Say chowder out loud: chowder. The word sounds like food. Not an appetizer either. An entree in a small crock topped with broken crackers.
As with so many things related to food, chowder is a storied dish.

A quick fyi. The Great Courses (formerly The Teaching Company) is offering 70% off every course again today. It’s Cyber Monday Part II. If you’re not familiar with it, the company provides an amazing service. They travel across the U.S., recording great professors lecturing on great topics that will appeal to any lifelong learner.

We thought that Brazenhead Books might qualify as the quirkiest bookstore we’ve encountered. After all, it’s run out of Michael Seidenberg’s apartment in New York City.

In a 2010 poll, Salvador Dalí’s facial hair was voted the most famous moustache of all time. The flamboyant moustache was part of his schtick, there’s no denying that. But some have assigned a deeper meaning to it.

Ever want to know how to bend spoons like Uri Geller? There are quite a few ways, apparently. But according to Geller’s arch-nemesis, skeptic and magician James Randi, “if Geller bends spoons with divine powers, then he’s doing it the hard way.

In 1955 Bela Lugosi was in a sad state. The once-handsome, Hungarian-born star of Dracula had seen his career degenerate over the previous two decades until at last he was reduced to playing a cruel parody of himself in some of the tackiest B horror films ever made. Along the way he picked up a drug habit.

When I first heard that 43-year old Austrian daredevil and former military parachutist Felix Baumgartner would be jumping 128,000 feet from space, my immediate reaction was, “What? Why?!” Because why would anyone do that? And I assumed it was all some macho stunt to promote Red Bull, his corporate sponsor, which isn’t entirely unfounded.

“Epic Tea Time with Alan Rickman” comes from a video series called Portraits in Dramatic Time, which features “an array of glacially paced performances of theater artists and actors.

Perhaps you remember the short animated film, I Met the Walrus. It revisits the moment when Jerry Levitan, a 14-year-old kid, slipped into John Lennon’s Toronto hotel room in 1969 and asked the Beatle for an interview. And he got one. The film provides all the proof you need.
Now here’s a nice companion story.

It has been said that ”the true voice of [Hunter S.] Thompson is revealed to be that of American moralist … one who often makes himself ugly to expose the ugliness he sees around him.” That ugliness served its literary and journalistic purpose, no doubt.