I’m hungry. From the Wikipedia: Empanadas.

Empanadas are stuffed pastries originally from the Iberian Peninsula. They get their name from the Spanish verb “empanar,” which means “to bread.” They are most often filled with some form of meat, and are for the most part completely awesome.

The Wikipedia believes that empanadas were derived from muaajanat, savory pastries popular among the 8th century Berbers that invaded the area in the Umayyad conquest of Hispania. The Wikipedia doesn’t have an entry for muaajanat, but it’s safe to say they were delicious.

Empanadas were first brought to the Americas by European colonists, though I imagine they were stale by the end of the boat ride.

Today, 22 different nations can claim varieties of the empanada. Empanadas are made with a variety of ingredients and prepared in a variety of ways, and the empanada’s Wikipedia page is amazingly exhaustive. It’s worth a read, but I’d like to highlight a few details:

– Medellin, Colombia apparently boasts a city-wide love of pork and chorizo meats. I’m investigating accommodations.

– El Salvadorian empanadas are not really empanadas at all, but fried plantains stuffed with sweet cream. So probably still really good.

– Empanadas in the Mexican state of Hidalgo are known as pastes, and were brought to the region not by Spanish colonists, but by British miners. They get their name from Cornish pasties, which are also available in Wisconsin and the upper peninsula of Michigan and which are way too dry.

– The list of similar dishes includes stromboli, knishes and Hot Pockets. “Stromboli Knishes and the Hot Pockets” would be a decent name for a band.

Nearly every carnivorous culture has come up with some sort of way to wrap some sort of meat in some sort of bread: the sandwich, the meat pie, the burrito, the beef patty, the pork bun, the gyro, the pupusa, the corn dog, the schwarma.

I could continue, but you get the point. Meats wrapped in breads are about as universal as creation myths, and usually way more satisfying. Their ubiquity should be a source of pride for the human race.

And thanks to globalization, they are available in ever-increasing varieties. This is one of the reasons it’s great to be alive and hungry* in the 21st century.

*Not hungry in the starving sense obviously. Hungry like a guy who is about to enjoy an empanada.

It’s raining today in midtown Manhattan. Forgive me if you’ve already heard any of my umbrella-inspired fury on other rainy days via Twitter. Here’s this edition:

From the Wikipedia: Umbrella

Umbrellas have existed for protecting the human head from both sun and rain since at least the 5th century BCE. Some form of umbrella existed in ancient times in Europe, East Asia, South Asia, Asia Minor, Africa and the Americas. If Aboriginal Australians also developed a form of portable head-protecting canopy, the Wikipedia is not aware of it.

In early times, umbrellas were normally associated with wealth or status, and umbrellas were rarely carried by the people they were meant to protect.

This tradition is boldly maintained today by Sean “Diddy” Combs, whose umbrella man probably had to suffer through the recording of the single worst rap performance of all time on “Come With Me.”

Umbrellas, like most things not named “the Bubonic Plague,” were hard to find in the Dark Ages in Europe. According to the Wikipedia, cloaks were the most popular method of personal weather-protection in the era.

Umbrellas today principally serve both their intended purpose and a second, ancillary function: pissing me off.

Look: An umbrella is a great way to protect yourself from the elements if you get caught in the rain in some open space. But in urban centers, people should be required to have licenses to carry umbrellas.

Honestly, you wouldn’t think it should be that hard to understand that, when carrying an umbrella, you take up a lot more space than you normally do. I mean, the whole point of the umbrella is that it extends beyond your person in every direction, assuming you’re not fatter than your umbrella.

But no. People just keep walking as if they’re unencumbered by umbrellas, as though they’re occupying only their usual diameter. And umbrellas are almost always soaking wet, so when people bump into you with their umbrellas while they’re carrying an umbrella and you’re not, you get doubly soaked.

And to make matters worse, umbrellas are armed with pointy things at just about every extremity, so it’s not like those of us who are left without umbrellas, walking around avoiding umbrellas, are every diving out of the way of getting our eyes poked out by cotton balls.

If you’re carrying an umbrella, you absolutely must watch where you’re going, for the good of humanity. A good rule of thumb: If when you’re looking forward, you see only the inside of your umbrella, you’re carrying your umbrella too low.

And once your umbrella is held at an appropriate level to accommodate your vision, consider the people walking toward you on the crowded sidewalk. If the person isn’t much taller than you, a good method is to raise up your umbrella as you pass him by, avoiding his head and providing him with a brief bit of umbrella coverage, to boot.

If the person is too tall for that, then gently move your umbrella away from him. This is tricky, of course: Be aware of any other passersby that could be in your general vicinity before any umbrella adjustments.

And please: NO SUDDEN MOVEMENTS! It’s difficult enough for people coming your way or trying to pass you to predict how you’re going to be walking when you’re not carrying a pointy, three-foot wide weapon.

Good lord. Just be considerate, that’s all.

And with that, I’m off to walk to Grand Central Station in the rain, without an umbrella.

Sometimes you end up so deep into the Wikipedia web that you don’t even remember what started it. That’s what happened today.

From the Wikipedia: Old Faithful

Old Faithful is a geyser in Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming. It was named by explorer Nathan P. Langford because its eruptions happen so regularly, and because, presumably, it is quite old.

In a guide to Yellowstone Park written in 1883, Henry Winser wrote:

Old Faithful is sometimes degraded by being made a laundry. Garments placed in the crater during quiescence are ejected thoroughly washed when the eruption takes place. Gen. Sheridan’s men, in 1882, found that linen and cotton fabrics were uninjured by the action of the water, but woolen clothes were torn to shreds.

I don’t really see how that’s degrading the geyser. The geyser couldn’t care less if you threw some clothes down there. It’s just good use of a natural resource, that’s all.

I’ve been to Old Faithful and I was a bit disappointed. Not by the eruption — that part was cool — but by the geyser’s relative lack of faith.

When you get to Yellowstone, you’re all, oh man, I’ve got to get to Old Faithful in a half hour, she’s about to blow. And then there’s a buffalo on the road in your way, and at first you’re like, “Oh, hey, cool! Buffalo!”

But then in a couple of minutes you’re all, “hey, get out of the road you stupid buffalo, I got places to be.”

Because you think you need to get to Old Faithful right quick.

Not the case. You get to Old Faithful and they tell you the estimated time of eruption, and then say, essentially, “give or take 45 minutes.”

45 minutes! What is this? I came for Old Faithful, not Old Every So Often. I had been led to believe by too many science teachers to count that this thing went off every 90 minutes, like clockwork. But that’s not even close to the case.

Yellowstone Park is really cool, I should add, and there are plenty of sights to see that are way more awesome than Old Faithful. Like the big smoking puddle of yellow stuff, for example, because what is that stuff?

Did you know that Yellowstone Park is really just a giant volcano?

Actually, that understates the case. It’s often considered a supervolcano.

Supervolcanos = Awesome. Less awesome would be said supervolcano exploding. Really not awesome, actually. Like “maybe we all die” not awesome.

And it turns out, the Yellowstone Supervolcano generally erupts about once every 600,000 years, and it hasn’t erupted in about 640,000 years. So that’s a little bit frightening.

But luckily, based on what I know of Yellowstone Park’s sense of timing, it’s probably really 600,000 years plus or minus 300,000 years, so we could have up to 260,000 years left. And unless I somehow unlock the secret of immortality, I probably only need about 80, tops. My kids can deal with the whole thing with the ash blocking out the sun for years.

From the Wikipedia: Thor

Thor, as you may know, is the god of thunder in Germanic and Norse mythology. Traditionally, he is depicted as a bearded redhead. Tales of his exploits dominated Germanic documents from the dawn of written language in the area until the late Viking age, because Vikings obviously recognized how awesome Thor was.

Thor is the son of Odin, the king of the gods, and Jörd, who was a Jötunn, or frost giant. He married Sif, a human female, but kept a Jötunn mistress named Járnsaxa, because Thor apparently had an Oedipal thing going on.

Thor’s weapon of choice was his Mjöllnir, which was way, way more than an ordinary hammer. In addition to performing the usual nail-driving stuff, it was capable of leveling mountains, plus featured a boomerang-like quality by which it would always return to Thor after he threw it at someone or something that had earned his wrath. Also, it could emit lightning bolts.

Thor traveled in style, of course, on a chariot pulled by regenerating goats from which Thor would eat whenever he got hungry. The goats were presumably stabled in the garage of Thor’s 540-room mansion at Asgard, not too far from Valhalla.

Thor’s Wikipedia page is positively rife with information, which makes perfect sense, as a Venn diagram of Wikipedia editors and Folklore and Mythology majors would yield concentric circles.

Thor’s life was replete with drinking contests, cross-dressing, competitive eating, and umlauts, and thus was not unlike my cöllege career. According to legend, he will die at Ragnarok, the Germanic-mythological equivalent of judgment day, but only after killing his arch-nemesis Jörmungandr the serpent.

I don’t want to delve too deeply into religion here, since obviously it’s a sensitive issue to a lot of people, but from a purely anthropological standpoint it always baffles me that monotheistic religions have so dominated polytheistic ones in the West. I feel like I’d get so much more geared up to go to church if I was going there to learn about a bunch of hammer-wielding, lightning-tossing badasses like Thor.

For that matter, it strikes me as at least a little bit strange that we read The Odyssey in high-school English classes but the Bible or Torah or Quran would obviously be off-limits, even just as historical texts. I’m not complaining because I thought The Odyssey was awesome, but it is so closely wrapped up with a religion, even if it is a mostly defunct one. Do we separate church and state or do we separate one specific type of church and state? And, if the latter is the case, isn’t that akin to the state endorsing that type of church?

I know that sounds ridiculous in the case of The Odyssey, but my 9th-grade class also read Siddhartha, which is most decidedly a book about a very active and popular religion.
I also enjoyed that book very much so I’m certainly not advocating denying it to our nation’s ninth graders. Don’t mistake anything here as any sort of political stance on anything. I’m just sayin’s all.

As for Thor, he is currently passing the time before Ragnarok as an NFL defensive coordinator. And my, has he let himself go.

It’s all quite meta. From the Wikipedia: The Wikipedia

The Wikipedia was founded in 2001 by Jimmy Wales and Larry Sanger and was originally intended only to complement the Nupedia, a free online encyclopedia of the more traditional form.

Articles to the site can be added and edited by any user, though certain controversial pages are limited to established users and site administrators.

The Wikipedia was available in 18 different languages by the end of 2001, 161 by the end of 2004 and is now available in 240 languages. The English-language edition has over two million entries, making it the largest encyclopedia ever compiled.

Needless to say, the Wikipedia’s Wikipedia page is rife with information about the Wikipedia. It includes criticisms of the Wikipedia and reports of various studies on the Wikipedia’s reliability.

I happen to think the Wikipedia is our greatest cultural achievement. How crazy is it to think that, when I was growing up, we had to take time out of our regular classes in school to go to the library and learn how to use reference materials? Do kids still have those sessions, or do they just learn how to search the Wikipedia, which takes about 10 seconds?

My parents had a Funk and Wagnalls encyclopedia, and we relied on it for nearly everything, even though it was from the early 1980s and perpetually thought the Soviet Union remained intact and the Berlin Wall upright.

We don’t need any of those things anymore, because we have the Wikipedia. And sure, maybe there are some errors, but those real encyclopedias, it turned out, had some errors too. And they didn’t have millions of users policing them all the time and editing out the most egregious of the mistakes.

The Wikipedia does, and it’s pretty damn accurate. I figured this out when I asked a doctor about a prescription medication I was taking and he went to its Wikipedia page to find out more. My wife is in med school now, and everyone there apparently relies on the Wikipedia for everything. At the very least, it can point people to more “legitimate” sources in the citations.

I have an iPhone now, which means I have access to the Wikipedia almost always. This has been, without a doubt, the best part about having an iPhone, and probably the best thing about technology ever. Unless I’m in a subway tunnel, I can get whatever information I want whenever I want it. It’s crazy, and it’s part of the reason the Wikipedia is the best thing humans have created.

In a related story, I co-founded a Taco Bell wiki a while back, and it sits mostly unedited. Get on it, Internet.

Don’t ask why. From the Wikipedia: Birdhouses.

The Wikipedia’s birdhouse, or “nest box” entry, contains frighteningly little information about birdhouses. Basically, all it confirms is that they exist, and they are houses made for birds.

So I’ll go ahead and assume they were invented in the Bavarian Alps by that region’s 18th century middle-school shop teachers.

Birdhouses are currently most sought-after by the American old, and maintain some popularity among birds.

Moreover, birdhouses are one of the most presumptuous human inventions.

“Hey, bird. I know you and your feathered ancestors have been perfectly fine on your own since the late Jurassic, but I figured there’s no way you could build yourself a home as nice as this one. Eh? Eh? We people have a fine sense of aesthetics, don’t we? See, it looks just like my house! Now you can live like a real person!”

And furthermore, birdhouses are another indication of how stupid birds are. If someone you didn’t even know — especially from a species that totally dominates yours — just set up houses for you at random, would you move in without a whole lot of suspicion? It seems way more likely it would be a trap, or haunted or something.

But birds don’t think that way, even though humans eat bird eggs for breakfast. Birds are just all, “hey, this seems like a good enough place to set up camp. I mean, look at how cute the roof is!”

They’re lucky that, in this case, the humans responsible usually have good intentions. But man, birds really have a lot of growing up to do.

Don’t ask what silly Wikipedia tangent brought me to this page, but it’s fascinating so I figured I’d share.

From the Wikipedia: the Count of St. Germain

The Count of St. Germain was an 18th-century man about town in London and also possibly in India. He was a charmer, for sure, and apparently a pretty talented violin player.

But the most interesting thing about the Count of St. Germain was that he either was immortal, or — more likely — was able to convince lots of people that he was immortal. Both are pretty impressive.

In fact, in some religions, people believe the Count was also Plato, St. Joseph (ie Jesus’ stepdad), Merlin, Christopher Columbus and English philosopher Francis Bacon, whom many believe to be responsible for writing all the plays attributed to Shakespeare. I’m skeptical, but if the Count was even three of those guys, that’s a pretty crazy resume.

The Wikipedia claims he supposedly dictated a book in 1670 even though he wasn’t “born” until 1710. It’s a pretty confusing Wikipedia page in general.

In any case, the Count of St. Germain should be lauded for his immortality or, at the very least, his ability to make Wikipedia editors suggest his immortality.

Fun fact: Pretty soon after I started writing for SNY.tv, I added myself to the Wikipedia page for Rockville Centre, New York, under “Notable Residents” in a vain attempt to drive up traffic. I briefly frolicked among the ranks of Dave Attell, Billy Donovan, Joan Jett, Segway inventor Dean Kamen, Sandy Koufax, Billy Idol ^{[citation definitely needed]} and Howard Stern.

Then, a couple months later, someone took me off the list of notable former Rockville Centre residents. I mean, I get that I’m not as notable as Billy Idol, but c’mon. Who took me down? It’s just messed up.

And to add to my frustration, two people I know pretty well have since been added to the same list, presumably not by themselves. They are ESPNews anchor and area stickball legend Kevin Connors and Taking Back Sunday drummer and incredibly nice dude Mark O’Connell, and they are both clearly more notable than me.

Chris requested this earlier in the time-travel post, then he found some more embarrassing pictures of Cole Hamels, so I figured I’d take a stab at it.

From the Wikipedia: the Higgs boson

Yeah, I’m sorry. I have no idea what the Higgs boson really is. Supposedly finding it will help explain why matter has mass, and it’s the last missing piece, apparently, of something called the Standard Model of particle physics. That’s all I know. Don’t ask me how or why or what exactly that means.

I really did try to figure this one out. I actually stumble my way onto Wikipedia posts related to theoretical physics with some frequency, and every single time I think, “OK, I’m going to try to see if l I can wrap my mind around this one.”

Doesn’t happen. In fact, it’s pretty rare I ever get past one sentence without encountering something I don’t know or can’t comprehend. Then, to make matters worse, I click on that thing, since it’s the Wikipedia, and then that thing’s article is also incomprehensible.

It’s frustrating on a number of levels. For one, theoretical physics apparently represent a giant hurdle in my quest for omniscience.

Second, it bothers me that there’s so much information about theoretical physics available on the Wikipedia. I mean, I get that the people who edit the Wikipedia are nerds and so are most theoretical physicists. But how many people must there be who understand this stuff for it to have such comprehensive coverage on the Wikipedia? Does every single person who gets what the Higgs boson is also edit the Wikipedia in his or her spare time?

I doubt it, and that makes it even worse. Because then that means there is a whole slew of people who can process this stuff, and only a small cross-section of them bother entering it into the Wikipedia.

There are probably thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people out there who know all about the search for the Higgs boson and why it’s important. But I am not one of them, and I think that’s depressing.

The second in the From the Wikipedia series highlights Godwin’s Law, which states that, as any threaded online discussion continues, the probability of a comparison involving NAZIs or Hitler approaches one.

This is both hilarious and pretty obviously true. People love nothing more than comparing one another to Hitler to make their points. And it’s funny because it’s such a pointless thing to do and a bad way to prove an argument.

One of the reasons I’m really excited to have this blog is that it provides a forum through which to more directly interact with readers, because I’m certain that’s where journalism is going. And I’ve been pleasantly surprised by the volume of comments so far, considering this blog technically hasn’t even launched yet.

But please, keep it civil. Hitler, I promise, is not lurking in the comments section of sabermetrically inclined New York sports blogs. Let’s assume that the people who make their way here are smart, reasonable humans with interesting and worthwhile opinions, and let’s not call each other morons until we prove it to be so.