How to Get Good Duck A collection of fascinating ramblings and conclusions. I mean fascinating. Statistics Unique Visitors: Total Unique Visitors: Outgoing: Total Outgoing: 0 0 1 958

Articles from How to Get Good Duck

Uttered in my kitchen, early this morning: 2007-11-21 04:25:00 Go ahead, Aisha, eat. I'm not going to dance around it and make it rain.Huh? ...

Talking Turkey 2007-11-20 00:48:00 Here's some Thanksgiving fun that'll blow your mind - More than likely, the turkey that you will be eating on Thursday has never flown. Or bred. Not for a lack of will, I am sure, but because it couldn't. Fly or breed.The broad-breasted white turkey is the turkey that has dominated the US market for quite some time now, said to represent 99% of the turkeys eaten on Thanksgiving day. To keep up with a demand for cheap white meat, this breed has been genetically engineered to produce a huge-chested (for that great breast meat), short-legged (who eats those anyhow?), white-feathered (to keep the feathers from discoloring the turkeys) and fast-growing (they have to grow fast because they don't live that long) turkey that can't even begin to think about flapping its little wings and becoming airborne, and must be artificially inseminated in order to reproduce.Want something better? Traditional turkeys, called heritage turkeys, are still around, but they are difficult to get a hold of a ...

Mapping the Tree of Life 2007-11-16 03:55:00 I recently met with Birgitta Bremer, the first woman to serve as Sweden's Professor Bergianus (the top botany position in Sweden, dating back to 1760) and spoke with her about her research. A very charming, highly driven and super-intelligent individual, she is focused on "family tree" style classification that will eventually map the relationships between all living organisms. Yep, all of them.The genus Bremeria is named after her and can be found on Madagascar and the Mascarene Islands. My article about Birgitta Bremer can be read here.Tags: * Birgitta Bremer * www.sweden.se * flowers * research * botany * tree of life * time tree * bremeria * Bergianska * Bergianus ...

Soup Peddling 2007-11-13 02:33:00 For a short period of time while I was working at an investment firm in San Francisco, I decided to start making and bringing lunch for some of my co-workers. I don't really know why, but I ended up with 5 or 6 regulars who paid me 5 dollars to bring them in whatever I made, once a week. So every week I would go around and double-check that these crazy people still wanted my meals, and would then go shopping and get the ingredients that I needed in order to make a meal that left over enough leftovers (can I say that?) for the whole group.These weirdos actually liked this service, some even tried to convince me to do it every day. Seeing that this was something that I was doing for fun and because I like to cook, it didn't end up being a career move for me. So, I did for a few months, and then I changed departments and... well, it fizzled away. But the reason people liked it and wanted me to keep going was because of the fact that it was a great feeling to have home-made, fresh meals ...

The Giuliani-Kerik Connection: Nouns, Verbs and 9-11s 2007-11-10 02:05:00 Joseph Biden was right on when he said that for the most part, Rudy Giuliani's sentences consist of "a noun, a verb and 9/11." What sort of amazes me is that Rudy Giuliani tends to not mess that up. Grammatically, he's correct in placing the noun first, then the verb, and then the 9/11. That's pretty smart for a mafia dude. Nice job Rudy. But that's where the compliments stop, capiche?I have startled myself upright in the middle of the night on many occasions, a cold sweat coating my shaking body. Sick? No - scared. Every now and then I think about the state of things: an irresponsible Republican administration has driven the United States into a rather unfortunate position. We are stuck in a game that none of us really wanted to be a part of, essentially, an unsuccessful Vietnam reprise, a touch football grudge match gone very foul. It's now become an extremely annoying loop that plays over and over again every time you turn on the radio and hear about additional casualties, budg ...

The Friday Funny 2007-11-09 11:49:00 Dave Chappelle is one funny dude. That's really all I have to say. Plenty of profanity, FYI. Feed readers watch it here. Happy weekend.Tags:* comedy * humor * funny * silly * entertainment * pop culture * Dave Chappelle * funny * London * comedy * stand up * cigarette ...

Velibbing in Paris 2007-11-05 05:03:00 I was in Paris last weekend to hang out with my friend Ellen and we ended up renting some bikes, using the new Velib bike rental program that Paris launched in July of this year. Here's a video showing us wheeling around Paris. Broken up by some amazing Metro puppetry:You may have noticed that the pitch of my voice changed significantly after the white wine and oyster stop. Go figure. I'm not sure that Velib wants a white-wined idiot cruising around Paris on one of their bikes and then reviewing their service on his blog, but who cares. Here goes:First of all, the bikes are awesome. They are really nice three-speed bikes, looking a bit like something that should be called iBike or iVélo or something. They're slick and user friendly. And they have one of those little dinger thingies so that you can scare people as they walk along the sidewalk, causing them to fear for their lives and jump out of the way. Having never owned a bike with a little dinger thingy, I used mine liberally.Th ...

Toasty schnitzelicious 2007-10-21 05:30:00 You have no idea how long I've been dying to stick my schnitzel in a toaster. Finally, the wait is over! Feed-readers click here to see the fascinating new TOASTY schnitzel... thing.Gotta love that presentation of the TOASTY at the end, carefully placed next to the ketchup-covered macaroni, with a little tomato garnish. Beautiful.----------------Now playing: Carlos Mendes - The Drillvia FoxyTunesTags:* comedy * humor * funny * silly * entertainment * pop culture * toasty * german * schnitzel * toast * toaster * toaster schnitzel ...

Sunday Funnies 2007-10-21 02:51:00 I spent all day yesterday writing and am about to do it again today, so I'm opting for text-light blogging today. In other words, that's where you just go out and steal a bunch of videos and post them. Yawn, but, hey, it's Sunday. Feed readers click through to see these poached videos here.This one is a must. Andy Kaufman doing what Andy Kaufman does. Or did:This is one of the best Bush press conference parodies out there. With zombies:And finally, a classic David Blaine parody. There's a precursor to this one, but the audio is a little annoying, so you get #2:These and other finny little thingies can be found at funnyordie.com.----------------Now playing: Boney M. - Daddy Coolvia FoxyTunesTags: * comedy * humor * funny * silly * politics * president * george bush * republican * democrat * conservative * liberal * congress * entertainment * pop culture * funny or die * videos * Sunday * funny * David Blaine * Andy Kaufman * Bush * press conference * zombies ...

Nobel prize winner has racist DNA 2007-10-19 00:20:00 Biologist James Watson, winner of the 1962 Nobel Prize for his role in discovering the double-helix structure of DNA, is apparently a racist idiot. Click-through to full article here.Watson apologized profusely yesterday for a statement that he made in which he insinuated that black people were not as intelligent as white people. He went on to say that he was "mortified" by public reaction to his comments and that he "cannot understand how (he) could have said what (he is) quoted as having said." Let's take a look at what he actually said and see if we can help him to understand what passed through those unruly lips of his.In an interview with The Sunday Times, the 79-year-old pair of lips molded the air being passed through them into words that indicated that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours -- whereas all the testing says not really." Here's a shot of Dr. Watson ...

An uninvited viZitor 2007-10-18 06:51:00 I got a zit. And it's been with me all week, unfortunately, and doesn't seem to have any desire to vacate the premises any time soon. It's great, I feel like a teenager again. The real bummer is that it's right below the right side of my lower lip. In other words, it's pretty strategically placed. I took a picture of it so that I could post it, but there's nothing pretty about a zit, so I'm skipping the self portrait and am opting for the John Belushi version instead:So I figured I could find some sort of amazing home remedy that would take care of the thing overnight, so I Googled "natural zit remedy" to see what I could find.This is apparently a good home remedy:To clear zits quickly, keep a small sealed jar of this natural topical remedy on hand (it keeps for a few months): Combine 2 tablespoons of green clay, 1 tablespoon of goldenseal powder (Hydratis canadensis), 2 to 3 drops of tea tree oil (Melaleuca alternifolia), and enough water to form a paste. Apply the paste to you ...

Love Letters and Correspondence 2007-10-16 01:13:00 Or maybe I should call this one "Love Letters and Correspenisdence." Let me think about that. It's a long one, and I apologize, sort of. Feel free and click through for the whole friggin' thing here.I'm happy to report that I'm not getting as much physical junk mail anymore. And I'm talking about snail mail junk mail, of course, not the electronic variety. Perhaps people actually are getting tired of wasting paper and trees, perhaps people realized that the junk mail went from the mailbox, into my hands for about 60 seconds, and directly into the fireplace. Seems like its dwindling in any event... Maybe it's just out of season and will pour in again when ripe.The electronic junk mail, however, I can set my watch by. Rain, sleet or snow, those little hard-working worms and bugs shuffle around their little cyberpaths, chomping at the bit before they poach my adddesses, lick the virtual envelopes shut, and send me my 4,000 messages about how I can have the Russian bride of my choice ...

Yet another prize for Mr. Gore 2007-10-12 10:42:00 When the Norwegian committee of five announced earlier today that the Nobel Peace Prize for 2007 had been awarded to Al Gore, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the planet definitely breathed a sigh of relief. Not just the thousands, perhaps millions, of people who have seen and been touched by his Academy Award-winning "An Inconvenient Truth", but the actual planet herself. Not only did my phone ring with calls from people who were excited by the news, but the skies cleared up over Karlstorp and made way for one of the most beautiful days I have seen in a long time. It was almost as if Mother Nature herself was beaming, puffing out her chest and saying, "See what I can do, huh? Now that you're all looking at me... See what I can do?"It is certainly fair to say that Mr. Gore is certainly proud of his Oscar, of his Emmy, and of all the other prizes that he's been awarded. But this one definitely takes the cake. The Nobel Peace Prize. That's super sexy. Nice wor ...

I'll take it. 2007-10-11 12:47:00 Whatever it is that they're selling. I'll take two. This is um... well, just watch it. ...

They're Baaaack... 2007-10-11 07:05:00 Small, cold white flaky things descending from above. Lock your doors and keep your children inside.Tags: * first snow * sweden * cold * weather * snow * snow * did i mention snow ...