Cordon-Blew a Fuse (June 3, 2021)
My junior high school Spanish club took a field trip to the Spanish embassy in Washington, DC, where we met with some low-level functionary who was delegated to engage with 20 or so uninterested 13- and 14-year-olds whose only mastery of the language was the ability to ask: ¿Dónde está el baño? Afterward, we went to a pricey Spanish restaurant for lunch, where our teacher encouraged us to order paella, the country’s national dish. Most of us opted for una hamburguesa — but if the paella had been prepared by a robot, we might have been more interested in trying it:
Since it was unveiled at a hospitality industry fair last month, the world’s first robotic paellero has been causing a bit of a stir. Set the programme, load the sofrito, rice, stock and seafood, leave it alone and the robotic arm, which is hooked up to a computerised stove, will do the rest…
[Engineer and entrepreneur Enrique Lillo] said he had been surprised at how good the finished dish was – right down to the crunchy crust, or socarrat – when he first tried it.
All too often, said Lillo, easily distracted humans just get it wrong.
[Read more here: https://bit.ly/2SWRTtf]
The same teacher organized a trip to Spain that summer, in conjunction with the high school Spanish club. I was fortunate enough to be able to go, impressing Spaniards with my mastery of bathroom-centric requests in their native tongue. That was probably because of all the suspect hamburguesas I insisted on eating throughout the visit.
Marching Madness (June 4, 2021)
Although I saw stories about this elephantastic episode just in the past week, apparently this group has been on the loose for over a year:
A herd of elephants that packed its trunks for an unexpected 500km (300 mile) trek has arrived at a Chinese city where millions of people live.
The 15 elephants have been hoovering up crops and poking their noses through doors on the march from the south of Yunnan province to its capital Kunming…
Stories abound, including of one elderly man who the Jimu News channel said had hidden under his bed in his retirement home as trunks were poked into rooms.
At least one elephant got drunk on fermented grain in a report that is - naturally - quite difficult to confirm.
And more than $1m (£710,000) worth of crops has been pilfered along the way. Fortunately, no one has been injured.
[Read more here: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-57348255]
I will take this opportunity to share my favorite elephant joke:
Why don’t elephants ride tricycles? Because they don't have a pinky finger to ring the bell.
I know another lengthier (and quite profane) elephant joke — feel free to contact me directly if you want to hear that one.
Construction continues apace on our renovation project — this week we had carpenters, plumbers and the electrician all on-site at the same time. Next week: new roof! I’ll be lucky if I can form one coherent thought… but will make a valiant effort to stay on top of the news and come up with some new verses.
Have a great week!
JB