Giblets and omakase

It's been a while. I've still been looking up stuff, but not blogging about it. Somehow it seems like too much trouble. I think it's time to re-commit to the commitment of, um. That thing, I don't know.

Anyway, tonight I finally found out what a giblet it. At the Preston Market, I buy chicken livers, chicken hearts, chicken necks, and giblets. Our cats eat them with delight (it's really gross to watch).

I've been wondering what a giblet is and does. It's kind of dense and really fibrous. Wikipedia tells me that what I see called a giblet is actually a gizzard. It's the part that a chicken uses for chewing. So now I know.

Also, tonight I was reading a blog post by Chris Onstad (creator of Achewood) in which he mentioned the word omekase. Turns out that this word implies a deeply cool Japanese tradition of asking the chef to prepare whatever they like, at the price they choose. Sounds like a gamble I need to try! I wonder if Japanese restaurants in Melbourne would do this. I wonder if a gaijin with no Japanese language skills can even make this happen...

Eternal leeks

My aunt grows these. Each leek has a lot of little seedling leeks growing around it. When you harvest a full-grown leek, you put the little seedlings back in the ground, hence: eternal leeks.

However, Google has not helped me out here. Maybe other people call these by another name.

It would not be the first time I found that outsiders don't know a word that was legal tender within my family. My grandmother coined the words "coeb" and "jubal", and I was at least twelve when I discovered that no-one else knew these little beauties.

A coeb (pronounced "koyb") is a little grain of sleep in the corner of one's eye. It's an initialism from Corner Of Eye Ball. Example usage: "You've got a coeb", then point.

The jubal is the entire area of the upper lip, starting from the bottom of the nose, all the way to the mouth. I think she invented it to disambiguate "upper lip", which can mean either the jubal, or the different-coloured flesh along the top of the mouth. A worthy task, disambiguation.

US Pronunciation of "processes"

Some of my US colleagues pronounce "processes" with "eez at the end, similar to the end of "analyses".

This bothers me.

I looked it up, and found this page, which includes an interesting Usage Note at the end of the first defintion: http://www.answers.com/topic/process

This site thinks that this is a hyperconnection from, indeed, the pronunciation of "analyses" and other words of Greek origin. That makes me feel better.

Thought leader

Today I received an email about a training course that I have to go on. It's a course to teach sales folk about how to sell the right kind of software. I'm going so I can learn about how the sales people do this, which might help me do better documentation.

Anyway, the description of the course includes this little gem:

"These sessions will not be about pitching product, but rather discuss security solutions and positioning with a thought leadership style approach."

Apart from the lack of hyphens at the end, this sentence has hairs on it. What is a thought leader? What is the style of thought leadership? So off I went to find out.

Wikipedia gives me these two quotations:

Elise Bauer:
A distinguishing characteristic of a thought leader is "the recognition from the outside world that the company deeply understands its business, the needs of its customers, and the broader marketplace in which it operates."

Phil Cosby:
"Leadership is deliberately causing people-driven actions in a planned way to accomplish the leaders agenda."

Right.

Here's a blog entry that defends the idea of thought leadership:
In Defense of Thought Leadership.

I can't stand this a second more, so I will go away now and write some more riveting documentation.

How to prevent citrus gall wasp

I don't have an answer for this yet.

Apparently the citrus gall wasp is a native to Australia, so you won't see this problem in other places.

The wasp lays its eggs in the new wood of a citrus tree, and the eggs cause a gall to grow. Eventually, they hatch and lay more darned eggs. The galls stress the tree, and if left untreated will eventually kill it, as well as continually providing a source of gall wasps to lay eggs in other trees.

However, the only treatment I've seen mentioned it to prune out the galls and burn them. This means that my young lime & lemon never get any bigger, because I have to prune out almost all of their new growth.

I've asked my question on this gardening forum: ABC Gardening Australia. I hope someone can help.

What's the story with Babylon?

I sing in a Sacred Harp group. Last Sunday, we sang a song that I find pretty confusing.

The words of the song include:

Hail the day so long expected,
...
Zion's walls are now erected
...
Babylon is fallen to rise no more

Although I went to Sunday School until I was twelve, I never heard the story of Babylon. Maybe the sex stuff was too much for the teachers.

All I knew about Babylon was that it had hanging gardens, which sound pretty cool to me.

So off I went to find out why we should be happy that Babylon is fallen (to rise no more!).

This page by Joseph McCabe gives an account of an account by Herodotus of a visit to Babylon. McCabe says that Herodotus said that women had to prostitute themselves in a temple, and that marriage was a once-a-year mass auction. McCabe thinks this wasn't true, but that Christianity has taken this account as the truth, and so Babylon has become a symbol or corruption and immorality.

Wikipedia describes the story of the Tower of Babel, built by a cooperative bunch of people who wanted to reach heaven. God destroyed the tower and made the previously uniform language into many, to prevent further attempts to reach heaven that way.

Wow. I think I need a rest from this. I might look into it further another time.

Purple wardrobe book

This one has me stumped for the moment.

When I was a kid, in the late seventies, someone gave me a book. It was a large-format hardback illustrated thing, with what seemed like a lot of text at the time.

The pictures were all purple line-drawings, which I found scary. I think some people had spirals for eyes.

There was a looming wardrobe involved, and I think the main character was a little girl whose name began with A. Not April, not Agatha. Hmmm.

My parents don't remember the book, and I haven't come up with a good Google search that will help me nail this one. Oh well, it will keep me occupied.