Iceberg

Tim Hayward rediscovers the joys of iceberg lettuce. I won’t be doing that. There are no joys regarding iceberg lettuce, but there are some amusing comments that follow the posting here on the Guardian website:

They were created to withstand rail transportation and icebox storage and thus brought generations of thankful Americans a ready source of vegetable matter almost year round. The stuff could be shredded onto sandwiches, into hamburgers, formed a careless ‘garnish’ to a million boring dishes, had no polarising taste to speak of and allegedly contained less calories than you burned chewing it.

• HOW STRIKING: Year after year, there’s a place in Venezuela where lightning strikes are seen over and over and over:

For 140 to 160 nights out of the year, for 10 hours at a time, the sky above the river is pierced by almost constant lightning, producing as many as 280 strikes per hour. Known as the “Relampago del Catatumbo,” this lightning storm has been raging, on and off, for as long a people can remember.

Why? “One theory holds that ionized methane gas rising from the Catatumbo bogs is meeting with storm clouds coming down from the Andes, helping to create the perfect conditions for a lightning storm.”

• SNACKING: Two things here. First, an article about snacking, and second, the word trendologist:

The spread of snacking has been abetted by parental guilt, the much-lamented death of the family dinner, over-scheduled children. Kara Nielsen, a “trendologist” at the Center for Culinary Development, a brand development company in San Francisco, cites the proliferation of activities, from soccer to chess club to tutoring sessions, that now fill children’s afternoons.

Jason Kottke is impressed with the use of the quotation marks and asks, trendologist isn’t a “real” “job” is it?