While surfing around, I found some interesting material I thought you folks might enjoy:
  • How Lisa Came to Israel, Part 6: Back in January, I pointed you to Lisa's blog, which had the first five installments of the story of how she ended up moving from Canada to Israel. She's been busy, but at last Part 6 has been posted! In case you missed them, she's posted links to earlier installments.

  • Someone beat Vanilla Ice to that rhyming couplet! Deenster writes about a song she learned at the Hasidic day camp she went to when she was very young:
    All the animals that we eat
    must chew their cud and have split feet
    but kosher meat just can't be beat
    i want kosher meat to eat!

    So...Take your ham and take your bacon
    i won't eat themyou're mistaken
    I'm a Jew and I'm not fakin'
    I want Kosher meat to eat!
    The "bacon / fakin'" rhyme sounded familiar, and moments later, it dawned on me: years (probably decades) after the song above was written, we got Vanilla Ice's Ice Ice Baby:
    Now that the party is jumping
    With the bass kicked in and the vegas are pumpin'
    Quick to the point to the point no faking
    I'm cooking MC's like a pound of bacon
    In honour of these songs, here's a little stanza I wrote called "Asian Dietary Rules":
    If it's got four legs and isn't the table
    Cook it and eat as long as you're able
    That also reminds me of Dizzy Gillespie's Hey Pete, Let's Eat More Meat [Windows Media sample | RealAudio sample].

  • Liz "mamamusings" Lawley's Video Game Store Lament. After a terrible experience getting a PlayStation 2 for her son at the local video game store, Liz came up with an interesting idea:
    Sometimes I think that what I ought to do is open up the ultimate gaming spot geared towards parents as well as their kids. There’s not much out there that targets tweens, really. The hands-on museums are for the younger set. The game stores and arcades are more for the teenagers (and the parents hate being there). So why not create a place that tweens will love, and that their parents won’t mind taking them?
    One of the projects we're working on here at the Research and Innovation department of Tucows is games, so this sort of this is interesting and relevant to my work. I'll write more about it in the upcoming weeks.

  • Somebody actually tried it! Julie Leung read my posting about deep-fried Oreos and actually made them. (Yeah, it's a post from a while back, but I've meaning meaning to point to it for so long.)