Durian is a strange fruit. It smells like feet, looks like alien fetus and has the texture of a rotten mango. What’s even more strange is that it tastes kinda good, some would say delicious. Now that it’s durian season, the strange smell pervades Havelock Road, but I haven’t had the courage to buy one. If you bring the fruit home, it stinks up the whole house and probably the neighbors too. Instead, I’ve tried two out of home options. One is the durian juice at Bombay Sweet Mahal (Wellawatte). The other is the durian ice cream at Carnival (Bambalapitiya), both on the Galle Road.

In Asian or Sri Lankan cooking, we put a lot of diverse ingredients into a dish. Salt, chili, curry leaves, coconut milk, onions, garlic, green chili. That’s just the base for many Sri Lankan recipes, before you start adding distinctive stuff. In western food, by contrast, the base is less, and less diverse. This seems apparent anecdotally, and also now scientifically. A chemical study has shown that Asian dishes incorporate more diverse flavors than western ones.

Ranjit is a gentleman farmer and I highly recommend his coverage of the ongoing vegetable crate protests. You may remember vegetables from Why Is The Military Selling Vegetables? and Why Are We Throwing Coconuts In The Ocean? Now Minister Johnston Fernando is catching flak for demanding that wholesalers ship vegetables in plastic crates.

Drove through Fort this evening and saw huge pile of tires. Thought it was for the Colombo Night Races at first, but no, they were burnt. Protest tires. No bodies inside though. Bonus. The basic issue is that the government is calling for all vegetables to be transported in plastic crates rather than sacks. The issue with the issue is that plastic crates cost at least Rs. 1000 (according to the farmer blogger Serendipity) and sacks cost like nothing.

Kurt Cobain sang “It’s OK to eat fish, cause they don’t have any feelings.” Indeed, most people don’t empathize with fish at all – I don’t really – despite the fact that we are evolutionary relatives. Pescetarianism is an acceptable form of vegetarianism, and in Sri Lanka dried fish is basically a vegetable. The artist Ted Sabarese has explored our relationship with fish by photographing people with fish that look like them. Interesting results.

Taxing imports is just taxing the poor, especially on food. Sri Lanka wants food independence, fine, but the cost for that political goal is more expensive food for everybody. Indonesia is one of the worst examples, propping up a few big rice farmers while everybody else pays through the nose. Now Prime Minister DM Jayaratne is calling for Sri Lanka to basically prohibit all fruit and wheat imports. It’s madness.

I walked out of the World Trade Center today to see the Colombo City Hotel (which I honestly haven’t seen before). I also saw a bunch of workmen coming and going from the low building which is the Old Dutch Hospital. This week it’s opening up with a bunch of posh shops and the new Ministry of Crab. First the deets, AFAIK, ODEL, Barefoot, and that’s all I know are setting up outlets here. I think there’s a press conference this morning.

Booze doesn’t necessarily make people violent or promiscuous. That concept of drunkness is actually a cultural one, it’s not inherent in ethanol. As social anthropologist Kate Fox says, “the experiments show that when people think they are drinking alcohol, they behave according to their cultural beliefs about the behavioural effects of alcohol.”

Rice and Curry has a good review of Green Cabin. What’s most notable in that he’s photographed every single short eat there. What is a short eat? Little starters, usually pastries. I like to imagine they’re derived from Portuguese empanadas or something but I don’t know. It’s an island. When I first discovered short eats I was like I Can Haz Cheezburger? but they’ve grown kinda old.

This video is of someone eating, essentially, the bubonic chronic chili. Ed Currie has bred what may be the world’s hottest pepper (HP22B). In this video, a hapless reporter eats it, pukes, hallucinates and ends up on the floor with daschund licking his face.