Pesto, when done well, is great. But I have consumed far too many nasty pesto dishes to unequivocally recommend it.

This morning I got out of bed and I stepped onto something soft. I thought it was a sock but when I looked closer I realized it was a big nasty glob of cat fur. Why oh why did this apartment have to have hardwood floors? Carpet hid the fur so much better.

Hans Wehr is the best Arabic-to-English dictionary and I believe that this is the English-to-Arabic equivalent of Hans Wehr. The only thing that is kind of confusing is that I think it was designed for Arabic speakers who are trying to learn English, because significant portions of the explanatory material are in Arabic.

But on the plus side, this dictionary is huge and comprehensive and has cool little sections on famous people (if you have ever needed to correctly spell Nietzsche or Marx in Arabic it comes in handy!), Arabic proverbs, and Arabic words that have been loaned into English. I tend to use it in conjunction with Hans Wehr – looking up the word in the English-to-Arabic and then confirming with the Arabic-to-English that I’ve got the correct word for the meaning I want to express.

All Scrubs episodes are worth consuming but this one was particularly hilarious.

I have been trying to play this game for like 8 months now and I just keep getting tired of it, even though it is supposedly one of the greatest srpgs out there.

This is a fabulous book! Without resorting to bogus racialized arguments or fatalism, Diamond attempts to explain why some groups of humans have come to dominate other groups of humans throughout history.

Diamond demonstrates how environmental variables create opportunities and limit options for human sociaties in different places and times. Small, seemingly random things such as the relative protein content of wheat and corn or the availability of load-bearing animals make a difference in the paths that human societies have taken.

Diamond sucks you in and makes even the most obscure things intriguing (animal-borne parasites, anyone?). Everyone should read this book!

Granted, it has been a long time since I was forced to see this movie, but the whole thing left me with a bad taste in my mouth. I feel like it was some creepy male fantasy. All the brothers were in love with the same woman and it seemed like she just got passed around the family. Ugh. Creepy.

I was forced to read this novel in college for a course on religion and modern literature because my professor loved George Eliot. I despised the book at the time, but now I feel that I must re-read it in a non-academic setting. I have heard so many good things about it since college.

Although I enjoyed this book, I was often thoroughly confused. How does anyone come away from this book thinking that it is some magical story about love that never dies? Like Arethusa I found nearly all of the characters to be repugnant, both personally and in a moral sense. How is any of this even remotely romantic?

For a textbook, it is pretty good. A decent introduction to the history of the Islamic world from pre-Islam, covering the early Islamic community, Umayyads, Abbasids, Fatimids, Mongol invasions, Mamuluke Sultanate in Egypt…. Focus on political and military history, but it also has interesting digressions on culture and arts. Each chapter contains a list of futher reading for those interested. The only problem is that it is ridiculously expensive for something so general.