLU Codes Users’ Guide [PDF]
Why stuff that provocative dental instrument into your mouth
Claude Hagège, author of On the Death and Life of Languages, answers questions from readers on Schott’s Vocab. In response to a question of how languages grasp the world, Hagège writes that “any text in any language can be translated into a text in another language.” The post is currently just over 26 inches long. The One Mile Scroll is a project by Daniel Eatock. Rejoice! Rejoice.
December 2009: Tables of Contents, eleven poems from Elle magazine
November 2001: A family affair, charm turns crowds disperse, party into uncharted territory
April 2003: Global puppy Mussolini muse more
Christmas Trees, Fluorescent Bulbs, One-Hit Wonders, Hay
December 12, 2009, 1 annotation
Knight Science Journalism Tracker reports that fresh-cut Christmas trees may be greener (ecologically) than infinitely reusable plastic ones; and that fluorescent bulbs rode a wave of hype that has since waned—they are, in fact, nothing like Byron The Bulb. Near my apartment, on a six-block stretch of road where I recently encountered 19 broken umbrellas on a rainy, windy night, there is an inflatable Santa (pictured). Apparently Charles Bukowski said something like, “my beerdrunk soul is sadder than all the dead christmas trees of the world,” which leads one to wonder—along the lines of that certain type of celebrity gossip that accounts on the way-down-the-road-and-after-the-fact lives of one-hit wonders—where are they now? For the last decade I completely forgot about hay. Wonderful hay, how could I have forgotten your many delightful properties! Plus, Ada Lovelace, and what the people say about the H1N1 vaccine distributed to Goldman Sachs first.
File Under Vacuum
My hippocampus has been on my mind a lot lately: Is it working OK? Would I know if it wasn’t?