Nepenthe

Here are some facts about olives you might not know. It takes approximately five kilos of olives to make a litre of olive oil. Spain is the biggest producer in the world - it has around 370 million olive trees. France has five million. Italy exports 10 times the amount of oil it produces by importing, blending and then selling it on under labels such as 'Tuscan produced'. Its oil tastes stronger in the south and mellows as you go north. Jordan has started to export its oil and its robust and peppery Terra Rossa extra virgin is now available here (£4.28 for 250ml, www.terra-rossa.com ).Polyphenols in olive oil have an anti-oxidant effect and are a heart-healthy food. However, heating olive oil for cooking destroys them, so the full benefit is really only derived from oils used as dressings and drizzled over finally prepared dishes. Oil's major enemies are light and air, so keep those fancy bottles out of the sunlight. Oil does not improve with age either, hence the huge plus...

Bison Grass Vodka - a potato vodka from Poland that is infused with an herb known as bison grass . Bison grass vodka is also called " zubrowka ." Since the 13th century, the vodka has been heralded for its supposed aphrodisiac and virility-inducing qualities. Until the 1970s, bison grass vodka was banned from the US because of its reputation as a medicinal drink. Hey, I didn't say it, but I know you're thinking it - hallucinatory? mind-altering? I tried zubrowka for the first time at a Polish restaurant in Santa Monica, Warszawa . The server poured the clear, though slightly ivory-tinted lquid into a shot glass and said I should try it straight to really taste the difference from regular vodka. It had a very distinctive taste - something like a slightly sweet vanilla mixed with herb - though the flavor wasn't overpowering. It was pretty tasty, and certainly much nicer to drink straight vodka that had a little bit of flavor to it than say, straight Belvedere. Mor...

When Hernando Cortés and his Spanish army of fewer than a thousand men stormed into Mexico in 1519, the native population numbered about 22 million. By the end of the century, following a series of devastating epidemics, only 2 million people remained. Even compared with the casualties of the Black Death, the mortality rate was extraordinarily high. Mexican epidemiologist Rodolfo Acuña-Soto refers to it as the time of "megadeath." The toll forever altered the culture of Mesoamerica and branded the Spanish as the worst kind of conquerors, those from foreign lands who kill with their microbes as well as their swords. The notion that European colonialists brought sickness when they came to the New World was well established by the 16th century. Native populations in the Americas lacked immunities to common European diseases like smallpox, measles, and mumps. Within 20 years of Columbus's arrival, smallpox had wiped out at least half the people of the West Indies and had begu...

“I was 30.000 feet above ground, when the idea for Strings began to take shape. The aircraft was moving along high above the clouds and on the small screen in front of me, a commercial taking place in Prague was playing. It had marionette puppets as actors and I was amazed of how much expression they could display. I began to wonder how the world would appear, if I was a marionette, and I drew up a sketch of a marionette fleeing his enemy. The puppet was sitting in a treetop while tens of thousands of strings, was closing in on him. I immediately felt the idea was very strong. An idea of a universe inhabited by marionettes with strings reaching all the way up to the sky, to a place where we are all connected -and controlled. I promised myself that if I won the European Fantasy Film Award for “Possessed”, my next project would be Strings. The plane touched down and a few days later I was accepting the award. Now it is 4 years later, 4 mill spent, and 200 dedicated ...

Here's a true story. A famous chef is persuaded to write a cookbook, but he isn't a native English speaker, so a specialist translator/editor is hired to help him polish up his work. When translator gets manuscript, he sees that the recipes, such as they are, are completely unusable - mere notes, often scribbled on scraps of paper. The translator spends the next seven or eight months clarifying, rewriting and repeatedly testing the recipes, in addition to writing introductory texts from material supplied by the author. Result: the book is a bestseller and prize-winner. But the translator/writer/recipe tester does not have his name on the cover, even though he wrote the book. The chef, meanwhile, is hailed as a genius - which he happens to be, in his own kitchen, but he can no more convey that genius in print than my cat can explain how to catch flies. Welcome to the murky world of culinary ghosting. Or rewriting or co-authorship, as it should sometimes be called. When you buy t...

I am sure I can count on readers of this magazine to have sat up late with Victor Klemperer's diary of survival under the Third Reich: I Will Bear Witness . This is the single most important document from the era of National Socialism. It gives an account of every day of Hitler's 13-year dictatorship, written by a German-Jewish convert to Protestantism who had married a heroic Protestant woman, and who briefly imagined that his dual loyalty (to employ an otherwise suspect phrase) might win him some immunity. Swiftly disabused on that score, Klemperer resolved to depict his beloved Germany's collapse into barbarism. The diary possesses three dimensions that are of great interest to us. By its portrayal of innumerable acts of decency and solidarity on the part of ordinary Germans, it seems to rebut the Daniel Jonah Goldhagen diatribe about "willing executioners." By its agonizing description of the steady and pitiless erosion of German Jewry, it puts to shame a...

Over 840 million people, according to the United Nations, are chronically undernourished. A quarter of them are in sub-Saharan Africa, but 204 million are in one country alone - India. Worldwide, approximately 200 million children under the age of five suffer from acute or chronic symptoms of malnutrition. Typical meals for people in some of those countries are: Malawi rice, greens, grasshoppers. Haiti bean sauce over rice or cornbread. Ecuador soup of potato, cheese and corn with half an avocado tossed in. Laos rice complemented with small portions of vegetables (mainly green leafy vegetables) and fish. Bangladesh, India and much of south Asia plain rice with dal made from lentils or other pulses. Protein as available - fish is the most common. In northern areas bread rather than rice may be the staple. United States (soup kitchen) watery barley vegetable soup and a slice of Wonder Bread. Kenya ugali na sukuma wiki, a stiff porridge made from maize meal, with collard-like ...

The phrase 'there's no such thing as a free lunch' is one that is habitually spouted by the sort of politician or businessperson who has evidently enjoyed many of them. What this normative statement really means is that 'nothing should be free for the lower orders'. As a child of the 1970s, and despite Margaret Thatcher's best milk-snatching efforts as Minister of Education, I grew up believing that a something-for-nothing attitude should not be the sole preserve of the rich. I therefore jumped at the chance to have lunch at the world-renowned French Laundry restaurant in California's Napa Valley. It was never going to be a tough call. My next-door neighbour here in San Francisco is the executive chef at a highly rated French bistro in the city. His enthusiastic reaction to my assignment suggested that there was much more than mere hype to master chef Thomas Keller's established eaterie up in Yountville, in the heart of Northern California's wine cou...

The interest in wine is passionately held, although Sir Cliff says his tastes are 'commercial rather than elitist'. So much so, that he has recently gone into the wine business himself, emulating Sam Neill, Gérard Depardieu, Greg Norman and Francis Ford Coppola in the celebrity wine stakes by launching a Portuguese wine called Vida Nova. Sir Cliff concedes that, for the time being at least, the project is a 'ridiculously expensive hobby', but says that making money out of Vida Nova doesn't really matter to him. 'I love the Algarve and I want to give something back to the area. People are surprised that I've set up a vineyard, but I'm surprised that they're surprised, frankly. Actors and singers have always branched out.' What is genuinely surprising is the location of the 16-acre vineyard. Even to Portuguese wine lovers, viticulture in the Algarve is a bit of a joke. 'Some of the guidebooks say that the Algarve bottles headaches for tourists,...

'Hang on, sorry can you say that again... Chloe Whiskey? Okay. I don't drink to get drunk I drink to stay calm and relaxed and able to deal with people that annoy me. Frascati is one of my favourite wines because it is the easiest to get in Ireland. I like good dry white wine therefore I like Italian or Spanish or... er... two or three French ones and a couple of German ones. I go for what I can get - wine is wine. Nenagh milk comes fresh from the local dairy. Everyday I walk past the cow that I get my milk from. I drink a lot of milk but it's mainly for White Russians, a cocktail that's made with Kahlua, vodka and milk. I just have one handy, then I get sick of them after a while and I switch back to something like gin and tonic. If I'm hungry and I'm in a hurry I'll eat macaroni cheese. They've got ring pull tabs so you can rip the top of the tin, grab a spoon, jump in the car and fuck off somewhere and eat it on the way. I get brown breadbecause it...

Que angústia! – O senhor fala português, sim ou não?? – O que é que esteve a fazer tanto tempo na Ucrânia? – Profissão? – Piloto de aviões. – No banco disseram-me que como estrangeira não posso ter livro de cheques. A verdade é que gostam do nosso dinheiro, mas de nós, não! – A escola?... Bem, aqui em Portugal há muita coisa boa... Eu estou na praia, faz sol, o mar é óptimo. Tenho trabalho… Mas a escola aqui é mesmo um problema. Muito fraca.

A Rússia política e literária em Fernando Pessoa À parte algumas referências de passagem, os ecos da literatura russa em Fernando Pessoa só se podem encontrar na sua biblioteca: Turgueniev, Tchekhov, Dostoievski Muito pouco se tem feito neste campo no que toca a Fernando Pessoa, o que é surpreendente se tivermos em conta o facto de que a sua biblioteca pessoal se encontra intacta em Lisboa, quase como a deixou quando morreu em 1935. É uma biblioteca relativamente pequena mas que merece a maior atenção pela existência de inúmeros sublinhados, notas e comentários devidos a Pessoa durante a sua leitura sempre criteriosa dessa fascinante variedade de livros, a maior parte dos quais em inglês e francês. (...) Os sonetos são assinados por Alexander Search e, ainda que menores, têm a importância de fazerem a demonstração poética do descontentamento de Pessoa em relação ao tratamento dado pelos Ingleses aos Russos. To England (When English journalists joked on Russia's disasters.) I....

I wasn't there as I wished and said on a previous post , at the 9th International Conference on the Short-Story in English, Views from the Edge: the Short-Story Revisited, but now there's a book with the output :) da 101 Noites . Nomes de escritores consagrados como Hélia Correia, Luísa Costa Gomes, Gonçalo M. Tavares ou Rui Zink, e de estreantes como Diana Almeida, Rute Beirante ou Jorge Vaz de Carvalho, juntam-se a outros autores numa antologia de 15 contos em português e inglês, lançada no dia 27 de Junho, no Instituto Camões (IC) e intitulada Onde a Terra Acaba, Contos Portugueses . «Trata-se de uma edição que veio prolongar e alargar a vida de pequenas narrativas de escritores portugueses que participaram no 9.º Congresso Internacional da Sociedade para o Estudo do Conto, realizado recentemente na Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa», disse Simonetta Luz Afonso, presidente do IC, a entidade que patrocinou a tradução da obra. «Será certamente um excelente instru...

Une trouvaille: a blog called Tabacaria, in hommage to Pessoa, in Portuguese and French. J'adore :)

Thanx, Mary :)

Thanx, Maria :)

Spassiba, Kseniya :)

'Just who is this Magna Carta fellow?' Statement of purpose I had heard about the British all my life. As a child, I had crushes on a series of Britons, including Hayley Mills, Julie Andrews and, somewhat problematically, Davy Jones. But for various reasons, including working for a living and not having enough money, I had never been to Britain. It is my belief that we Americans, geographically isolated as we are, tend to be perhaps not as knowledgeable about other cultures as we might be. This is regrettable. Since we are the sole remaining superpower, it is desirable that we know something about the rest of the world, because otherwise, when we take over different parts of the world, how will we know how good we did? Accordingly, I decided to undertake a visit to Britain and study the land and its peoples. A word about nomenclature Britain is often said to be part of "the United Kingdom", along with several other countries, including England....

Spanning the period between the Chicago World's Fair of 1893 and the years just after World War I, this novel moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York, to London and Gottingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all. With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred. The sizable cast of characters includes anarchists, balloonists, gamblers, corporate tycoons, drug enthusiasts, innocents and decadents, mathematicians, mad scientists, shamans, psychics, and stage magicians, spies, detectives, adventuresses, and hired guns. There are cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lug...

Jason and Kimberley Graham-Nye could have named their product the Eco-Diaper. After all, one of their chief motivations for selling a “flushable diaper system” is to offer an alternative to disposable diapers, which contribute to landfills and take years to biodegrade. But instead they went with the name gDiapers, which doesn’t mean anything. Well, they would put it differently: they say that the “g” could stand for “green,” but it could also mean “groovy.” The point is to leave things vague enough that a consumer might be drawn in by gDiapers’ fashionably bright colors, comfort or perhaps just the novelty factor, and then learn that, “P.S., they save the planet,” Jason suggests. While saving the planet seems like sort of too big a deal to reduce to a postscript, the Graham-Nyes figure too much emphasis on the ecofactor would restrict their product’s appeal to what they call “dark green” consumers. GDiapers were introduced in the U.S. just six months ago in a handful of green-friendly...

Conceptualists Many geniuses peak early, creating their masterwork at a tender age ... LITERATURE: The Great Gatsby F. Scott Fitzgerald Age 29 PAINTING: Les Demoiselles d’Avignon Pablo Picasso Age 26 FILMMAKING: Citizen Kane Orson Welles Age 26 ARCHITECTURE: The Vietnam War Memorial Maya Lin Age 23 MUSIC: The Marriage of Figaro Wolfgang Mozart Age 30 Experimentalists ... while others bloom late, doing their best work after lifelong tinkering. LITERATURE: Huckleberry Finn Mark Twain Age 50 PAINTING: Château Noir Paul Cézanne Age 64 FILMMAKING: Vertigo Alfred Hitchcock Age 59 ARCHITECTURE: Fallingwater Frank Lloyd Wright Age 70 MUSIC: Symphony No. 9 Ludwig van Beethoven Age 54

10- Make Paper Obsolete Imagine curling up on the couch with the morning paper and then using the same sheet of paper to read the latest novel by your favorite author. That's one possibility of electronic paper, a flexible display that looks very much like real paper but can be reused over and over. The display contains many tiny microcapsules filled with particles that carry electric charges bonded to a steel foil. Each microcapsule has white and black particles that are associated with either a positive or negative charge. Depending on which charge is applied; the black or white particles surface displaying different patterns. In the United States alone, more than 55 million newspapers are sold each weekday. 9 - Bury the Bad Stuff Carbon dioxide is the most prominent greenhouse gas contributing to global warming. According to the Energy Information Administration, by the year 2030 we will be emitting close to 8,000 million metric tons of CO2. Some experts say it's impos...

The psychedelic legacy of Syd Barrett Syd Barrett, who died several days ago (no one is sure exactly when) at age 60, was, to say the least, a mess. The wire services are remembering the co-founder and first lead singer of Pink Floyd as a "troubled genius"—obit-speak for lunatic—and indeed his life was a lurid tragedy that seemed scripted for a VH-1 Behind the Music special: Gifted psychedelic-rock pioneer streaks like a comet across the Swinging London music scene, sears his mind on drugs, descends into madness, and disappears. He became something more horrifying than a rock martyr like Jim Morrison or Jimi Hendrix; he became a kind of living dead man. The most famous episode in the Barrett legend was his 1975 reunion with Pink Floyd, when he turned up unannounced at Abbey Road Studios just as the band was recording their Barrett elegy, "Shine On, You Crazy Diamond." He was a gruesome apparition—bloated, with a shaved head and shaved eyebrows—and none of his ex-b...