Puso: Filipino Woven Rice Pouches

Very cool:

Puso are one of those incredibly perfect foods… boiled rice in a biodegradable package. It is nutritious, delicious, hygenic, easy to carry or transport, easy to open up, keeps the rice clean, can be brought out to the fields, a picnic, etc. And it doesn’t mess up any pots or pans or utensils when you cook them. All you need to master is the weaving process…simple, right? Of course the simplest looking things are often the most difficult to do. And of a dozen folks in our Cebu office, not one among them knew how to weave a puso container made out of coconut leaves or fronds. All admit to having eaten hundreds if not thousands of servings of rice purchased or cooked in this manner, but few had any clue how to make the little packages. It was time to call in an expert, and “Richard” (who made puso for a living) was asked to come to the office to teach me how to make a puso, ineschange for a modest “consulting” fee.

Link has many more photos of the weaving process.

Rogue & Poet

New Web site centered around the arts in the Rogue Valley. Good luck to them.

Blogging From the War

We live in a very strange world.

Colby Buzzell's blog: MY WAR.

Wiki.

Complete, Handwritten Darwin Online

From Darwin-Online.uk.org:

This site contains Darwin's complete publications, thousands of handwritten manuscripts and the largest Darwin bibliography and manuscript catalogue ever published; also hundreds of supplementary works: biographies, obituaries, reviews, reference works and more.

Great Moments in Fark Headlinery

Fark headline of the day award:

"A Cambridgeshire church has lost its 'Spitting Vicar'. The English language, however, has gained another euphemism for 'Penis."

Google, Qatar

Some curious person in Doha, Qatar googled the words "sexual positions pictures" and was, of course, led to a Long Tough Blog. Ahem. (The link was about Karl Rove and the Don Siegelman case.)

That allowed me to see Google, right to left.






"The History of the World": 1601

Cool collection of books online via the University of Chicago:

The first Booke containeth the Dedicatorie Epistle or Preface of the worke, addressed to Titus Vespasian the Emperour. Also the names of the Authors out of which he gathered the Historie, which he prosecuteth in 36 Bookes: togither with the Summarie of every Chapter: & beginneth, The Books, &c.




"They're Gonna Mock Us Out!"

Unbelievable. People are freaking out over the TUBES!

Then, alluding to the sometimes combative world of online media, they added there was “the real possibility that these letters, once released, would be published on the Internet and their authors discussed, even mocked, by bloggers.”

Why the worry about being published on "the internet"? They could be published in a newspaper, or a magazine, and be discussed, even mocked - but everything's different now, isn't it? People are discussing things, and we can see, watch, read them doing it in nearly real time. And a whole bunch of us can join in! And some people hate that.

It's fun to see.