Welcome to this week's selection of Picks, where we've been pondering the big questions: Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Why did the chicken cross the road? Why are chickens at the center of most Western creation myths? Why can't we stop thinking about chickens? Of course, we may have an answer for that last one. It's probably because we've been visiting Eatchicken.com, where we found a searchable Recipe Database and handy Cooking Tips. Thanks to the site's daily "Chicken Nugget," we even learned that per capita chicken consumption will hit 83 pounds by the year 2000. We're gearing up in anticipation, ready and roasting to go. Now, on to Plucks, er, we mean Picks...
If you find that your chicken consumption is not equal to your chicken supply, you might consider canning the excess. Of course, you'd want to do it safely, so consult the National Food Safety Database. A multi-state project to make food safety information more accessible, the NFSD provides consumer- and industry-related information, from home food preservation to beef production. Learn about such diverse topics as seafood safety, mangos, and how to avoid food and drug interactions. It's also browseable by topic or searchable by term. We entered "peanut butter and dill pickles." Uh-oh. Maybe we're pregnant.
Speaking of food safety, have we got a site for you. It's the North Jersey Society of Paranormal Research. What does this have to do with food safety? Nothing. Ha-ha. The NJSPR busies itself investigating local paranormal activity, with a primary focus on ghosts, hauntings, poltergeists, and "current methods available to obtain tangible evidence of conscious intelligence after bodily death." Upon making a visitation to their site, go straight to current investigations, which includes a house in Hardystown where a child's toys have been moving about without the batteries in them, the doorbell has been ringing in the middle of the night, and there is "a possibly anomalous photo taken of the family's puppy." Also, don't forget to read up on EVP, the practice of recording ghostly sounds. Cool. Maybe they can investigate the mysterious and scary dead links that haunt the Web; we're too chicken.
Riddle: Why did the technologically inclined East-Coasters cross the country? Answer: To attend Burning Man. Okay, it's not as funny as the original chicken joke, but in this case, it's true. There really is a gaggle of wireheads hitting the road to travel from New York City to San Francisco by way of the notorious Nevada bacchanalia. It's a biennial event called the Alley-Valley Rally, and in fact it's already started. Of course, like any webheads worth their cigarette-lighter-powered laptops, the participants have a massive online presence. Check out the "official" route, team bios, and the obligatory trip journals. For the casual viewer, it may not have the star power of Cannonball Run, but nonetheless, it's always fun to live vicariously through other people's car trouble.
The Alley-Valley Ralliers aren't the only ones who like to experience the world in all its colorful, fast-moving glory. Occasionally, even we put on our hiking boots, grab the ole knapsack and go. To a movie, that is. Being a lot more discriminating about films than we are about Web sites (wait, scratch that), we find there's no better source of critical opinion than the Chicago Reader Movie Section. Not only does the Reader post full-length critiques of recent films, it's made available a searchable database of over 6,000 capsule reviews from their archives. For no good reason, we searched on "Godzilla" and got this analysis: "Is Godzilla... a metaphor for Japan's nuclear trauma? Or is he, as Bruno Bettelheim might suggest, a fairy-tale projection of a child's fears about his growing body and voracious appetite?" A search on Ingmar Bergman's "The Seventh Seal," retrieved this: "The feel-good Swedish movie of 1957!" Go figure.
If a friend tells you that he "was sitting down for a bubble and squeak when the ankle-biters came in to lark about" and you're trying to figure out just what the heck he means, you might want to have a dekko at The Cockney Handbook, a dead cert, knockout of a site. Here you will discover (as any East Ender could tell you) that your friend just sat down for fried leftover potatoes and vegetables when the children came in and started acting up. (That's what you get for not eating chicken.) But don't stop there, review the Cockney dictionary and Rhyming Slang for a right purfick understanding of such phrases as "more rabbit than Sainsbury" and "laugh to see a pudding crawl." Get the FAQ on Cockney language and history, or, if you fancy a bit of ding-dong, listen to The Old Bull & Bush.
We turn now from British slang to British art, because that's precisely what we found at the Worsley Institute of Blu-Tack Art. The young artists of this exciting collective create small sculptures out of a substance known as, you guessed it, Blu-Tack, a pliable cerulean clay that is commonly used in scientific experiments. The highly evocative pieces are presented via photos and short, erudite explanations. We found ourselves nodding in unrestrained agreement as we read that the work titled "Bunny" is meant to express "the sociological and psychological zeitgeist of our human now." The only downside: They carelessly neglected to include any chicken or chicken-related sculptures. Tsk tsk.
Finally, we feel obligated to tell you that Nixon is still alive. How do we know? From those "anonymous sources" at the National Enquirer. Truth or fiction? Take your pick(s).
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