Modern genius

Despite the Hatchling's shortcomings in classical mechanics and abstract algebra, she is doing well in fields.  Botany, for example.  She has been hampered somewhat by being unable to pronounce the word "flower" - producing something more akin to "fla-fa", but nevertheless her theoretical knowledge is excellent.

Just the other day when I was eating a plate of nasi lemak, she pointed at the red-skinned roasted peanuts on my plate and said, "Bean! Bean!".  Now it would easy to patronisingly assume that she had mistaken the red peanuts for kidney beans, which she had in fact eaten just several days earlier.  I, however, knew that she knew that peanuts are not true nuts but are actually a variety of legume, or bean.

Well played, little Hatchling, well played.

Wasting rice

One of my hobbies that I just invented for the purposes of this post is collecting sayings relating to the wasting of rice.  I'd never heard of such a thing until my Smaller Half told me about some of the dreadful things her parents used to say to her to get her to eat all her rice.  Apparently this is something of a tradition in families from cultures where rice is king.  They used to say to her:

Every grain of rice you don't eat will be a pockmark on your face when you grow up.

But what really piqued my interest was that they didn't say that to her brother.  To him they said,

Every grain of rice you don't eat will be a pockmark on your wife's face when you grow up.

Ah, the gender politics of grain consumption.

I came across two more when reading Maeve O'Meara's Food Safari yesterday.  From Vietnam we have:

Every grain of rice you waste becomes a maggot that you have to eat in Hell.

Ingenious, not only because of the rice=maggot image that lingers in your mind for far too long, especially if you eat rice regularly, but because of the inbuilt assumption that you're going to Hell anyway.

And from Japan we have:

Be careful when washing rice - if even one grain goes down the drain, you'll go blind.

At first glance this really ups the ante - blindness for just one grain!  But in my opinion it's misguided.  Once that first grain is lost by accident - and accidents happen - further losses are insufficiently disincentivized.

If any of you were threatened in brutal or baroque ways by your parents for wasting rice, I'd like to hear about it.  Please, for the sake of future generations, speak up!