It may look like sushi, taste like sushi and wriggle like sushi, but for the gourmet in London, Paris or New York, the question remains: just how Japanese is this raw fish?

Officials in Tokyo are offering a worldwide “authenticity screen” for restaurants that purport to be Japanese. The scheme, they say, may lead to an equivalent of the Michelin star system for the world’s 25,000 Japanese restaurants. The kitchens of these establishments will soon be visited by teams of experts, run under the auspices of Japan’s Ministry of Agriculture, who will assess the provenance of ingredients and how far they offer a real taste of Japan.

So will these “sushi police” be checking the mercury levels of the tuna as well? The Japanese seem rather blasé about mercury in their tuna, so perhaps that’s part of the authenticity!

It’s almost been a year since I ate my last piece of sushi. We discuss going for sushi every once in a while, but the fact remains there is mercury in almost all fish these days, especially tuna, and that tends to take the edge off the desire to eat sushi … or fish at all. I can’t even remember the last time I made fish or ate fish. That’s sad.

Those Oreos? They completely sucked and were nowhere near as good as I recall Oreos being. In fact, while I am certain that Oreos have always sort of sucked, even though I was addicted to them, I think in the last year they have begun to suck worse. The cookie part seemed thinner and harder, and there was just about no white stuff in the middle at all … and they don’t get super-soft when dipped in milk as quickly as they used to either. So, yeah, not happy with the Oreo experience. I guess when this bag is gone I never need to buy them again.

Also … why didn’t anyone I know mention that Torchwood started new episodes last weekend?! Thankfully they are playing last week’s episode before the new one this Saturday! So glad I thought to check on when that show was starting up again. I’d have been even more peeved had I missed it two weeks in a row.

And … yes … I am grumpy this morning.

The clock says it’s noon, and aside from making dinner, I have done everything I needed to do today including eating lunch and exercising the cats. Though the list of things to do was short for today, I didn’t expect to get done so early. I usually procrastinate a little more.

I bought a package of Oreos at Walgreens. There hasn’t been a single Oreo in this house for almost a year. Some of you may recall that Oreos were our all-time favorite cookies, but we gave them up when we decided to start eating better. I’m wondering if we will still like them as much as we used to, or of we will think they taste like the collection of chemicals and additives they actually are. I guess we’ll find out after dinner!

Since I now find myself with tons of free time on my hands today, I think I’ll go zip through my recorded craft shows and then settle on the couch to play a video game. Feels strange to have free time during the daylight hours.

In an effort to stop clearing my computer’s desktop by dumping all the crap into a folder to be gone through later, and which then never gets gone through, I am just going to start clearing it off my dumping the links here. I obviously thought these things were important enough to put on my desktop, but I don’t have enough hours in the day to rant about them all.

News links:

5 Myths About Terrorism (Washington Post)
Time Warner’s Pricing Paradox (Business Week)
The Illustrated President (Harper’s)
Former sanitizer of rental movies is accused of paying teens for sex(Salt Lake Tribune)
Lewisville teen’s hand sanitizer gel sniff ‘not a crime’ (WFAA Dallas)
Judge orders art car must go (News 8 Austin)
Man beaten to death in China for taking photos (CNN)
PETA Requests Vegetarian Diet in Jail for Cannibalism Suspect (Tyler Morning Telegraph)
Wiretaps Are Cut Over Unpaid Bills (Washington Post)

And some non-news links:

Olive Oil Crackers Recipe (101 Cookbooks)
Oven BBQ Ribs Recipe (Cooks.com)
Are flamingos pink because they eat shrimps? (Straight Dope)
The King Ranch
Neverwinter Nights Wiki

Aaaah. Nice clean desktop … for a few hours anyway. I’ll have it filled up with junk again in no time.

I just posted this at Metafilter, but have to share it here as well:

Barbie Tarot for those of you thinking the Rider-Waite deck just isn’t pink enough for a proper life reading.

Thanks to the anonymous person who sent me the link. Gave me a grin this morning!

I gathered together the bits of my bread recipe, and once I had all the pieces together at the table, something became obvious. Ronin didn’t just shred the page. Ronin ate it. Ronin ate my bread recipe. Well now I know he finds olive oil flavored paper to be tasty!

Also, it’s a good thing I put the last tubes of flea goo on the cats a week ago. I have noticed a few fleas in the house the last few days. I better spray the rugs and order more flea goo. I have the feeling this flea season is going to be a bad one. Time to make my preemptive strike!

For some inexplicable reason, the coffee maker is behaving normally today. Even though it had been making unusual noises and not working 100%, I kept using it this weekend hoping it would just putter along well enough until I had decided what to replace it with, and today … it’s working normally. Weird. Let’s hope that holds out a while yet, because I haven’t found the coffee maker to replace it yet, and I have decided that buying a new one every six months sucks, even if it is cheap, so not buying another one just like it.

If anyone has any recommendations of coffee makers to look at, let me know. What I am looking for is something that makes about 4 regular (small) cups of coffee at a time (to fill two large travel mugs) that takes freshly ground beans (not pods/whatever) and isn’t fussy (no French presses). I’d also like to not spend a mint on it too. There are tons of them out there, but none that seem to be stand-outs as far as user reviews go. Maybe one of you has used one you really like. I take the recommendations of friends over anything anyone says at Amazon.

Today’s agenda consists only of a few daily household chores, making cookies, and going out into the world to get Dr Pepper. That’s going to leave me plenty of time this afternoon to get caught up on watching the craft shows I have recorded on the DVR. It doesn’t really take me too long to watch a weeks worth of shows. I watch them in fast forward, sometimes in double fast forward. Lin once asked me how I got anything out of the shows that way, but the fact is, there isn’t much new under the sun as far as crafts go, and I have dabbled with all of them. When I see something new or interesting, I slow it down to real time and watch that part, and then press on quickly. I don’t really need anyone to tell me how glue paper together or how long to bake polymer clay and so on. I already know the how, and what I watch the shows for are the project ideas.I don’t have to listen to the taking heads or see every frame of the tape to gather than information.

Lin’s alarm keeps going off, but I don’t hear him getting out of bed. It must be time for me to go turn on the morning news and get the man moving by being noisy. I also need to go deal with an annoying cat. Ronin apparently spent some time last night eating the page of my notebook upon which my bread recipe was written, and right this minute, he is shredding the very last few shreds of it while looking at me as though I just don’t get it. Dude, could you please not consume my recipe workbook?!?!

Anyone out there reading this who has played Neverwinter Nights and the two expansion packs (Shadows of Undrentide and Hordes of the Underdark)? I have some questions. Well, actually Lin has some questions.

The big question is: Will he be able to take the character he is currently playing in the original game into the expansion packs, or is he going to have to start all over in each one. I am reading conflicting reports on the internet, and to be honest, I don’t have much invested in finding the answer since I am not playing the game.

I’m just trying to find out one way or the other to prepare myself for any loud griping that might happen when he finds out he can’t take his awesome Ranger any further.

And, if you can take your original character into the expansion packs, does all their gold and inventory transfer with them?

If no one knows, I guess I might have to AskMetafilter. Lin really wants answers to these two questions badly.

Yes, I was standing in the middle of the road. Not like there was any traffic to worry about, and the middle of the road was safer than the sidewalk where I was nearly run over by roving gangs of joggers.