Alaskan Range: Ways To Spend Time On The Internet
Greg Hill spotlights some of the Internet's odder and unexpectedly entertaining sites.
Smoking salmon at our house usually entails plenty of garlic, and then some. Our brining recipe calls for 10-15 cloves, so we make it an even 20. I figure the herb's manifold qualities far outweigh its pungent aroma. As www.FoodReference.com notes, "Garlic and onions are among the oldest cultivated food plants. Their culinary, medicinal and religious use dates back more than 6000 years." Still, one must agree with gardener extraordinaire John Woolridge, whose 1688 classic, "The Art of Gardening," includes the observation that "Much more of Garlick would be used for its wholesomeness, were it not for the offensive smell it gives to the by-Standers."
Garlic's trademark smell, which comes from its high sulphur content, can linger on your fingers, too. Fortunately, we have a Wonder Bar in our kitchen. This device shouldn't be confused with a similarly-named item of women's clothing, being instead a simple bar of stainless steel that somehow removes strong smells from hands when rubbed under running water. A quick Google search failed to find out how it works, with only conjecture being revealed. So I turned to StraightDope.com, a reliable and amusing website devoted to answering questions.
StraightDope's pseudonymous author, Cecil Adams, reports that stainless steel does appear to reduce or eliminate strong odors from hands.
"Theoretical underpinnings for these results are lacking," he writes, and mentions two possibilities: "1. The steel acts as an abrasive. Boring but plausible. 2. The nickel in the stainless steel causes ionization, which fools the nose into thinking the smell is gone. You know any explanation containing the word 'ionization' has got to be a crock. But that's all we've got for now."
Adams claims to never have encountered a question he couldn't eventually solve, so long as it doesn't "lie beyond the veil of things known," like whether the Vatican Library really contains an ancient porn collection. He usually prevails, though finding out how the Mars company imprints M&M letters onto the candy pieces took years. He also won't answer mundane or inane queries but loves the odd ones.
My family enjoys oddities and has been sharing odd and even inane Internet websites, if they're amusing, like photos of cute panda bears eating icy birthday cakes, (PandaLovestoParty.tumblr.com), and photos of voracious turtles eating strange foods, (TurtlesEatingThings.com). There was the collection of terribly decorated cakes our baker daughter Mimi forwarded (CakeWrecks.blogspot.com), and our photographer daughter Leah contributed the self-explanatory AwkwardFamilyPhotos.com. Like so much in life, "The things that stand out are often the oddities," as Pierre Salinger once noted.
A great Internet source for oddities is BoingBoing.net, a blog that collects a wide range of sites that amuse, confuse, inform and inspire. The articles are brief, usually illustrated, and always include links to more information. A recent BoingBoing foray dredged up the following: a website estimating the size of printer's type necessary to reach the moon (the letter "h" would be 282.6 billion points, compared to the 11 or 12 point type I normally use, or "roughly 5.6 times as tall as the Earth"), the MakerBot 3-D printer that makes fully-formed plastic copies of computer images, a 1969 video of Muppet creator Jim Henson demonstrating puppetmaking, and a site selling Moslem burqas "decorated in American flag colors."
There's evidence that Cecil Adams is a nom de plume. "Billed as the 'World's Smartest Human,'" Wikipedia says "Adams responds to often unusual inquiries with abrasive humor." Whoever he is has the skills of a first-rate reference librarian, citing sources of his answers, revising answers as new information becomes available, and providing alternative answers. When asked what questions he refuses to answer," Adams responded, "Can't think of one." Just like your local reference librarians, who love helping people with questions find answers. And while much less abrasive, than Adams, who has said, "If ignorance were corn flakes, you'd be General Mills," librarians share his delight in the unusual. After all, as Shakespeare pointed out, "Every man is odd."
