Dewitos, Thanksgiving regional dishes, some football nicknames, Chopin's heart, Interstellar

So the last post discussed Mt. Dew, and Bryan mentioned Dewitos. i'd heard something about Mt. Dew testing flavors of Doritos, but didn't put any thought into it. Turns out, they're taste-testing doritos-flavored soda, according to Snopes. (Oh, eww.)

In other articles mentioning Doritos, NPR's Monkey See blog writer Linda Holmes was sounding off on a recently NYTimes regional thanksgiving recipes piece in a recent post called "'Grape Salad Is Not Minnesotan, And Other Lessons In Cultural Mapmaking". Her response was hilarious and spot on. My own home state is represented by turkey tamales. Please, children, we don't even have turkey every Thanksgiving; some (awesome) years, my grandmother and mother take a break and my uncles barbeque ribs, or Dad'll fix a brisket. A dear friend and Kentucky native had a similar response to his home state's featured item:

 Bryan:  i've also never heard of pocket stuffing

which is apparently from ky

i think it's just from the one dude's grandma

Anyhow, something that i knew on an intellectual level but didn't consider in any depth was dressing. At home, it's always cornbread-based, which takes moisture well and ends up almost like a Thanksgiving polenta. Having mentioned that, too, to Bryan, he hadn't ever had cornbread dressing, and looked up an article about the regionalism of various recipes. " Turkey stuffing tells a story: It reveals a lot about who you are and where you're from. If you call it "stuffing," for example, you probably grew up north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Southerners tend to serve "dressing."   ". That sounds about right.

Here's a ridiculous info-gram about 'Habits of the World's Smartest People'.

Something else i had to google today was the backstory of the Buffalo Bills running back Anthony 'Boobie' Dixon. He's on my fantasy football team, and i find it odd that they don't use his given name on the roster. This article reports that the nickname stems from a Friday Night Lights character comparison, "

Dixon also explained his nickname, “Boobie,” which he got in college at Mississippi State.“It happened when I was a freshman in college,” he said. “The Friday Night Lights movie was coming out. I went out there my freshman year and I was balling and making plays and doing some of everything. All the players were calling me that. Coach Sylvester Croom at the time started calling me that and it just stuck.” James “Boobie” Miles was one of the lead characters in the movie. ". Also, since we're on the subject, Green Bay Packers Safety HaHa Clinton-Dix's given name is Ha'Sean, but his grandmother gave him the nickname, "

"My grandmother has been calling me that since I was a little kid, so just been a little kid thing," Clinton-Dix said. Does he like it? "I love it," he said. "Coach loves it. Everyone loves it, so HaHa, that’s what I go with."

Here is this story about the previously-secret recent exhumation of Frederic Chopin's heart (which lies in his native Poland, as the rest of him is in France, apparently smuggled back into Poland in what is probably a crystal jar of cognac, hidden under his sister's skirts). The line that drew my attention was, " "The spirit of this night was very sublime," said Tadeusz Dobosz, the forensic scientist on the team. ". He had what appeared to be a complicated love life according the wikipedia article, having broken an engagement from a Polish lady in his mid-20s, a complicated affair with French author George Sand, then a not-relationship relationship with a student, Jane Stirling, socialite and daughter of a Scottish Laird, who collected-by-purchase his entire estate upon his death, and " While there is no evidence they were lovers, she was often referred to, after Chopin's death, as "Chopin's widow" ". Wikipedia also reports that , " It has been claimed that the financial assistance said to have been provided by Jane Stirling and Katherine Erskine was actually from the Swedish soprano Jenny Lind, and that the Scottish sisters were simply a cover for Lind's anonymity. Their father's will left them only £300, which was by no means enough to fund the sort of generosity that was provided to Chopin  ". Golly.

So i saw Interstellar the other day with a friend. We both enjoyed the movie while watching it, but would have preferred the movie to just end with **SPOILER ALERT** Cooper to get sucked into the blackhole/wormhole thing (and not have the whole father-daughter deathbed scene). **/Spoiler alert** Anyway, the movie did what i thought was a great job at explaining the relativity of time to gravity and speed, and it seems like others had the same opinion; Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a Q&A session here, and astrophysicist Kip Thorne's response is here. That last article reports that, while attempting to generate a plausible black hole, "

Von Tunzelmann tried a tricky demo. She generated a flat, multicolored ring—a stand-in for the accretion disk—and positioned it around their spinning black hole. Something very, very weird happened. “We found that warping space around the black hole also warps the accretion disk,” Franklin says. “So rather than looking like Saturn's rings around a black sphere, the light creates this extraordinary halo.”

That's what led Thorne to his “why, of course” moment when he first saw the final effect. The Double Negative team thought it must be a bug in the renderer. But Thorne realized that they had correctly modeled a phenomenon inherent in the math he'd supplied." Pretty neat.