[seven dishes] designed to churn the stomach

Seven foods which really make you marvel at man's mind:

1] Cало: A top entry in the competition would have to be Russian Sala, where fatty pork, replete with blood and jellied, wobbly, oozing gristle is lovingly served with delicious sauteed vegetables.

2] Tripe: It's a type of edible offal made from the stomach of various domestic animals. Beef tripe is typically made from the first three of a cow's four stomach chambers, the rumen (blanket/flat/smooth tripe), the reticulum (honeycomb and pocket tripe), and the omasum (book/bible/leaf tripe). Abomasum (reed) tripe is also seen, but with much less frequency, owing to its glandular tissue content.

3] Black Pudding: It's a sausage made by cooking blood with a filler until it is thick enough to congeal when cooled. Black pudding can be eaten uncooked but is often grilled or boiled in its skin.

4] Frog's legs: Only the upper joint of the hind leg is served, which has a single bone similar to the upper joint of a chicken or turkey wing. They are commonly prepared by frying or deep-frying, sometimes breaded and sometimes unbreaded.

5] Sheep's brains … I can't go on any longer.

6]

7]

[fishy stories] of halibut, tin cans and mobile toilets

Iceland Review banner shamelessly stolen from their site. Who do they think they're kidding with this summer fields business?

Never let it be said that this blog never brings you cutting edge news. Iceland Review informs us, in that quaint way which only they seem able to manage:

The crew of Gudmundur í Nesi recently caught a fish that appeared to be wearing tribal jewelry around its neck. After a more detailed examination it was determined that the necklace was in fact a tin can.

“This Greenland halibut must have looked down into a tin can on the ocean floor out of curiosity at some point,” Gunnar Gunnarsson, an employer at the fish processing plant Brim who received the strange fish, told Fréttabladid.

Gunnarsson said the fishermen, who had caught the halibut, first thought the tin can looked like tribal jewelry they had seen in history books. It had a rusty golden color and it appeared as if the halibut had worn it around its neck for a long time.

“The tin can had partly grown into its flesh,” Gunnarsson explained. He said these days nothing is supposed to be thrown into the ocean, but evidently tin cans are sometimes tossed overboard, which is dangerous for fish. Gunnarsson said the halibut would not end up in stores.

Name me one mainstream newspaper which would bring you that story. Meanwhile, the Age reports that:

Britons accidentally flush 885,000 mobile phones down the toilet each year, according to new research. The phones fall out of pockets or into the toilet after being placed on the toilet-roll holder.

Just tell me - have you ever accidentally flushed yours down the loo?

[blogpower] voting has started has started

If you get a chance, either visit Blogpower [banner top left] or hit one of these links to take you to the polling. 19 and 20 aren't yet ready:

1 Best Britblog or Column

2 Best North American Blog or Column

3 Best Blog or Column outside North America and the U.K.

4 Best Fisker

5 Best Ranter

6 Best Political Blog or Column

7 Best Blogpower Blog or Column

8 Best Layout and Style

9 Best Blog Name

10 Best Little Blogger [i.e. under 100 uniques a day]

11 Most Articulate Wordsmith

12 Most Under-rated Blog or Column

13 Most Over-rated Blog or Column

14 Most Politically Incorrect Blog or Column

15 Most Sadly Missed Blog or Column

16 Most Consistently Entertaining Blog or Column

17 Prettiest or Tastiest Blog or Column [refers to food or domestic bloggers]

18 Award for Services to Blogging

19 Best Post of All Time

20 Most Unintentionally Humorous post

[beauty] and blogpower

How long till I post something decent again?

Right after I get the last poll up over at Blogpower. Sometime this evening, hopefully.

Meantime, some people have been unkind enough to think that my little guy in the pic [top left] looks a bit dorky.

I don't really look like that, of course.

I actually look like this [lower right]. Handsome little chap, aren't I?

[msm commenters] wot us illit ... lit ... er ... wottev'va

Not everything is as it seems. Predictable MSM blast here by James Farmer, of The Age but this time not at the bloggers themselves:

Comment is twee

I am utterly sick of blog comments. Honestly, I've had enough.

Enough of the flaming, the trolling, the moderation, the spam, the 'who's-got-more' syndrome, the inanity and the sheer stupidity behind allowing them on sites like theage.com.au.

They devalue our content, insult much of our readership, piss off our advertisers, waste massive amounts of our time and place us at an enormous legal risk.

They're also perhaps the least web-savvy thing we, as a large media organisation, should be doing. They're yesterday's online communication forums, they're twee.

This, needs revisiting. Let's get rid of them now.

Thing is - this blogger half agrees with James Farmer. I've seen the comments on my own site and on my fellow bloggers' and the worst they get is incorrect but still readable. But at the newspaper just mentioned, you just need to look at any regular lifestyle column and the illiteracy of the average commenter is staggering:

Not so fast: a lot of 'splaining to do when your teenage son finds it accidentally. "Ewwww" he says.... [Migs is a bit sheepish at June 6]

puts up hand*...ooook...i'll join yours then...[ecboy under a thumb at June 5]

what do I tell you people....research, research research practise, practise an then some … [KARMA at June 6]

*whisper* just between you & i, bornagirl...it's only to keep the peace...i'm not surrendering...[ecboy keeping the peace at June 6]

Tea spluttering out the nose moment, here.Yes, where do you keep it, flightless bird? It's a bit like 'where to put the jewelery' - every place you think of you imagine a burglar finding easily… [bornagirl at June 6]

Rivetting stuff. I don't know how James Farmer finds the exchange above incoherent, near-illiterate and pitched at the lowest common denominator. The pathos is moving and the creative use of the written word poetic.

Bloody MSM snob!

[rest their souls] v-line crash

I'm not going to say one word about Connex.