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.