Author: John

Curro Claret: Combination Cutting Board / Bird Feeder. Cute. (via Kottke)

Strange Maps: Greek to Me. This is a little bit of a departure for the Strange Maps folks. In English we say something is “Greek” to us when we can’t understand it. It turns out that every language has an equvalent phrase, but substituting another language. For example, Greeks say something confusing sounds “Arabic”. Here’s…

A new pastry shop on Professor in Tremont: A Cookie & a Cupcake. 12 different cupcake types per day. $2.50 a cupcake. Check out the custom cake and cupcake pictures on their website. Posnanski: New words. This month’s candidates: Vegawalk, Gleng, and Volumate. There’s definitely a need for these! Channel 3: Polensek says the Convention…

Boston.com: Squeezed. Orange Juice is my favorite thing to drink. And “not-from-concentrate” juice is my favorite kind of orange juice. Alissa Hamilton’s written a book about the Orange Juice industry, “Squeezed: What You Don’t Know About Orange Juice,” due out in May from Yale University Press, which goes into great detail about how juice is…

The Cleveland Film Festival is coming up starting the 19th, and the film schedule is posted. We used to go to a ton of films every year. I can’t remember the last time we got over there. But I still like looking over the list of films. And by the way, Great Lakes Brewery is…

Crain’s:Forest City Enterprises cuts convention center/medical mart cost estimate. To under $400MM, or about $130MM less than their lowest previous estimate. This is completely predictable. Apparently $55MM of the reduction was due to “market condition price reductions” (because the economy’s so bad, I guess). Wouldn’t MMPI also be able to get those same kinds of…

NY Times: How Much Water Does Pasta Really Need? Not as much as you’d think. (via Kottke) Lance Knobel: A Book for Our Times.  Lance just finished reading the new Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky translation of War and Peace. Sounds like it might be worth trying out: Dear reader, if you haven’t read War…

Fish Fries! OK, it’s Lent. And among other more important things, Lent means Fish Fries. Here’s Channel 3’s list. Update: Here’s the Cleveland.Com/Plain Dealer List — much more complete. Here’s the Diocesan page, but there doesn’t seem to be much there yet.

Daily Routines: A blog about how various famous folks (such as CS Lewis, Winston Churchill, Fred Rogers, and Barack Obama) organize their time. What a great idea! NY Times: Tropicana Discovers Some Buyers Are Passionate About Packaging. Recently Tropicana switched from their traditional “Orange with a Straw in it” package design to a much more…

Bill Callahan: US Bancorp CEO: TARP was meant to fund bank takeovers all along. Very illuminating quotes from Richard Davis, the CEO of US Bank. Apparently US Bank is considered one of the most stable of the big banks. For example, see this. But if you follow Callahan’s blog, US Bank is constantly one of…