The first time was just about a year ago. Spurred on partially by Jeremy and partially by the National Blood Service TV ads (god, that music—I was welling up just listening to it on the website), I finally overcame my complacency and trundled down to Hove Town Hall to donate a pint.

I admit, I was a bit nervous. I’m not particularly squeamish about needles or blood, but I don’t especially like to be jabbed and I wasn’t quite sure what to expect from the whole procedure. As it turned out, it was absolutely fine; all the “donor carers” were gentle and reassuring, and frankly, they make you feel like a bit of hero for being willing to donate at all. Plus, you get tea and biscuits afterwards—yay!

Between going to Thailand in February and then traveling back and forth to the States throughout the year, Jeremy and I couldn’t donate again until this month (because of the risk of malaria from Thailand and West Nile virus from the States). But yesterday, after a fortifying lunch at E-Kagen, we headed over to the donation session for our second round of bloodletting.

After it was over, Jeremy said that the whole thing had restored his faith in humanity, and while it may sound funny, I have to agree. You see an entire cross-section of the population at these donation sessions; yesterday there was a big guy with tattoos (which he must have gotten a long time ago or else he couldn’t have donated), a kid in a hoodie, older men and women, people who had clearly just nipped out from the office, a hip couple in their 20s… It was a little snapshot of Brighton, and I wondered what had prompted each person to come and donate. Whatever the reason, the important thing was that they were there, voluntarily giving a part of themselves to help someone else.

If you can donate blood and you don’t faint at the sight of a needle, I would really encourage you to do it. You’ll feel good about yourself, you’ll feel good about your fellow citizens, and you’ll be saving someone’s life.

In many ways, Japan was exactly like I expected (and hoped) it would be. I got to see cyberpunk landscapes and eat tons of delicious food and see loads of amazing fake food and speak some Japanese and ride bullet trains and stay in a traditional inn and experience the beauty of Kyoto in the autumn and the craziness of Osaka and the unimaginable vastness of Tokyo.

But Japan did surprise me in one key way: it felt much less alien to me than I thought it would. For all its apparent other-ness—and for all that I, as a tall blonde, stuck out like a sore thumb—Japan felt oddly comfortable to me. Jeremy agreed that the weirdest thing about Japan was how not weird it was, and we both said that we could quite easily imagine living there (okay, I say that about every place I visit and fall in love with, from Sydney, Australia to Sitka, Alaska—but for Jeremy to say that is really rather remarkable).

This may be in part because it reminded us both quite a lot of Germany, with its cleanliness and orderliness, its feeling of security, and with the formality that governs day-to-day interactions with others. The blinding neon landscapes and blaring pachinko parlors are deceptive, I think; they give an impression of chaos where very little chaos exists. It feels completely chaotic as you try to navigate gigantic Shinjuku station or the teeming streets of Shibuya, but at the same time it feels like there’s a method to the madness, and as someone who doesn’t deal particularly well with uncertainty or chaos, I liked that a lot.

I also liked (nay, loved) the fact that you could stroll the streets at night and not encounter people getting into fights/shouting at the top of their lungs/upchucking kebabs on the sidewalk/vandalizing cars and bikes/generally being wankers. Even the seediest little alleyway we wandered down in “edgy” Osaka felt safer and more civilized than any street in Brighton on a Saturday night. It was very heartening to be reminded that there are places in the world where people can have a good night out and not feel compelled to break something afterwards.

There were other pleasant surprises, too: I have never, ever seen such spotlessly clean hotel rooms in all my life, I’ve never had even the simplest of foods presented with such attention to detail, and I’ve never had so many people call out greetings to me as I walked through a store (Irasshaimase! Irasshaimase! - actually, that got to be a bit much after a while).

I was also very pleased to find that the minimal Japanese I managed to learn before going really came in handy, because there sure wasn’t a whole lot of English around. It’s perfectly possible to get by without speaking or reading any Japanese, of course, but just knowing hiragana and katakana and being able to figure out what were ramen shops and what were yakitori joints, for example, made me feel a lot more confident. Plus, it was great fun trying to work things out—and sometimes even succeeding.

Between Tokyo, Kyoto and Osaka, I think Jeremy and I got to experience a nice slice of urban Japanese living. Tokyo offered all the neon canyons and noodle bars you could want, but there were also surprisingly peaceful places to be found, like the forested walk to the Meiji Shrine, or even the top floor of the Takashimaya department store in the middle of Shinjuku, where you could escape from the hordes and enjoy a cup of coffee on a little rooftop terrace. We got a brief taste of Akihabara and its manga madness, we got to do a spot of karaoke, and we got in a lot of people-watching at the Starbucks overlooking Shibuya crossing. And we even managed to get up at the crack of dawn to visit the absolutely massive Tsukiji fish market and then dine on a big sushi breakfast.

Kyoto was a welcome respite from bustling Tokyo. It’s not that Kyoto wasn’t bustling itself; the streets were thronged with shoppers and the tourist sites were thronged with visitors enjoying the fall colors. But the pace and atmosphere were still different. With its traditional buildings, serene wooded hills and women shopping in kimonos—not to mention the occasional glimpse of a geisha—Kyoto has a much more stately air about it. It’s also a stunningly beautiful city, and one of my most treasured memories from the entire trip to Japan is of the lantern-lit alleyways and temples of Kyoto at dusk, which are simply magical (one of my least favorite parts of the trip was wandering around those alleyways in the heat for 45 minutes with a splitting headache while we tried to find our inn—but it was all worth it once we were settled in our room overlooking a tiny Japanese garden, with some traditional Kyoto sweets and a pot of hot green tea to soothe us).

I loved Kyoto so much that I was a bit worried when we left to spend a few days in Osaka; despite the lure of good food, I wondered if we were making a mistake giving up gorgeous Kyoto for gritty Osaka. I shouldn’t have fretted: Osaka was awesome. The entertainment district is like all of the bright wackiness of Tokyo compressed into a single street—and if any place I saw in Japan reminded me of Blade Runner, Osaka did. We did head out of Osaka during the day for a quick trip to quiet Nara, with its giant wooden temples and pushy deer, but we spent our evenings on gaudy Dotonbori, eating street food and looking out for men with missing fingers (we never did see any).

We spent our last night back in Tokyo with new and old friends, drinking at the J-Pop Café and dining on yummy fried things on sticks. Jeremy and I had also treated ourselves to a big room at the swanky Cerulean Tower hotel in Shibuya, and as we sipped early-evening cocktails there and looked down on the glittering Tokyo skyline from 35 floors up, I had a sudden feeling of utter conviction that I would be visiting again some day. And I fully intend to learn more Japanese and do just that.

Finally, I have to say thank you, thank you, thank you to John Allsopp and the rest of the Web Directions East team (Satoshi, Akane…) for making this trip possible in the first place and then going way above and beyond the call of duty in making sure everyone (including me, who was just along for the ride) was happy, comfortable and very well fed—and thank you to Oli for the wonderful company and great meal in Osaka—and to Jon for taking us to Yakitori Alley—and to the other WDE speakers for being so much fun to hang out and sing karaoke with—and to Jeremy, my partner in exploring Japan’s highways and byways, its finest hotels and tiniest bars, its craziest sights and its endless culinary delights.

Domo arigato gozaimasu!

It seemed particularly fitting to me that he should write about language today of all days, as I find myself on the eve of our long-awaited trip to Japan. Yes, in just over 12 hours, Jeremy and I will board a flight bound for Tokyo, and I’ll get to see just how far all those hours of podcasted Japanese lessons will get me.

I’ve been really, really enjoying the whole process of learning Japanese; it’s not something I ever thought I would do or could do, but now that I have started doing it, I really don’t want to stop. I hope that I can maintain the motivation to keep learning even after our trip to Japan is over. It’ll be tough—I’m not terribly self-motivated when it comes to most things—but having gotten off to such a good start with the language, it would seem like a pity to let it all slide.

Anyway, those are thoughts for the future. My thoughts for right now are 1) packing, 2) sleeping and 3) not missing my plane tomorrow. So for now: sayonara!

Jeremy has been asked to speak at Web Directions East in Tokyo in November, and it goes without saying that I’m going to tag along because…dude, it’s Japan!

I’ve wanted to go to Japan for a looong time—probably ever since I first picked up a William Gibson book. When the prospect of Web Directions East arose several months ago, I tried not to think about it too much because I knew I would be massively disappointed if it fell through. But several months on, the conference is set, the plane tickets are (almost) booked, the travel plans have (almost) been made, and I can now officially be excited.

I tend to view traveling to a new country as an opportunity to dabble in a new language. I always like to know a few words of the local language, partly because I hate the helpless feeling of not being able to communicate properly, but mostly because I’m just a word nerd who gets off on knowing how to say “thank you” in Tlingit or “that was delicious” in Thai. So naturally, as soon as I found out the Japan trip was on, I decided I had to learn a bit of Japanese so I wouldn’t feel completely and utterly lost when we arrived in Tokyo.

It’s fair to say that I knew next to nothing about Japanese a few short months ago. The first thing I learned is that written Japanese uses 3 (three) alphabets, or rather, two syllabaries (hiragana and katakana, each with 46 basic symbols) and one set of characters known as kanji, of which there are, oh, about 50,000. But only around 2,000 of those characters are used really frequently.

Uh, yeah. So much for being able to read the street signs then.

I haven’t let this knowledge scare me off, though. Fully aware that I have no chance in hell of learning any significant amount of Japanese in the short time available to me before the trip, I have nonetheless embarked on some intensive self-study in the hopes of maybe being able to at least work out some menu items when I’m in Japan (culinary exploration being, as always, a key aspect of this trip).

I’m making use of a few programs recommended to me by Relly, namely, JapanesePod101.com and the Michel Thomas Japanese foundation course. I’ve also got notebooks scattered around the house so I can practice writing hiragana and katakana while I’m at home (I didn’t intend to learn how to write the characters, but writing them helps me remember them), and I’ve got some kana and kanji apps on my iPod for practicing while I’m on the go.

And amazingly, after several weeks of sporadic study, some of it actually seems to be sticking. My first revelatory moment came a few weeks ago: On his last trip to San Francisco, Jeremy brought me back some little sushi stickers, some of which have Japanese writing on them. I had no idea what the writing said—or even what characters it was written in—when he first gave the stickers to me. The stickers sat by my computer for ages, and every once in while I’d look at them and giggle, because little sushi stickers are quite funny. And then one day, after I had started coming to terms with hiragana, I idly picked up the stickers—and lo, I could read what they said! It was like in a movie, when gibberish symbols suddenly morph into letters and words. Unagi! Uni! Maguro! (It helped that the writing happened to be the names of types of sushi, which was pretty much the extent of my knowledge of Japanese.)

That small victory spurred me on to keep at it, and since then I’ve been making a concerted effort to study a bit every day. I walk around the house talking to myself in what little Japanese I now know (“I like it, therefore I will buy it.” “Yes, I will drink a beer.” “I drink coffee every day, but I do not eat sushi every day.” ). I pore over pictures of Japan, attempting to read the signs on the shops. I find myself transfixed by the packaging in Asian food stores. And I go to bed every night with Japanese words and thoughts of Japan swirling around in my mind.

I think it’s all driving me a bit mad—not to mention poor Jeremy, who has to put up with me shouting “Soba!” and “Yakitori!” at him every time I work out what’s written on one of those red lanterns. But it’s rather thrilling as well. It’s been a long time since I tried to learn a brand-new language from scratch, and I’ve never immersed myself in a language like this on my own. It’s tough, but it’s so incredibly satisfying when all the little linguistic pieces start coming together, and you start seeing the patterns and connections, and you start understanding the syntax and morphology, and…okay, yes, I’m a language dork. But it’s like code-breaking: you chip away at it and chip away at it, and when you finally crack it, the sense of achievement is fantastic.

Whether any of this will be of any practical use to me once we’re in Japan remains to be seen. But for now, it’s just brilliant fun!

Last Friday was dConstruct, the Web conference put on by Jeremy’s company Clearleft. The build-up to the event was rather intense, not least because Jeremy was giving what was, in effect, the closing keynote, and he was stressed out beyond belief about it. He was researching, writing and practicing the talk every opportunity he got, and those opportunities got fewer and farther between as the week progressed and more and more out-of-towners started to show up in Brighton.

The real flood of social activity began Wednesday night when the first big wave of geeks arrived. The conference preparations hit a peak on Thursday, and Thursday evening culminated in a wonderful dinner for the conference speakers at Pintxo People (where I had my birthday dinner), which I was lucky enough to be able to tag along to, followed by a pre-party for the conference attendees. The party was ridiculously loud, and we knew we’d have an early start the next day, so we did the smart thing and headed home early to rest up for D(construct)-Day.

On Friday morning, I was over at the Brighton Dome at 8 AM to man the registration desk for the conference. I did get to catch the first two talks of the day—the fascinating keynote by Steven Johnson and the enlightening and animated presentation Brighton’s own by Aleks Krotoski—and then I hovered around the venue, helping out wherever I was needed and getting progressively more nervous as the time for Jeremy’s talk approached.

By the time he took the stage at the end of the day, I was a nervous wreck; you’d have thought I were about to get on stage in front of 700 people and present an insanely intellectual overview of network theory. I don’t think I even breathed through the first half of his talk. It wasn’t that I didn’t think he could pull it off; I just desperately hoped people would get it and not just dismiss it as a load of pretentious waffle. In the end, he pulled it off with panache, and I was—and am—incredibly proud of him. He put his heart and soul into a subject he’s passionate about and delivered a mind-warping talk to wrap up the conference in style.

After that, there was just time to clean up and grab a quick dinner before heading to the after-party and the after-after-party, where everyone could finally unwind and congratulate each other on a job well done. I think dConstruct was really great this year, and I don’t just say that because I have an emotional investment in the event. Everywhere I looked throughout the day, I saw people talking and smiling. There are always a few nay-sayers (it’s so easy to sit back and be snarky on Twitter), but the vast majority of people seemed to enjoy themselves and appreciate the effort that went into making the conference a success.

But the activities didn’t end there—oh no, for the very next day was BarCamp Brighton 3, which, to be honest, I was looking forward to about as much as I’d look forward to a trip to the dentist. I had spent a fair amount of time assembling my thoughts, writing up notes, and even putting together some slides (for the first time ever!), so I felt pretty prepared. But I also felt quite nervous, not to mention absolutely exhausted. BarCamp started at 10 AM on Saturday, and though we slept in a bit and showed up later, I was still completely worn out and really not in the best of moods.

I perked up once we got out to the venue, though, and I saw some of the fun talks that were going on, like Marrije’s talk about wearable electronics, which was a great way to kick off the day, and Relly’s talk on Japanese pop culture, which was a great way to wrap up the day. I had intended to get my own talk out of the way on Saturday, but there was no room left in the schedule, so I was given a bit of a reprieve and could dedicate myself to other people’s presentations. Actually, I wound up missing a few talks I had planned to catch because I was engrossed in various conversations—about languages, about crafting, about geekiness. Jeremy was right all along: BarCamp is a very relaxed, welcoming environment where everyone is made to feel like they “belong”.

By the end of the day, however, I really felt like I belonged at home on my own for a bit, so I cut out early and headed back to the homestead to regroup for the next day. It was a smart move because even though I was still tired on Sunday and didn’t make it back out to BarCamp until lunchtime again, I was a lot more refreshed than I had been the day before. This was a very good thing because at 2:30, after catching Rebecca’s great talk on typography, I found myself standing in front of a screen giving my own presentation: “Making the Web Multilingual - What Translators Do and Why It Matters”. Gulp.

And what do you know? It went perfectly fine. I was pretty much precisely as nervous as I figured I’d be—that is, enough so that my hands were a tiny bit shaky when I started out, but not so much that I couldn’t remember what it was I wanted to say. I think I got my points across, and I managed to spark an interesting and quite technical discussion amongst my small group of listeners about the localization of user-generated content and tracking language stats online. I put my slides up online yesterday—and much to my surprise, I got an email a few hours later telling me my slideshow was being featured on Slideshare. Yay! Not bad for my first foray into public speaking, I suppose. And I’m already mulling over ideas for my next potential talk…

Since BarCamp ended Sunday evening, we’ve been hanging out with the last of our friends from abroad and slowly winding down after an entirely jam-packed week. Even though I’m tired and in some ways it will be good to get back into a normal routine, it’s been very poignant having to say goodbye to people as they drift back into their everyday lives and we drift back into ours. But there’s still plenty to look forward to over the next two weeks, not least a visit from our German friends and a wedding in London. And just a year from now: dConstruct 2009!

The 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die meme (if you could even really call it a meme) is several months old. It’s based on the book of the same name which was published two years ago to much grumbling about what was included and what wasn’t. I went through the list back in May and noted which books I’d read with the intention of writing about them here, but…then I kind of forgot.

Well, better late than never, eh? What follows is not a list of all 1001 books, but rather a list of the 96 that I’ve actually read. I’ve tried to be fair and not include books that I’ve “kind of” read or just read some of—like Heart of Darkness, The Tin Drum and Ulysses, all of which I’ve started but not (yet) gotten to the end of. In some cases, I found it hard to remember whether I’d really read a particular book or just seen the movie—appalling, I know. It’s also appalling to see how many classic books I haven’t read, like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, or anything by Jane Austen, or indeed most anything by Dickens. Oh, the shame.

Still, I have read 96 of the 1001 books, which apparently makes me 9.59% well read—that’s not too bad, I suppose. My rate was bumped up by three main factors: that I actually read most of the books assigned to me in high school, that I studied German literature in college, and that I now read so much George Orwell, Margaret Atwood and Ian McEwan (five each from the list). And I suppose the fourth main factor would be that I just like to read.

If you want to keep track of your own progress on the 1001 books, you can download a handy Excel spreadsheet from Arukiyomi. The spreadsheet will also tell you, based on your current age, how many books you need to read per year to get through all 1001 before you kick the average bucket. In my case, it’s 20—a not entirely unreasonable number if I were to dedicate myself solely to reading books off the list. Which I have absolutely no intention of doing.

So, with no further ado:

• Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro
• Saturday – Ian McEwan
• The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time – Mark Haddon
• Atonement – Ian McEwan
• Life of Pi – Yann Martel
• The Blind Assassin – Margaret Atwood
• Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson (I recently re-read this. So. Much. Fun.)
• Amsterdam – Ian McEwan
• The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy
• Enduring Love – Ian McEwan
• Alias Grace – Margaret Atwood
• The Reader – Bernhard Schlink (read in German)
• Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis de Bernieres
• The Robber Bride – Margaret Atwood
• Possessing the Secret of Joy – Alice Walker
• Smilla’s Sense of Snow – Peter Høeg (in German)
• The Butcher Boy – Patrick McCabe
• Possession – A.S. Byatt
• Moon Palace – Paul Auster
• A Prayer for Owen Meany – John Irving
• Cat’s Eye – Margaret Atwood
• Foucault’s Pendulum – Umberto Eco (one of my favorite books EVAR—read many times)
• The Satanic Verses – Salman Rushdie
• The Player of Games – Iain M. Banks (interesting to see this included)
• The Long Dark Teatime of the Soul – Douglas Adams
• Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency – Douglas Adams
• The New York Trilogy – Paul Auster
• World’s End – T. Coraghessan Boyle
• Beloved – Toni Morrison
• Watchmen – Alan Moore & David Gibbons (interesting to see this too—read twice)
• Love in the Time of Cholera – Gabriel García Márquez
• Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit – Jeanette Winterson
• The Cider House Rules – John Irving
• Contact – Carl Sagan (read several times)
• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (read several times)
• White Noise – Don DeLillo
• Neuromancer – William Gibson
• Shame – Salman Rushdie
• Waterland – Graham Swift
• The Color Purple – Alice Walker
• Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally
• The Comfort of Strangers – Ian McEwan
• The Name of the Rose – Umberto Eco (in German and English)
• If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler – Italo Calvino (in German)
• The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams
• The World According to Garp – John Irving
• The Shining – Stephen King
• Interview With the Vampire – Anne Rice
• Sula – Toni Morrison
• Invisible Cities – Italo Calvino
• Slaughterhouse-five – Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.
• One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
• Everything That Rises Must Converge – Flannery O’Connor
• One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich – Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn
• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess (read at least twice)
• Stranger in a Strange Land – Robert Heinlein
• Franny and Zooey – J.D. Salinger
• Catch-22 – Joseph Heller
• To Kill a Mockingbird – Harper Lee
• The Once and Future King – T.H. White
• On the Road – Jack Kerouac
• The Lord of the Rings – J.R.R. Tolkien (Jeremy read the whole thing to me, and I’ve read it myself)
• Lord of the Flies – William Golding
• The Catcher in the Rye – J.D. Salinger (read at least twice)
• Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell (another all-time fave—read many times)
• If This Is a Man – Primo Levi
• Animal Farm – George Orwell
• The Outsider – Albert Camus
• The Grapes of Wrath – John Steinbeck
• Coming Up for Air – George Orwell
• The Hobbit – J.R.R. Tolkien
• Keep the Aspidistra Flying – George Orwell
• Burmese Days – George Orwell
• Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
• Lady Chatterley’s Lover – D.H. Lawrence
• The Castle – Franz Kafka (in German)
• The Trial – Franz Kafka (in German)
• The Magic Mountain – Thomas Mann (in German)
• We – Yevgeny Zamyatin
• Women in Love – D.H. Lawrence
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – James Joyce
• Sons and Lovers – D.H. Lawrence
• Death in Venice – Thomas Mann (in German)
• Buddenbrooks – Thomas Mann (in German—so very, very long)
• Dracula – Bram Stoker (I’ve read this myself, and Jeremy’s read it to me as well)
• Effi Briest – Theodore Fontane (in German)
• The Yellow Wallpaper – Charlotte Perkins Gilman
• The Picture of Dorian Gray – Oscar Wilde
• Little Women – Louisa May Alcott
• Crime and Punishment – Fyodor Dostoevsky
• The Scarlet Letter – Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Wuthering Heights – Emily Brontë
• Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë
• The Pit and the Pendulum – Edgar Allan Poe
• Frankenstein – Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley
• Don Quixote – Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

It’s a random, entirely subjectively list, obviously, with an Anglo-American bias and some inclusions—and omissions—which seem startling at first glance. (Andrew Wheeler’s follow-up to the Omnivore’s Hundred meme puts the list in context and explains some of the choices.) I mean, peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Root beer floats? Initially I chuckled, but when I gave it some real thought and looked at other people’s responses to the list, I realized just how much I take some of my most basic food experiences for granted. Peanut butter and jelly (that’s jam to my English readers) is commonplace to me, but I remember my German flatmate being horrified at the very concept of something like “peanut butter.” In turn, sauerkraut seems pretty much as commonplace as peanut butter and jelly, but maybe only because I lived in Germany for so long. And after eight years in England, chicken tikka masala is about as exotic as takeaway pizza.

It turns out there are 28 things on the list that I haven’t tried, only one of which I wouldn’t consider eating unless I absolutely had to. I guess that makes me very omnivorous indeed!

Here’s the drill:

1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.

2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.

3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.

4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.

And here’s my list:

1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile (I’ve had alligator, but I guess that doesn’t count)
6. Black pudding (I love black pudding, even when Jeremy jokingly describes it as “pig scabs”)
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp (I may have had carp somewhere, but I don’t remember, so it doesn’t count)
9. Borscht (I make a pretty decent borscht if I do say so myself—that’s what comes from getting so much beetroot and cabbage in our veg box)
10. Baba ghanous
11. Calamari
12. Phở (Just once, with my brother, in Seattle—a happy memory)
13. PB&J sandwich (Ideally with cheddar cheese as well)
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses (Smelly, but smelly-good)
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes (Plum wine, apple wine…)
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans (I was born on a Monday in New Orleans—I have rice and beans in my blood)
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper (I’ve cooked with them, but why would you eat one raw?)
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters (Though after getting sick from dodgy shellfish in Paris, my oyster intake has declined drastically)
29. Baklava (I always like the idea of it more than the taste—too sweet)
30. Bagna cauda (I keep meaning to make this—mmm, anchovy bath…)
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi (Not a fan of the salted lassi, I gotta say)
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar (I have had cognac, and I have had a cigar, but I don’t know if I’ve had them together)
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O (What American college student hasn’t had a Jell-O shot?)
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail (Nothing beats rich, dark oxtail soup on a cold, miserable day)
41. Curried goat (Jeremy ordered this at a Jamaican restaurant in Massachusetts—yum)
42. Whole insects (This is the one thing on this list that I would really, really struggle to eat. If I were going to mortally offend someone by not eating a whole insect, then I suppose I’d choke one down—otherwise, I just don’t know if I could bring myself to do it. The only thing worse would be to eat a scorpion.)
43. Phaal (I like spicy food, but even I have my limits)
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/€80/$120 or more (I’ve had some pretty expensive whisky in restaurants, but I’ve never spent this much on a bottle myself—yet.)
46. Fugu (Not yet, though it looks like I’ll be in Tokyo before the year is out, so who knows—but then, seeing as there’s no antidote if you are poisoned, probably not…)
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel (Smoked eel is lovely, but nothing beats unagi )
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut (Warm, straight from the oven, after a wet, freezing day on a ski slope—fab)
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear (Lots of this to be found in Arizona—jam, salsa, etc.)
52. Umeboshi (Had my first one just a few weeks ago—really salty, quite sour, and strangely addictive)
53. Abalone (I kind of think I have had abalone somewhere, but I can’t be sure)
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spätzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV (Hello, Belgium!)
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores (Overrated, if you ask me)
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin
64. Currywurst (Hell yeah )
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake (Yes, yes, yes, yes)
68. Haggis (Don’t knock it ‘til you’ve tried it)
69. Fried plantain (One of those things that never tastes as good as I’m expecting it to)
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill (Not to my knowledge. But I’d eat well-prepared roadkill before I’d eat a whole insect.)
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie (God, I loved these as a kid—blueberry or apple)
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum (One of Jeremy’s favorites)
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare (I’ve had rabbit, but not hare)
87. Goulash
88. Flowers (Pretty in a salad)
89. Horse (I think I had horse goulash in Vienna—and incidentally, for a good laugh, check out the machine-translated version of this German restaurant’s menu, which I came across when I Googled “horse goulash”. I particularly like “shrimps in self-making dressing” and “escalope of calb on the crust of rolled oafs represented on cream-fungi”. Good lord, people, hire a professional translator!)
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab (To be honest, soft-shell crab really creeps me out.)
93. Rose harissa (I’ve had—and made—harissa, but I’ve never had rose harissa)
94. Catfish (Ideally blackened or cornmeal-crusted)
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor (Seems like overkill to me, though; I’d stick with fresh lobster dipped in melted butter—or better yet, fresh crab)
98. Polenta (The best I ever had was at a restaurant called Robert’s Creekside Cafe in Sedona, Arizona—which, sadly, is no more…)
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake

Jeremy has been encouraging me for years to attend a BarCamp. I realize they’re very “loose” events—much like Reboot, in fact—where anyone can speak about anything and even first-time presenters are welcomed and supported. And, as Jeremy says, some of the best BarCamp talks he’s experienced have been ones which weren’t “geeky” in the techie sense at all—talks about whether Cornwall is part of England, for instance, or how to make the perfect cup of tea. Andy has presented on mixing the perfect margarita, and Jeremy himself has talked about technology and the transmission of Irish traditional music. So there’s no question that BarCamp is a mixed bag.

And yet…and yet…it’s still a geek event. I’ve argued to Jeremy that he can talk about Irish music, or Andy can talk about margaritas, because they’ve already proven their “geek credentials”. They have established roles in the Web community, so it’s fine for them to break out of those roles occasionally and talk about different interests, because beyond the Irish music and the margaritas, there’s all the DOM scripting and CSS and microformats and Web design, and everyone knows that.

But for someone like me to come in from the outside, as it were, and talk about something maybe not entirely Web-related…well, I just feel like people are going to wonder what the heck I’m doing there. Jeremy argues that 1) BarCamp isn’t about “credentials” or “proving something”, and 2) I’m more geeky than I give myself credit for. Both of those things may be true, but it doesn’t change the fact that I have serious doubts about attending a BarCamp and expecting people to listen to and be interested in what I have to say.

There’s a part of me that knows I’m being too dismissive of myself. I mean, I work on the Web, for God’s sake. But I have that typical perfectionist trait of constantly feeling like a big fake (apparently it’s known as neurotic imposture, which sounds quite mad indeed). I know that I know a lot and I know that I’m good at what I do, and yet I go through life thinking that, at any moment, someone’s going to turn towards me and do that freaky pointing-and-shrieking thing from Invasion of the Body Snatchers and say, “You’re a fraud! You don’t know what you’re doing, and you don’t know what you’re talking about!”

But with all of that in mind, I’m still going to give a talk at BarCamp. It’s face your fears time again, I guess. I’ve already started to outline my presentation—and it’s about translation, something I really do know something about. I want to give people an insight into what a translator does (because I’m always surprised at just how many people don’t really know) and what simple steps can be taken to ensure that multilingual websites are pleasant to read and easy to use. For all my qualms, I’m actually kind of excited; I do like nattering on about language, after all. And if my talk prompts just one person to say, “Oh, I didn’t realize that!”, then I figure the whole thing will have been worth it.

It’s a new series on BBC 1 called Britain from Above, which has essentially taken the kind of thing that OpenStreetMap and other organizations have been doing for a few years—i.e., visualizing GPS traces and other data—and turned it into a television show.

I’m fascinated by data visualization, and by maps, and by looking at the earth from above, so I’m really looking forward to the start of this series on Sunday. I hope it’s as good as it looks like it could be.

For my last foodie post of the month, I intended to leave you with a brief account of my most recent culinary adventure: homemade gyoza! But as my “brief account” grew somewhat longer and more detailed, Jeremy suggested that maybe it was really a post for Principia Gastronomica and not WordRidden.

I tended to agree with him, so I’m afraid that on this, the last day of the NaBloPoMo month, my non-foodie blog has lost out against my foodie blog, and my gyoza post can be found over on PG. But I suppose that’s a fitting end to this particular NaBloPoMo.