Lorem Ipsum

These items do have themes, but no one set of them seemed worth an entry of its own, so I'm posting three unrelated sets in one entry.

Pages of fake (and entertaining) reviews:

• Product: Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon. "There's nothing better than milk - well except maybe radishes." "Has anyone else tried pouring this stuff over dry cereal? A-W-E-S-O-M-E!" "This milk worked well when I first got it, but within a few days it wouldn't hold a charge."
• Recipe: Salted Water For Boiling. "This is a great make ahead recipe. It will keep up to 3 days, covered, in the refrigerator. Just bring to a boil and serve." "No way would I go to all this trouble again. I am buying mine premixed."
• Books: the Family Circus books, by Bil Keane. These are the granddaddies (grandmommies?) of the online-fake-review genre (medium? form?); sadly, Amazon deletes many of these fake reviews over time, but there have been hundreds if not thousands posted over the years, and there are always new ones.

A couple of serious items about mammoths (no word on whether these are also relevant to mimmoths):

• A new scientific technique for getting good DNA samples from hair has "yielded a mass of new information about woolly mammoths."
• Several mammoth tusks from 35,000 years ago "show signs of having being peppered with meteorite fragments."

In old books, I've seen many references to wire recordings, but was never sure what that meant, so I finally looked it up:

• Wikipedia article on Wire recording explains that in the 1940s and early 1950s (and earlier in more expensive versions), before tape recorders, there were wire recorders that recorded audio magnetically on spools of thin wire, "nearly as fine as hair."
• Wire Recorders page at Video Interchange (a site for recovery and restoration of old audio and video recordings) has more info and photos.

I'm still unclear, though, on whether the phrase "wearing a wire" is a holdover from the days of wire recording, or whether it refers to the wire from the microphone to the transmitter.