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give peas a chance (sorry)

While in Squamish I developed a … habit… of eating wasabi peas. In Canada they came in huge bins in the Save on Food supermarkets (which have huge bins of pretty much everything, and are a fantastic invention).

I have been unable to find any local wasabi pea sources. I need more wasabi peas! I miss the recoil of having eaten a pea with too much wasabi paste on it… I even miss licking the wasabi crumbs off my fingers, and shuddering after every one – it burns, yet it’s so good. Curse you all! Find me some wasabi peas.

wasabi peas
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cromulent postings

Wikipedia is a fantastic source of useless (and useful) information. After an entertaining read of made up words in the Simpsons, I read the tomacco page….

In 2003, inspired by The Simpsons, Rob Baur of Lake Oswego, Oregon successfully grafted a tomato plant onto the roots of a tobacco plant, which was possible because both plants come from the same family, Solanaceae or nightshade, and furthermore both plants are dicotyledons. (It is not possible to graft monocotyledons, because the xylem and the phloem are distributed in bundles throughout the stem, and therefore it is impossible to align the vascular tissues of the two plants.)

Baur suspected that the normal looking tomato that resulted may have contained a lethal amount of nicotine, however testing gave it the all clear (although the leaves of the plant did contain nicotine) – where’s the fun in that?

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ten pin bowling potential

Fainting goats have developed the most stupid evolutionary trait imaginable. This is the sort of animal that creationists will point to to demonstrate that Darwinism is a load of cobblers.

“Oh, what’s that? A lion? I think I’ll have a lie down.”

The video under the link explains it all, but basically, due to a genetic condition (myotonia congenita) the goats legs stiffen when they’re suprised or over-excited. Often leading to them falling over. Apparently shepherds used to include them in herds with their sheep as wolf fodder. Now they’re being bred for novelty value. Poor goats.

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have you ever…?

Team procrastination brings you the inauagural climbing purity test. 100 questions – the turmoil, the excitement, can you possibly make your way to the end?

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an exciting glimpse into the world of chartered accountancy

One of the other Australians in the climbing group was farewelled in style, as I discovered that climbing fibreglass poles barefoot can lead to friction burns. Two days later I discovered that climbing offwidth cracks in an indoor gym leads to removal of skin (I suspect this rule applies to outdoor offwidth cracks as well, although I may have to test this theory in person). These incidents have combined to lead to painful stinging shower experiences.

For the non-climbers: an offwidth crack is one too wide to wedge hands inside and too narrow to wedge one’s body inside – the style required to climb such a thing is best described as ‘interesting’.

poleocean

Meanwhile, newsflash, I have a new way to entertain myself as work – planarity. I just finished level 11. It’s not very exciting. Nothing gets blown up. And I might even concede that it’s just a little bit geeky. Yet strangely addictive.