Journalist Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food along with four previous books, spoke at Google last month as part of their Authors@Google series. The video of his talk is up on YouTube and it’s incredible.

So compelling (and practical) was his talk that I rushed out to purchase his book immediately and it’s been worth every penny. In a world that has constantly conflicting scientific reports on nutrition, a government that issues shifting guidelines oftentimes in response to politics rather than data, and supermarkets filled with food-like products rather than food, how are we to know what to eat? And why in the world would we even have to ask such a seemingly silly question?

Pollan addresses and answers these questions and more in his book while also giving us – in seven words no less – very practical advice on eating and staying healthy.

Many thanks to all who turned out for the book signing this past weekend at Borders Books in central PA. Not only did we have a capacity crowd, the store also sold out of their entire stock of the book!

The current edition of Ripley’s Believe It Or Not will soon go off the shelves to make room for the upcoming edition, so if you’d like to see me at a store near you, make sure you drop me a line soon or have your bookstore contact me!

The Take a Picture, Get a Poster promotion is still running, but again, if you want to participate you better do so quickly, as the book won’t be around much longer!
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A collection of persistent mistakes and fraudulent facts from the world’s most popular reference work.

How many times have you found yourself in a lovely yet heated discussion, feeling that you might be making some headway with your argument, only to hear the following dreaded phrase - “Weeeelll, according to Wikipedia…” - followed by a stream of apocryphal facts and sources?

Forget for a moment the questionable prudence in citing an encyclopedia as a source – after all, we all turn to it as a quick reference now and again – but with mistakes so rampant, bias so pronounced and (despite Wikipedia’s best policy efforts) the actual real world practice of scholarly correction so spotty, how can we in good conscience trust the trivia that comes spewing forth from the Grand Collaboration?

side note: I have direct experience with the sketchy nature of Wikipedia. A good friend’s well-researched entry was once removed with no explanation and replaced with a poorly written and terribly inaccurate 14 year old girl’s entry (still active), while one of my own original entries became a marketing platform for my competitors – still uncorrected years later.

Appearing in the Boston Globe on Sunday (link via boston.com) was a wonderful article by Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law at Yale and author of Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have Given Up on the Meaning of Life.

The article explored - as presumably does the book - the reasons for which exploration of the most important questions in life have been abandoned by virtually all modern colleges and universities.

In a shift of historic importance, America’s colleges and universities have largely abandoned the idea that life’s most important question is an appropriate subject for the classroom. In doing so, they have betrayed their students by depriving them of the chance to explore it in an organized way, before they are caught up in their careers and preoccupied with the urgent business of living itself. This abandonment has also helped create a society in which deeper questions of values are left in the hands of those motivated by religious conviction - a disturbing and dangerous development.

Since becoming quite addicted to The West Wing television series, I’ve been finding it easier and easier to bring my laptop to bed with me to watch episodes of my favorite television shows as I fall asleep. Unfortunately, this has been slowly displacing my life-long routine of reading before bed and I’m feeling a bit, well, guilty.

For some reason I suspect that the X-Files, Star Trek:TNG and Red Dwarf just do not stack up - in the good-for-personal-betterment sense - against the usual diet of philosophy and science reading to which I’m accustom. Sure, I’ve been able to catch up on all the episodes of QI - and that has to count for something - but even ingesting the wisdom of the comics has left this lingering feeling that I’ve somehow become lazy.

Almost a full three weeks ahead of the originally scheduled date, the new Ripley’s Believe It Or Not: The Remarkable… revealed book is now on bookstore shelves everywhere.

I popped in to a Borders Books to see if I could sneak a peek at my own entry in the text, and sure enough, there on the shelf was a stack of at least 15, face-forward, fresh copies of the book.

A quick look revealed that my full-page pictorial complete with full text entry appears in the section entitled Fantastic Feats, and as the editorial staff promised, it’s a great looking layout to accompany a great looking, extremely visual book.

My thanks go to the Ripley’s staff for featuring me this year, and to all of the readers and fans who continue to encourage the work. And a thank you to my good friend Scott for taking the extremely candid and casual photo of me in the bookstore.

Last year while browsing at my local Borders bookstore, one new release leaped off the shelf and caught my attention: Eat This Book A Year of Gorging and Glory on the Competitive Eating Circuit.

The title and design alone are enough to make anyone take notice – what an odd subject – and though I wouldn’t normally consider myself interested in the topic, I nevertheless found myself interested in this book. A later interview with the author by Jon Stewart on The Daily Show further increased my interest in the work.

Little did I know (it only took me a year to get around to reading it!) that the author, Ryan Nerz – a freelance journalist and emcee of competitive eating events – actually cited me in this text! It’s always fun to find references to me and my work by happenstance, but in a book on competitive eating was the last place that I expected to do so!

Cryonics – the act of cryopreserving human remains for possible future resuscitation – is the subject of a new …wait for it… children’s book.

Though the practice of cryonics has been going strong for forty years now and has seen treatment – however scientifically unsound those treatments have been – in several Hollywood movies and many books, never has it been featured as a central part of a children’s storybook with an eye towards being both engaging from a story-standpoint as well as accurate scientifically.

Nonetheless, this is precisely what author Shannon Vyff attempts with her new children’s book 21st Century Kids. As a cryonicist and Alcor member herself, Ms. Vyff may be uniquely positioned to write an accurate portrayal of the scientific basis of cryonic suspension for an audience of young readers, but one question remains – should she?

Wandering through a small bookstore in Burlington, Massachusetts when I was a mere fifteen years old, I stumbled by sheer happenstance across an intriguing book that prove to be the most influential text of my formative teenage years, and which would lead me to untold intellectual treasures in the years to come.

Little did I know that I had picked up a Pulitzer Prize-winning text, nor did I anticipate that this bit of writing would continue to influence me so profoundly over the years that it would make itself known everywhere from my many college papers (and arguably my entire college education) to my music and, well over a decade later, my stage and theater work.

The title of this text? Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid (Basic Books, 1979) by Douglas Hofstadter.

Kurt Vonnegut, whose dark comic talent and urgent moral vision in novels like “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and “God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater” caught the temper of his times and the imagination of a generation, died last night in Manhattan. He was 84 and had homes in Manhattan and in Sagaponack on Long Island.

Mr. Vonnegut suffered irreversible brain injuries as a result of a fall several weeks ago, according to his wife, Jill Krementz.

FULL NEW YORK TIMES ARTICLE HERE

UPDATE: April 12th, 12:34 pm - Posts about Vonnegut’s death started appearing this morning over on BoingBoing. The original announcement is here, while readers have been sending in more information, updates and tributes that can be viewed here.

Holiday activities this past weekend left me with an abundance of brightly colored hard-boiled eggs and not a clue as to what to do with them all. So in the grand tradition of Woody Allen, I set out on a search for the world’s perfect egg salad recipe.

My palate being the decidedly adventurous that it is, combined with the fact that these eggs are more than the mere boring white variety, not just any recipe would do. Instead of your run-of-the-mill American egg salad, I discovered this little gem via the Rachel’s Bite blog, courtesy of Marcus Samuelsson’s The Soul of a New Cuisine: A Discovery of the Foods and Flavors of Africa.

Spiced Egg Salad (4 servings) 1/4 cup olive oil, divided 1/4 cup unsalted blanched dry-roasted peanuts 1 bird’s eye chili, seeds and ribs removed, finely chopped 2 small red onions, finely chopped 3 garlic cloves, minced 1 tablespoon paprika 1/2 teaspoon ground ginger 1 1/2 teaspoons chili powder 5 hard-boiled eggs, peeled and chopped 2 tomatoes, chopped 2 teaspoons chopped cilantro 1 tablespoon soy sauce Juice of 1 lime 1/2 teaspoon salt

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

CONTACT
Roderick Russell
ph: 646-285-5229
fax: 866-705-3503
roderick@roderickrussell.com
www.roderickrussell.com

Roderick Russell Featured in Upcoming Ripley’s Publication

Ripley’s Believe It Or Not and Ripley Entertainment have just announced that they will be featuring world-record holding sword swallower Roderick Russell in it’s upcoming fall of 2007 publication entitled Ripley’s Believe It or Not: The Remarkable…revealed.

Set for inclusion are several photographs, including x-ray images, of Mr. Russell in the act of swallowing swords. One of a mere fifty active sword swallowers remaining in the world, Roderick is the only performing artist presenting this unique and rare art form while dancing a tango.

With a tentative publication date of August 7, 2007, The Remarkable…revealed can be pre-ordered now through Amazon.com.

# Hardcover: 256 pages
# Publisher: Ripley Publishing (August 7, 2007)
# Language: English
# ISBN-10: 1893951227
# ISBN-13: 978-1893951228

Dining establishments distinguish themselves in numerous ways; from the mundane and expected methods of hosting famous chefs, serving top-notch gourmet dishes and offering impeccable service, to those unusual establishments that set themselves apart by virtue of their unique and off-beat marketing approaches. Toronto’s cosplay-themed iMaid Cafe (slashfood review here) and Bradenton, Florida’s Linger Lodge, which features such treats as Guess That Mess - their meat is “so fresh, you can still see the tire tracks” - are two great examples of the latter. Though I certainly have a penchant for the unusual and decidedly bizarre (just look at what I do for a living), one restaurant that is particularly close to my heart is the much more reserved, though always delightful, Traveler Food and Books.

It’s approaching the end of the year and I’m clearing out the remaining limited stock of my book Confessions of a Renaissance Faire Sword Swallower.

This pitch book is a 42 page, 8.5″ x 5.5″, saddle stitched document containing a short history of the art of sword swallowing and lengthy interviews with yours truly wherein I discuss my position on this ancient and dying art, my philosophy of performance and other particulars too numerous too name. Also featured are photographs of me performing this feat, along with x-rays and miscellaneous photographs of other acts that I perform such as escapes and fire breathing.

These books are typically only offered in-person at live events, but I need to clear room for more material that is set to arrive, so you folks get to be the lucky recipients of this offer.

Though entirely unintentional, the short list of articles found on this blog seem to feature a high incidence of “sex in classical music” entries. I have yet to create an entire entry dedicated solely to the subject, but embedded in other articles the reader will find references to the sexual appeal of such musicians as Lara St. John, a link to a humorous - if disturbing - website called Beauty in Music (which is not surprisingly lacking in said beauty), links to articles that discuss the topic of overt sexuality in the classical music industry and at least one title of an article which should have elicited chuckles from all appreciative and even slightly cynical readers.Why the preoccupation with sexuality in classical music? I’m certain that I don’t know. Hints to the cause may be found throughout the other articles, but when it comes down to it, the secret and sordid life of bohemian musicians as contrasted with the conservative stance of many of their public and the historically prim and proper marketing and image of the industry can not help but be interesting. It is a remarkably fascinating dichotomy that sheds light on several aspects of social and interpersonal psychology and plays to our inherent love of secret and sophisticated perversion. Which brings me to the topic of today�s entry: A new book by former oboist Blair Tindall entitled Mozart in the Jungle: Sex, Drugs, and Classical Music.