pic o’ the day: stormwatching in Ucluelet

Do ya ever chat with Europeans and listen to them complain about “wilderness” and “wild animals?” A friend of mine lived in Heidelberg for a year and during that time she noted several occasions on which the populace was encouraged to go out into the forest and “Pick up the garbage, like fallen leaves, branches, etc”. Can’t have that messing up the forest, nosirree!

What we have here is a failure to communicate.

Hedgehogs are not the same as grizzly bears. If your country does not support wildlife that can kill you, it has no wilderness. It has parks.

A friend of mine used to say that if you go camping and shoot a gun off and anyone else can hear it, you’re not really camping.

Welcome to my world. This is nine hours drive from here, including ferry time, but I can walk from my apartment downtown to an area with bears in it in about two and a half hours. Forty minutes on the bus if you’re lazy.

Behold Ucluelet, world-renowned destination for stormwatching, for obvious reasons:

Ucluelet by Sherri Boe

snakes on a plane: the auditions

From DCLugi, and also Christopher Walken, Robert DeNiro, Jack Nicholson, Joe Pesce, and a special guest some of you might recognize…

lessons from a Japanese chopstick master

“Ah, Grasshopper, when you can snatch the chopsticks from my hand…”

Learn how to use Chopsticks from a Japanese Chopstick Master!!!

Lesson 1: How to split apart those cheap wooden chopsticks
Lesson 2: How to eat Japanese soba noodles
Lesson 3: How to eat a McDonald’s Cheeseburger

Great, now I’m hungry. Anybody know a good noodle place around here?

a cookie even Cookie Monster couldn’t love

a cookie even Cookie couldn't loveYou think I’m kidding? First off, it’s Japanese, which is the 21st Century’s version of Dali-esque. The entire nation seems populated by navy suit-clad, sex toy obssessed, seafood-fetishizing lunatics. Seriously, if there are sane Japanese people out there, I ain’t heard about it.

Secondly, they are made from giant, invading jellyfish.

Thirdly, they taste like it.

From Pink Tentacle:

yummylicious!As part of an ongoing battle against invading swarms of giant jellyfish in local waters, some residents of Fukui prefecture have developed a method for converting the jellyfish into powder, which is used to make souvenir cookies. The jellyfish treats, called “Ekura-chan saku-saku cookies,” are now on sale at JR Fukui station at a price of 580 yen for a box of 10…

The result is a cookie with a superbly textured sweetness nicely complemented by the bitter, salty flavor of jellyfish.

Simply charming. Not even in the name of research will I go near these godforsaken morsels of hellfire, not least because I know what they’re made from.

Mmmm, doesn't that look good?

Monstro escapes, terrorizes Eastern seaboard

The world is your lobster 

Yep, I wouldn’t wanna be a Massachusetts mussel with this insatiable leviathan prowling around out there.

Monstro the monstrous lobster has been set free to slake his bloodlust once again on the unsuspecting bivalves of the Atlantic coast. After holding the rapacious crustacean thirty days in captivity, his captors bowed to pressure from special interest groups and released him, to prowl the sea bottom once again. Truly the End Times are upon us; note the name of his temporary resting place: quaintly charming, or sinisterly forboding?

The giant lobster caught 100 miles off the Massachusetts coast spent last month in the lobster tank at Angelica’s Restaurant in Bethlehem. He recently was returned to the water, just off the southern tip of West Island, five miles from New Bedford, Mass.

Fred Cunha, the restaurant owner, bought the 37-inch Monstro with his 15-inch-long claws from a New Bedford fishing boat in mid-October. Cunha estimates Monstro is 50 years old…

After persistent lobbying from diners and his 7-year-old daughter Angelica, Cunha decided to raffle off Monstro, with the winner deciding whether to send him to the ocean or the cooking pot.

So Monstro lounged in the restaurant’s tank with Mr. Crabby, Angelica‘s pet 2-pound lobster, feasting on minced crab and scallops…

Until