Tuesday, November 29, 2005

Skein

Who uses it: The editors of Variety
What it means: A TV series
How you can use it: To describe a long story.

I see how you get the word "flick" for moving picture, because the image does flicker on the screen, but "skein" for series takes some imagination. I'm guessing the metaphor is of a spool of yarns, but does anyone know for sure?

Temperatures rose enough last night to make the trip to Portland easy, especially since I wasn't driving. The Bragdons and the Lechners officially closed my week of birthday celebrations by taking me to dinner at Restaurant Oolong, which I highly recommend. For the record, ginger is a good flavor for ice cream, and an even better flavor for creme brulee.

Here's a continuing puzzle, though: if Asian cuisine has beef (and they do -- we had an excellent Vietnamese beef-and-watercress dish, and I was sorry to skip over the Korean short ribs), why don't they use any milk? I get that temperatures are too high to allow them to store dairy products, but that's not true in the mountain regions, and parts of Japan and China and Korea have very cold climates. It's true that many Asians are lactose-intolerant, but which came first -- the lactose intolerance, or the fact that dairy isn't part of the Asian diet?

Unless, of course, you count crab rangoon, which Anna ordered last night after mocking it as a British colonial perversion of Asian cooking. The British haven't exactly made huge contributions to world cuisine, so I don't mind giving them crab rangoon, particularly since I myself don't eat it.

3 comments:

Anna said...

There's no crab in Crab Rangoon, Ellen. Yet another reason to mock the British. I should have told you that last night. Twouldn't have been fair of us to order seafood at your birthday celebration!

Ellen Clair Lamb said...

No way... are you kidding? I need to look this up!

Anonymous said...

that's hilarious--I keep thinking of a guy we went to College with, who used to do this funny "come in Rangoon" radio joke while making tuning-knob motions with his hands--but always pretending to do it on someone's boobs...oh, how we laughed and laughed...
sorry...
Sue
(thank God there was no milk in the bird saliva soup)