This holiday season sales are down in just about every industry, except the craft industry. That’s right, in order to make their dollar count, consumers are turning from ready-made to handmade and bumping up the sales of stores like Michaels and Jo-Ann. I suppose you could count me among those jumping on the craft bandwagon. I’ve been beading for a little over two years now and mostly use the reserves in my bead stash, but occasionally, I’ll need to make a quick dash to the store to grab something I’ve run out of. I haven’t yet noticed the increased traffic at my favorite shopping spots, but if this report holds true, then none of them should be going out of business anytime soon.

Above, you can see the latest of my holiday creations, a necklace designed by me with beads from the Bead Fetish in Sacramento.

Long before the mainstream media started reporting on Barack Obama’s lunch menu, spam musubi was a favorite among Hawaii locals and Japanese Americans. I grew up watching my mom fry up the spam on the stove, and then we’d lay the marinated meat over a bed of rice, pile on some more carbs, and press it all down into the plastic mold. I’d take my ethnic version of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches to school for lunch and eagerly scarf it down. However, some of my friends could never get over the fact that I was eating spam.

But we are in a different age now. If America’s next president can come away from the glitz of Washington to enjoy a lunch of spam musubi, then all the elitists out there who think of spam as poor man’s food will have to think again. Moreover, with the economy the way it (and not likely to change anytime soon), what is more cost-effective than spam and rice (well, the dried seaweed might set you back a bit, but let’s not harp on the details)? Just in case you need one more push before you dive into the wonders of spam, I’ve conveniently included several links to spam musubi recipes down below:

spam musubi recipe from SeriousEats.com
spam musubi recipe from AllRecipes.com
spam musubi recipe from WhatsCookingAmerica.net.

Links courtesy of Huffingtonpost.com

Enjoy!

I knew when I confused my friend’s shout out of “I’m done!” for the popular brand of instant noodles, Indomie, that it was not just my stomach talking. A few Google searches later, my suspicions were confirmed when I came to this page hosted by the University of Cambridge. The following is a piece of text, commenting on letter order and word processing, which started circulating the Internet in 2003:

Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at Cmabrigde Uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteer be at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae the huamn mnid deos not raed ervey lteter by istlef, but the wrod as a wlohe.

If you didn’t get that, the text is supposed to read,

According to a researcher (sic) at Cambridge University, it doesn’t matter in what order the letters in a word are, the only important thing is that the first and last letter be at the right place. The rest can be a total mess and you can still read it without problem. This is because the human mind does not read every letter by itself but the word as a whole.

It is important to note that this isn’t entirely true. Since my background in Cognitive Science is rather weak, I won’t go into all the details, but one bit I found interesting in the analysis of the above claim was the idea that word shape influences reading. The typographer in me is inclined to believe this statement even before reviewing the hard evidence.

First let us revisit the offending text:

If we take away the swapped “M” and “N” and the “I” (since it only appears in “Indomie”), we can see the middle and ends of both words are visually identical.

Add in the fact that “M” and “N” are structurally similar and that the thin profile of the “I” tends to disappear when wedged between much blockier letters, and you do what I did, begin to see food in places where it doesn’t belong.

I was poking around the Style section of the NYTimes today and happened upon this delightful article, “Butter Holds the Secret to Cookies That Sing.” I’ve been baking a lot this past year, and in the process, I learned from my aunt that there is a reason why you keep the butter cold: Cold butter when set to bake releases pockets of air that form the structure of the baked good. Let the butter melt before you bake it, and you lose this added element and end up with cookies and crust that won’t hold together. So when the recipe says to cut in the butter, cut in the butter and don’t take a shortcut by melting it.

The NYTimes article addresses this baking principle as well as the intricacies of butter flavor:

Blind tastings by Dining section staff members and others found the differences among butters, European and American, to be pronounced. Some were waxy, some nutty, some grassy. Some seemed less greasy than others. Professionals like Mr. Bradley can taste many other flavor undertones in butter, some lovely and some not, including grass, flowers, whey, old cream, malt, must and weed. Some flavor differences come from cows’ feed. Others are acquired during processing.

Forget wine tasting. Let’s head out to the country and sample some butter!