Welsh Rabbit
 A dish that a vegetarian could safely order: melted cheese poured over toast or crackers.
The name may have originated among the English as a dig against their neighbors, the Welsh. Rabbit was a much more expensive dish than cheese and toast, but if you were Welsh, that’s probably what you made do with. Since there is no rabbit at all in this dish, folk etymology created the variantWelsh rarebit, which upgrades it from a poor man’s dish to a purported delicacy. Photo: adactio from Flickr |
Read more at http://www.merriam-webster.com/top-ten-lists/top-10-surprising-food-words/welsh-rabbit.html#k3GfLfPCZr0sx70j.99
And It Wasn’t Even Valentine’s Day
AP Strange But True
Moved: 8/2/2012 07:41
LONDON (AP) — When you’re competing in the Olympics, you want to try to maintain a healthy diet.
So, most athletes try hard to avoid the temptation of the free McDonald’s food inside the athletes village.
American swimmers Ricky Berens and Conor Dwyer couldn’t help themselves, though, after winning gold in the men’s 4-by-200 relay.
Dwyer says, “It was pretty bad. A couple quarter pounders, McFlurries, fries.” Berens tweeted a picture of their feast, which included Big Macs.
He says, “We eat so healthy all the time, so I felt pretty gross after that.” Dwyer said he still felt bad the next morning.
AVOIDING SPOILERS
NEW YORK (AP) — It used to be a lot easier.
If you wanted to watch the tape-delayed coverage of an Olympic event in prime time, even though it took place hours earlier, you just turned off the news for a few hours.
But that was in the days before social media, email, and text messages. These days, you might just have to lock yourself in a closet — without an Internet connection.
One Atlanta woman who wanted to wait until she got home to watch her favorite sport — fencing — had to avoid Facebook yesterday. And it’s too bad, because it was full of happy birthday messages for her. But Mandy Hauck didn’t want to risk finding out who won, and ruining the excitement of watching it as if it were live.
She also deleted her iPhone apps for CNN and ESPN. But she couldn’t stay away from social media completely. Her job in marketing requires her to spend her day on Twitter.
CYCLIST’S SIDEBURNS
LONDON (AP) — It isn’t hard for Bradley Wiggins to spot his fans.
The British Tour de France champ known for his scraggly sideburns, has inspired men, women, boys and girls to don sideburns of their own. They are taping fake hair to their cheeks in hopes of creating a winning karma for him.
They turned out by the thousands to cheer him on as he captured the gold medal yesterday in the Olympic time trial. It’s his fourth Olympic gold.
Those who didn’t want to bother with making their own fake sideburns could just pick up a newspaper. Two rival tabloids, the Sun and the Daily Mirror, each turned their front pages into cut-outs of Wiggins’ facial hair.
The Sun even offered sideburns that were colored gold for the occasion.
YANKEES-SOTOMAYOR
NEW YORK (AP) — When she’s at the Supreme Court, Sonia Sotomayor normally sits next to fellow justice Stephen Breyer.
But she switched benches yesterday, and sat next to “Bald Vinny” Milano.
For one day, she wasn’t just a Supreme Court justice — she was a Bleacher Creature, joining the group of die-hard New York Yankees fans who sit in the right-field stands and carry out a ritual in the first inning of every game. They conduct a “Roll Call” of the Yankees’ starting lineup, chanting the name of each player until that player acknowledges the cheers with a wave or salute.
The Yankees say Sotomayor moved to better seats once the Roll Call was over.
Sotomayor has been known to play an even bigger role in baseball. In 1995, as a federal judge, she issued an injunction that led to the end of a seven and a half-month strike by players.
BELARUS-TEDDY BEAR INVASION
MINSK, Belarus (AP) — It’s probably the first time in history that teddy bears have defeated generals.
In the former Soviet state of Belarus, two generals have been sacked — after a Swedish light plane intruded the country’s airspace and dropped hundreds of teddy bears carrying slogans supporting human rights and media freedom.
Officials in the authoritarian state weren’t laughing.
They actually denied the incident happened until last week, when President Alexander Lukashenko called a government meeting to scold authorities for allowing what he called a “provocation.”
NO MICRO-BREWERS
MILWAUKIE, Ore. (AP) — Milwaukie won’t be getting a baseball team.
You may think they already have one — the Brewers — but you’d be thinking of the Milwaukee in Wisconsin.
This one is in Oregon, and it’s spelled with an I-E at the end, not an E-E.
Officials in the Portland suburb were hoping to bring a Class-A team to town. The city was ready to spend $25 million to build a 4,000-seat stadium. It would have joined three other Oregon cities with Class-A teams.
And they could have had some fun with the team name. Maybe the Micro-Brewers?
Copyright 2012 The Associated Press.