Nepenthe

Did you ever wonder what exactly that green stuff is that you smear on your sushi? I mean, we all know that wasabi (わさび, 山葵) burns like a hell-spawned wildfire, and clears the sinuses with a fiery vengeance. But, where does it actually come from, and how can something so seemingly innocent be so unbelievably potent? For starters, the best wasabi comes from Japan (no surprise there), most notably the Izu peninsula in Shizuoka prefecture. Much like American horseradish, wasabi plants grow naturally in stream beds, particularly where there is clean water that is free of impurities. If you've ever had the pleasure of smearing just a tad too much of the stuff on your tuna roll, wasabi is a nasal irritant that is more comparable to hot mustard than it is to chili pepper. That wonderful little chemical that can have you rolling your head on the sushi bar is called an isothiocyanate, which coincidentally inhibits microbe growth. Although there's no denying that wasabi brings out ...

"It's 11pm on a Saturday night, I need to leave you guys to find some ass." I swear to whatever there is above, that's what a girl said to us recently on the night of Noche en Blanco in Madrid. I wouldn't announce it so blatantly, but I have to admit that hooking up whilst on the road -- whether it's a holiday, gap year, or extended travel -- is one of the glories of traveling whilst you are young and single. Whether you are are 'wham-bam-thank-you-maam' type, or the passionate whirlwind love affair type, all's pretty easy on the road. Depending on what you are looking for and how open you are about finding it, some places can work for you more than others. Being a girl who doesn't have the 'one-track-mind' all men are accused of having by default, to think about a piece like this wouldn't have occurred to me unless I read this great piece on the Sydney Morning Herald's travel blog. Of his list of 10 best places to pick-up, I...

On my first try, I stopped at 1000 grains of rice.

Why do we curse?

and burn. Smack, crack, groupies and firearms - not to mention little blue men crawling across the floor: with Guns N' Roses, at the height of their fame, Slash saw it all. An exclusive extract from possibly the most insane rock'n'roll autobiography you'll ever read ...

My translation

Global Warming Wrecks All the Fun Say Goodbye to French Wines Wacky temperatures and rain cycles brought on by global warming are threatening something very important: Wine. Scientists believe global warming will “shift viticultural regions toward the poles, cooler coastal zones and higher elevations.” What that means in regular language: Get ready to say bye-bye to French Bordeaux and hello to British champagne. [ LA Times ] Say Goodbye to Light and Dry Wines Warmer temperatures mean grapes in California and France develop their sugars too quickly, well before their other flavors. As a result, growers are forced to either a) leave the grapes on the vines longer, which dramatically raises the alcoholic content of the fruit or b) pick the grapes too soon and make overly sweet wine that tastes like jam. [ Washington Post ] Say Goodbye to Pinot Noir The reason you adore pinot noir is that it comes from a notoriously temperamental thin-skinned grape that thrives in cool...

Slashfood: Remember all the hoopla about several chocolate companies who were planning on changing the way they made their chocolate? Well, don't include Mars in all that talk. The company (which makes Milky Way, M&Ms, Snickers, Dove Chocolate, and other chocolate candies and bars) has announced that they are going to keep making their chocolate with 100% cocoa butter. Some have been pushing for the industry to change to cheaper, healthier vegetable oils and fats. One thing I didn't realize is that the FDA says that if a company changes to those oils, they can't call it "chocolate." The company says that even though they could have saved money by switching, that would hurt the taste of the chocolate. Thank you Mars!

Exclusive from Cinematical

Tenho problemas com o espanhol. Não gosto especialmente da língua, leio pouco em espanhol (excepto poesia) e não falo espanhol nem para comprar água no Kalahari. Reparem que não tenho nada contra a Espanha e os espanhóis, nem me apanham a escrever coisas contra o «perigo espanhol» (é o mercado, estúpido); simplesmente me dou mal com o castelhano. Talvez isso tenha alguma coisa a ver com experiências linguísticas. O ridículo do portunhol, as séries americanas dobradas na TVE (« Espencer, detective privado »). E com os títulos. Ai os títulos. Acho que já contei que descobri o Mein Kampf numa versão espanhola que se chamava naturalmente Mi Lucha . O sinistro panfleto nazi, agreste e tudo (« Kampf »), transformado numa simples putéfia espanhola (a Milucha). Depois os pintores: esse misterioso «Durero» que afinal não é andaluz mas o alemão Albrecht Dürer; esse mestre incógnito, «El Bosco», que afinal é Hieronymus Bosch e não um aguarelista primo de Mota Amaral. E finalmente o inadjectiváve...

1. The aim of this report is not to question or to fight a belief – the right to freedom of belief does not permit that. The aim is to warn against certain tendencies to pass off a belief as science. It is necessary to separate belief from science. It is not a matter of antagonism. Science and belief must be able to coexist. It is not a matter of opposing belief and science, but it is necessary to prevent belief from opposing science. 2. For some people the Creation, as a matter of religious belief, gives a meaning to life. Nevertheless, the Parliamentary Assembly is worried about the possible ill-effects of the spread of creationist ideas within our education systems and about the consequences for our democracies. If we are not careful, creationism could become a threat to human rights which are a key concern of the Council of Europe. 3. Creationism, born of the denial of the evolution of species through natural selection, was for a long time an almost exclusively American phenomenon....

The Website is a must see ;))

Baobabs are popularly seen as vegetable elephants, the most bulky, contorted, awesome, antique masses of tree tissue on the planet. The greatest are believed to be 1,000 years old, but it's their surreal shapes as much as their presumed ages that have always marked them out. The Senegalese trees in Mimi Mollica's portraits seem to be chimeras, hybrids between plant, animal and rock. They're alabaster columns, lava streams, desert boulders, cave mouths. Their bark echoes the hide of the elephants to which they are so often compared, pouched and wrinkled and etched, ironically, with the gougings of tusks. When they're young, they inhabit a monde renversé, the flat, foreshortened topknot of branches looking for all the world like a root system. No wonder baobabs were the subject of fascinated myths in West Africa. One is that, at the Creation, the animals were each given trees of their own. The hyena got the baobab - and was so appalled he turned it upside down. A related ...

The 87-year-old has been honoured with the 10m kronor (£763,000) award for her life's work over a 57-year career. Her best-known works include The Golden Notebook, Memoirs of a Survivor and The Summer Before the Dark. Lessing said she was "very glad" about the honour - particularly as she was told 40 years ago that the Nobel hierarchy did not like her. She told BBC Radio 4: "I've won it. I'm very pleased and now we're going to have a lot of speeches and flowers and it will be very nice." They can't give a Nobel to someone who's dead so I think they were probably thinking they had better give it to me now Doris Lessing She recalled that, in the 1960s, "they sent one of their minions esp...