The Day of the Flying Fish
Globalization and the making of modern sushi
Katherine Mangu-Ward
For traditionalists in 19th-century Japan, a new sushi place was a sign the neighborhood was going to hell. In 1852 one writer grumped about the proliferation of sushi stalls in booming industrial Tokyo. The McDonald’s of their day, the stalls offered hungry factory workers a quick, cheap meal of fish and sweetened, vinegared rice. If the fish wasn’t top of the line, well, a splash of soy sauce and a dab of spicy wasabi perked up a serving of fish gizzards nicely, with some antimicrobial benefits to boot.
Today that writer’s spiritual descendants dwell on food chat boards like Chowhound, where calling a new Japanese place “inauthentic” or deriding it as “strip mall” or “food court” quality is the kiss of death. When we think of high-end, “authentic” sushi today, we envision rich, fatty slices of smooth tuna and creamy salmon arranged on a pristine plate—the height of elegant Japanese cuisine. But sushi wasn’t always elegant, and salmon and tuna are relatively recent additions to the menu. In that sense, sushi’s appearance in food courts worldwide is more a return to the dish’s common roots than a betrayal of authenticity. Sushi has always been in flux, with new ingredients and techniques added as convenience demanded. Globalization has sped up that process exponentially, bringing novelty to an old food and bringing traditional food to new places. The story of sushi is the story of globalization writ small—very small, on tiny slivers of raw fish.
More…
(On September 17, 1994, Alabama’s Heather Whitestone was selected as Miss America 1995.)
Question: If you could live forever, would you and why?
Answer: “I would not live forever, because we should not live forever, because i f we were supposed to live forever, then we would live forever, but we cannot live forever, which is why I would not live forever,”
“Whenever I watch TV and see those poor starving kids all over the world, I can’t help but cry. I mean I’d love to be skinny like that, but not with all those flies and death and stuff.”
–Mariah Carey”
Smoking kills. If you’re killed, you’ve lost a very important part of your life,”
— Brooke Shields, during an interview to become spokesperson for federal anti-smoking campaign .
“Half this game is ninety percent mental.”
–Philadelphia Phillies manager, Danny Ozark
“It isn’t pollution that’s harming the environment. It’s the impurities in our air and water that are doing it.”
–Al Gore, Vice President
“We’ve got to pause and ask ourselves: How much clean air do we need ?”
–Lee Iacocca
“The word “genius” isn’t applicable in football. A genius is a guy like Norman Einstein.”
–Joe Theisman, NFL football quarterback & sports analyst.
The Inaugural ICT Industry Xmas Event
http://tinyurl.com/3dnnyq
Brought to you by CollabIT (an AIIA & Vic Govt initiative) inconjunction with Enterprise Java, ACS, Vic ICT for Women, ITS Aust. & AIMIA
Join in a great fun evening December 5th, from 4:30pm to 8:30 pm
Bowls, BBQ Dinner and Drinks at Fitzroy Lawn Bowls Club.
A good fun Lawn Bowls Face Off between the various ICT Industry Associations will take place on the Lawns of the Fitzroy] Lawn Bowls Club on Wednesday 5th December, 2007. Great networking opportunities, great entertainment and prizes,
so register your team of 4 today, or register yourself as an individual player and you will be matched up into a team of 4. You do not need to know how to play lawn bowls to participate. AIIA and CollabIT will be launching the CollabIT Industry Event Calendar at this event. This resource has been created to provide one central repository where you can list and find ICT events and information. As such, the calendar will provide ICT associations and groups with the opportunity to see ‘what’s on’ within the industry at any given time and hence, assist in planning of future events. The event calendar will also provide small and large associations with a useful tool which can be used to collaborate on events. In short, the CollabIT Industry Event Calendar will bring people together and improve networking.
Date: Wednesday, 5 December, 2007
Time: 4:30pm to 8.30pm – Includes BBQ dinner & drinks
Venue: Fitzroy Lawn Bowls Club
Cost: 578 Brunswick Street, North Fitzroy
Register: Members $60.00, Non Members $85.00
* Members rates apply to members of any of the participating
associations
Register online at: www.gener8.com.au/bowlit.asp
or contact Gener8 on ph) 03 9018 9095 or email
registrations@gener8.com.au
Amazon’s new electronic book, the Kindle, was released just in time to make it on holiday gift lists. The product has been derided by some reviewers as ugly and overpriced. Both of which it is. But the Kindle is an important product for Amazon and for publishing, since it represents a potential game changer in how we acquire content to read. The Kindle is also a Web-access device–in fact, it’s the only wireless device I know of that comes with a free (well, after you buy it and the content, too) EVDO data connection. It can display blogs and newspapers. But, bizarrely, you have to pay for each blog you want to read on it.
Amazon’s Kindle, the new electronic book reader (hands-on first look), is not just a device for reading paperless books and newspapers. It’s also an ecosystem for writers who want to publish their works without dealing with publishers or vanity presses or other middlemen.
Read more…
Twine is a new Web 2.0 service for managing all your information, using your social network and built-in intelligence to auto-tag all your stuff.
With Twine, people collect different pieces of information in a single place and let other people add to that collection. People can e-mail items into Twine, bookmark Web pages, or upload documents. To add tags, people fill in a form.
The software is smart enough to create tags itself after mining through the content, which can be text, audio or video. It also taps into the collective knowledge of Wikipedia to categorize information.
Read the review.
