Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere
Just completed Neverwhere. It was given to me for my birthday last year, by my wife. This novel was darker than Stardust - the first novel of Gaiman I read, but it nevertheless bore some resembalance to it. This time, it's not some sleepy village that's serving as a portal to another world - this time it's London. And the world is bellow London. It's a dark, and terrible place, where horrors and death is the norm. It's also inhabited by some really fantastic creatures, and stories. It's a place where time operates differently. It's a place where myths come to life. It's a place where a quest will be started. It's a place where a mad angel has been imprisoned, and it seeks to escape to bring heaven's downfall. There - I've probably given away too much, but it's a great book that you'll get hooked on anyway!
The first chef
First came fire ... and then, as the camera shifts to the soon to be late-village idiot, you're left wondering -- just what was going through that mind -- and food is put on the fire, for the first time, and cooking is accidentally discovered by humanity. The first chef is ridiculed by grunts, then the local thug tries a sample of the burnt carcass, and soon, everybody gets queued at the McDonalds drive-thru. What happened? Richard Wrangham of Harvard believes there's more to cooking than evolutionary history would have you believe. Wrangham points out that there is no way homo sapiens could survive on just raw food. Raw food just doesn't give up calories as easily as cooked food -- and raw food makes the digestive system expend more energy to get at those calories. Cooking on the other hand breaks complex molecules down, allowing the digestive system to make easy work of them -- and cooking also softens food, allowing the body to get to the calories with less effort...
Comments
Post a Comment