Game Designer Dave Arneson on Slice of SciFi Show #151, Sat. Mar. 8, 2008
Be sure to join us online this Saturday, March 8, 2008 for Slice of SciFi Show #151 and again on March 10, 2008 on XM Satellite Radio?s…

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:17:17 EDT
recipe - podictionary 714
If I tell you that I am going to give you a recipe youll likely expect it to be for some delicious meal. I checked both with online newspapers and with a dictionary corpus and confirmed that this is pretty well the universal usage of the word recipe these days; the ingredients needed and how to prepare them for a meal. But if I say to you I have a recipe for a happy life youll think that I am extending the meaning of the word, making a metaphor. In fact it is the other way around chronologically, the recipes we use for cooking are so called because earlier meanings to the word fell away. In Latin the parent word was recipere and meant to take. About the time of William Shakespeares birth just over 400 years ago physicians would give written instructions on what to take to make a sick person better and would head the list with this Latin word. You still see a vestige of this at the pharmacy when you notice the pharmaceutical symbol Rx. Thats what that mysterious little Rx symbol actually means; it stands for the Latin parent of recipe and it literally means to take because these are the medicines you are supposed to take according to your doctor. Before recipes came to mean instructions for food preparation the meaning of recipe branched out from medical prescriptions to that metaphorical sense of a mix of things to achieve some end, such as an honest life as suggested in the 1643 citation from the Oxford English Dictionary; or a happy life as in my example. It wasnt until the mid 1700s that we have citations for cooking recipes. These early recipe mentions are perverse and frustrating. The first one—ostensibly for pastry—reveals on double-checking the source of the citation to be an extract from a poem ranting against another kind of poetry; saying that the poet would no sooner have copies of this poetry that he doesnt like—and has just tossed in the fire—than have recipes for pastry. I guess he was no cook. The next citation which comes from a 1775 book called Travels in Asia Minor in which the Turks are said to drink coffee in little china dishes, as hot as they could endure, as black as soot, and tasting not much unlike it. This coffee is compared to the black broth of the Spartans which is said to have been made with human blood and so—and this is where the recipe citation comes in—and so the epicure will not lament that the entire recipe has not reached us. The first citation (at least in the OED) that relates to real recipes comes in 1853 (although there must be examples before that) and it is worthy because it is from a work called The Pantropheon: or history of food and its preparation by Alexis Soyer. This reference thankfully closes the circle since it relates to pastry recipes. Soyer was a kind of culinary superstar in the England of the Victorian age. He cooked for kings and queens and for the 1851 London exhibition he opened something he called the Gastronomic Symposium of all Nations which was not only a restaurant serving a thousand people a day, but a kind of early theme park as well. The Royal Navy was killing sailors with its food and asked Soyer to investigate; he also wrote helpful guides for housewives. But behind all the glitter things werent quite simmering properly. His Gastronomic Symposium ended up thousands of pounds in debt and all his flashy activity didnt leave him as much time as hed like for other pursuits, so although that Pantropheon history of food stands in old libraries with his name on it, he actually just bought a French version and translated it, sticking his own name on as the author. This gives a whole new meaning to recipere to take. I also wanted to mention that at the podictionary website every blog entry ends with a little green button marked share this. If you click it, it allows you to email the article to a friend or to add it to one of the social networks such as Facebook or Google bookmarks.

Fri, 29 Feb 2008 00:01:38 EST
(WWE) Interesting Move by Dish Network for Royal Rumble (The Wrestling News Page)
Was watching both the Canadian Bell Expressvu and American Dish Network feeds of the Royal Rumble, and noticed a very interesting difference between the two feeds.

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 12:06:17 GMT
Open Question: Samsung Helix XM Radio use in the car?
I would like to purchase the Helix, but I’ve heard questionable feedback on it. Main uses for it would be at my work, (some rooms with windows, others without) At the Gym, In my apartment (can it hook up to speakers?) and in the car.
I was on XM’s website and there is a car cradle available that has “wireless FM frequencies” but I want to be clear that I won’t have to drill into the dashboard or wire the radio, that I can just play the XM through a blank radio station, im sure predetermined by the manufacturer? HELP!!
Thanks everyone!!

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 17:59:56 GMT
From PVRblog - Wild rumor: DirecTV reps claiming TiVo coming to DirecTV DVRs
A friend of mine also named Matt recently canceled his cable and went with DirecTV. During the signup process he said two reps claimed TiVo software was coming to DirecTV boxes in a couple months. I asked Matt for clarification? Read more? From…

Sun, 04 Nov 2007 21:18:01 GMT

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