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Friday, May 18th, 2007

An Inconvenient Truth

Categories: [ TV/Cinema ]

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0497116/

© Imdb.com

This documentary features Al Gore (the same ex-next president of the U.S.) lecturing about global warming, interspersed with pictures and clips from different locations and various topics. Gore basically tries to convice americans that global warming is actually hapenning despite the claims of the current government, and shows various scientific proofs (CO2 levels in the atmosphere in the past 650,000 years, temperature levels over the same period…). He also explains the consequences of global warming on the natural disasters such as hurricanes (getting more powerful when passing over warmer sea) and drought (caused by higher evaporation due to higher temperatures), on the desynchronisation of the birth of baby birds and of caterpilars, their usual food, as well as the influence of the melting of ice crusts in Groenland and Antarctica on sea currents (especially the Gulf Stream), which could disappear if the sea gets colder because of more intensive melting of the ice. He also accuses the big corporations to try to hide the scientific results proving the existence of global warming, the same way the tobacco industry tried in the past to deny and hide the existence of a link between smoking and lung cancer. Finally, he gives some hints to the audience about what to do in order to produce less CO2, showing that the technologies are available but the U.S. refuse to use them, putting the country behind most other countries in the world on that matter, including China.

The movie was interesting, well built and easy to understand. I wonder though if Gore has a political agenda, because he's so many times pointing fingers at the current administration and its supporters.

[ Posted on May 18th, 2007 at 16:00 | no comment | ]

Banana-Parsley Milk Shake (TGRWT #2)

Categories: [ Cooking ]

tgrwt2

Food pairing is fun, because it looks absurd at first sight. Then you think about it, and it still seems improbable. Then you taste it, and… sometimes it's good, sometimes it's not ;)

This second edition of They Go Really Well Together started by Martin at khymos.org is now hosted by Tara at Should You Eat That?. This time, the goal is to associate banana with parsley. I did it with an obvious parsley enhanced banana milk shake.

Ingredients

  • 2 ripe bananas
  • 100g vanilla ice cream
  • about 5 dL milk
  • 5 cL fresh parsley

Preparation

Banana-Parsley_Milk_Shake

Peel and slice the bananas into a blender. Add the ice cream cut into small parcels (otherwise you might clog the blender) and the milk. Mix until smooth.

In a small and fast blender, chop the parsley. Add about 2 dL of milk shake, and mix until smooth.

Comment

It's foamy and creamy like any banana milk shake, but definitely much more green! The first attempt smelled and tasted obviously of banana and vanilla, with a hint of something else you can't recognize. The parsley then bursts out in the aftertaste.

In the second attempt I put a little less parsley (the leftovers of the bouquet, actually), and whereas it looked the same and tasted fine, the aftertaste was absent. I suppose numerous experiment and a precision scale (for weighing the parsley) would be necessary to be able to reproduce the recipe.

[ Posted on May 18th, 2007 at 11:29 | no comment | ]