I’m gonna believe A LOT OF THINGS before I believe that “senior sexting” is a bona fide trend.

Roger Cohen’s IHT column about eating dog in China is raising hackles in the dog-loving precincts of the Internets. Let’s establish first that Cohen definitely did eat dog.

The menu was predictably dog-dominated: dog paws, dog tail, dog brain, dog intestine, even dog penis. We went for a dog broth, simmered for four hours, with Sichuan pepper and ginger. It was warming, with a pepper-tingle. The meat was tender, unctuous, blander than pork, but stronger than chicken. Later, the owner, Chen Zemin, explained how the best dogs for eating had yellow coats, weighed 30 pounds, and did miracles for arthritis.

But the beagle-owing Cohen has a larger point to make.

I’m not happy that I ate dog. But I’m happy China eats dog. It so proclaims both a particularity to be prized in a homogenizing world and its rationality. Anyone who doesn’t want China to eat dog must logically embrace pigs as pets.

Fair enough. Still, if I were a pig, I’d be a little concerned. I think I’d just as soon be eaten.

This, the first of two recipes we will provide for you for this weekend’s festivities, is even easier than you think! Yes you can! USA, USA!

Even if you don’t like football, and have not watched a single match this season, America demands that you will gather with friends on Sunday and drink beer and watch a game. If only to see the commercials. Really, it’s the least you can do. The advertising agency spends the whole year selflessly making all our lives better. This is their big night. They’ve spent so much money-$2.6 million for every 30 seconds, more than they’ve ever spent before-that you owe it to them, we all owe it them, to watch. And you must do this in company. And gamble money on things you don’t understand. You will be drunk. Suck it up and enjoy.

Besides the money you will never see again, how else should you contribute to the party that it is your solemn duty as an American to attend? How about make guacamole? You will be popular. You will be even more popular if you follow these instructions, because this is the best way to make guacamole. It is called “The Ceviche Method.” (So named by someone who is maybe a bit too proud of his one original culinary discovery.)

First, do not make the guacamole at your own home and bring it to the party covered in cellophane. Your guacamole is not a toilet seat at a high-school party. It is to eat fresh. Make it there. Surely your host or hosts has or have a knife and a bowl and a place to cut and mash things in his or her or their kitchen. And salt, you don’t need to bring salt. Bring the other ingredients: one avocado for every two people who will be at the party, slightly more onions than that, more garlic, jalapeno peppers and cilantro than you think you’d want, and limes. Lots of those, too. Lots and lots of limes. The limes are key. You start with them.

Cut open your limes and squeeze the juice into the bowl. Make a nice deep pool in the bottom of the bowl. Or a bath. An acid bath. You will be soaking all your spicy, bad-breath making ingredients in an acid bath to soften their potentially overpowering flavors and save the party from collective halitosis.

Now, chop up the onions, garlic, jalapeno peppers and cilantro. (Oh, seriously, take the seeds out of the jalapeno peppers first.) Chop everything into very small pieces. Even smaller than regulation-size casino dice. Do you like the movie Goodfellas? If you do (meaning, if you’re not a terrible person), maybe you’d like to slice the garlic into pieces so thin they’d liquefy in a pan with just a little oil. It’s a good system. Even though you won’t be using a pan or oil.

You’re cooking with lime-just like how people who live in very hot places, like, say, Costa Rica, which you may have visited many years ago, are able to enjoy the “raw” fish in ceviche. Perhaps you were hesitant to try this foreign dish, this raw fish being served to you in a plastic cup, that which looked like it had been sitting unrefrigerated for some time in such a hot place. Until perhaps someone smarter than you explained that the acid in the lime juice (and maybe in the jalepeno peppers, too?) actually cooked the fish-denaturing the proteins, if you want to get scientific about it. Costa Rico is beautiful, isn’t it?

As you finish chopping each ingredient, dump it into the bowl.

Besides Goodfellas, do you also like the television show “Top Chef”? Despite your frequent annoyance with regular judge Gail Simmons and the way she always says, “This could use a little more acid,” about every dish she tastes, even when she could just as easily say “lime” or “lemon” or “vinegar” or whatever? Like she’s some kind of scientist or Deadhead? Are you surprised to find yourself using the word so much right now?

Once all the flavorful ingredients are in their lime-juice bath, go away. Go back to the television and watch more commercials. Consider buying something. Come on, someone’s going to have to get us out of this recession! Or make a bet about something else. You don’t need to like or even understand football to have a good time. Drink beer. Fast. Chug. Faster. Chug it. Go! Go! Go!

After five or ten minutes and beers, go back into the kitchen and chop up all the avocados and put them into the bowl with the lime juice and the no-longer-raw onions, garlic, jalapenos peppers and cilantro. Mosh everything up with a fork. Salt to taste. You are done. You are popular. Explain the miraculous secret when anyone asks how you have made guacamole so flavorful and delicious and with such a pleasant aftertaste.

by Luke Mazur

A friend emailed me last week. The subject line read: “Have you seen this?” The body of the email was without text-just a pasted in Wikipedia entry for “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.”

This is what the body of the email looked like: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_buffalo_Buffalo_buffalo.

What the fuck, I thought, before actually clicking on. Who was mocking my city like this? Buffalo, NY has a proper Wikipedia entry; I’d read it countless times before. This “Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo” entry then must be a joke.

But a joke about what? Was the Wiki entry mocking how people who are from Buffalo always tend to find a way to bring up their city in conversation? Or was it a virus meant to trap people who are from Buffalo, NY? Surely the only people to click on such a ridiculous link are those with a severe complex about where they are from. Those who remember with pride, for instance, that Governor Mario Cuomo announced he’d be rooting for the Buffalo Bills in the 1991 Super Bowl, a historic game, where we’d play the New York Giants. Mario’s reasoning was that the Giants played their home games in New Jersey, and as such the Bills were New York State’s home team. Well?

Finally I opened the link. (Not to real talk, but even if it wasn’t safe for work, I don’t have a job anyhow, so no harm in boldness.) And it turns out the eight Buffaloes actually comprise one grammatically correct sentence. It took me a really long time to understand how this was so. Apparently my attention span is so warped that a string of eight words, even if they’re all the same word, is difficult to read.

To read the sentence properly, it helps to know that “buffalo” can function as a verb. When it does, it means “to bully” or “to intimidate.” For example, the bar exam I will be taking later this month still buffaloes me.

Also know that in this particular sentence when “buffalo” is capitalized it functions as an adjective, and not as the city Mario Cuomo considers part of New York State. As an adjective it means “from Buffalo.” Think Buffalo Bills, or even Buffalo wings. (That is, by the way, why they’re called that.)

If you wedge an imaginary “that” (or a “who,” if you really want to anthropomorphize the buffalo) between the second and third words of the sentence, it reads better. Which is to say, Buffalo buffalo [who] Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo. However, the sentence remains slightly odd: the city of Buffalo doesn’t have buffalo of its own. In fact, the ones at the Buffalo zoo are actually American Bison. (Note though that in the preceding sentence, “Buffalo” is functioning as an adjective.)

It would be really useful to diagram this sentence. Luckily, we learned how to do that in 10th grade. Unfortunately, like many things about high school, I don’t remember how I did it. Just that I did. For instance, that year we also read Macbeth, but all I seem to remember was that the emo kids were all “out, out brief candle.” This too, even after we had to read it and then listen to it read to us, and then read it again. There was possibly something about a porter who took a whiskey drink and then a vodka drink. And a Banquo. But how to visually conceptualize a sentence? That memory faded quicker than Mario’s presidential prospects.

OK so if you are in fact able to wrap your head around the sentence, you’ll see it’s quite the circle jerk. Buffalo who get bullied by other buffalo bully more buffalo. It’s kind of similar to how one kid bullies another kid and then that kid who just got bullied goes and bullies me. Lord of the Flies meets Western New York, if they were buffalo native to this corner of the world. A pecking order of bullshit, that exists primarily within a made-up universe.

That’s sort of what grammar is. Right?

Luke Mazur is getting back on the bar exam bandwagon, by George!

Here is your snow report for the metropolitan New York area, specifically Manhattan’s East Village: Nothin’ yet. Further bulletins as events warrant.

Sure, it’s from Tuesday, but since nothing on the Internet is ever really old, we’ll pass it along: Po, a “three-year-old reptile from Taipei in Taiwan has become hooked on nicotine, thanks to his owner Sho Lau’s 20-a-day habit.” He apparently gets really pissy when Sho Lau doesn’t have any smokes to spare, which, you know, I can totally identify with.

by Katie Baker

At first I was fairly heated up about the Sports Illustrated cover shot of shredding sensation Lindsey Vonn. Absurd from every angle-and boy, are there ever angles-it’s got her all glammed up in a pretty power princess kind of way, all glossy hair and painted lips. You have to squint your eyes toward the base of her Red Bull-endorsed headthing to see, but I’m pretty sure she’s wearing diamond hoop earrings. All that aside, there’s other bait: consider, as someone pointed out, the unfortunate juxtaposition of a certain set of letters.

But now I’m pretty much over it. For the real crime, as it turns out, is the blandest of all: unoriginality.

For just as the 90’s are BACK in high fashion and literature, so too have we trawled them for cover design. From 1992:

He’s wearing a helmet, but still, fair enough.

(Props to the mag, by the way, for the slick and searchable “SI Vault”; it’s amazing the number of outrageous ski-themed covers from the 50’s and 60’s. Should you be so inclined, do check out 1957’s “New American Look in Ski Clothes”. Ooh, I like this lady’s lipstick! And I know 1968 wasn’t the brightest of years, but come on: Jean-Claude Killy sure makes up for a lot.)

It’s always so awkward when athletes doll up. Was there anything worse than Kerri Strug in street clothes? Vonn pulls it off mostly, but for all of her marketable polish she remains kind of a goof. A goof who likes to go 150 on the autobahn!

But enough about skiers. I’ve covered that ground, which is more than can be said for the snow in Vancouver. Things are getting so bad that they’re building jumps with hay bales and trucking in snow. Olympic officials (who must be freaking out) are gritting their teeth and making harried statements. “It’s beautifully white and clean and it looks great on television,” said Renee Smith-Valade.

She meant the snow, not Joe Biden, who will be leading the US delegation in Vancouver. Given his considerable foreign relations expertise and his ongoing involvement with the Special Olympics, I can’t think of a more suitable man for the job.

As far as I have been able to ascertain via Google, this particular diplomatic assignment involves hanging out with Mike Eruzione and Peggy Fleming, and oh my God, is Biden going to wear a warmup and march in the parade!? This column on the wonderfully manic Brian Burke seems to suggest as much, but I’m not going to get all my hopes up just yet.

Given the lack of meteorological cooperation-cue the “shoulda had the Olympics in DC!” yuks-many athletes must be glad they’re competing indoors. And while someone has already got the Johnny Weir beat covered, less attention has been paid to some other blade-wearing athletes.

The US speedskaters, who along with Vonn are the country’s top medal contenders, got bad news in October when large sponsor DSB, a Dutch bank, went kaput. The speedskating federation, faced with a $300,000 hole in its budget, was bailed out by an unlikely benefactor: Stephen Colbert. No stranger to odd publicity stunts, Colbert used his powers for good in asking viewers to donate to the cause. In the first week alone they raised $202,000.

It was not without controversy. Shani Davis, who holds several world records in long track and is widely expected to take home some gold medals, went on record against the talk show host. “He’s a jerk,” he told a reporter in early December. “You can put that in the paper.” No one, including Davis’s pal Apolo Ohno, was quite certain of the reason for the rancor; as it turned out, Davis was likely reacting to a 2006 bit in which Colbert faux-chastised him for not skating in the team pursuit event in Turin.

It was a touchy subject. The team pursuit “flap” in Turin resulted in a public feud between Davis and teammate Chad Hedrick that overshadowed Davis’ gold medal in the 1000m (the first gold to a black athlete in an individual Winter event in Olympics history) and culminated in a press conference so horrifically painful that it moved ESPN writer Eric Adelson to reach deep into history for a suitable comparison:

It’s funny. This type of rivalry goes all the way back to the beginning of U.S. history. More than 200 years ago, a Northerner named Alexander Hamilton and a Southerner named Thomas Jefferson disliked each other so intensely that a new nation nearly crumbled in their wake. And even though that rift still exists today, we have both of them to thank for the role they played in building America.

We can only hope to eventually say the same about the fallout from SkateGate II.

While Davis and Hedrick have yet to forge a new republic, they now exist on civil terms. And the rift with Colbert is a thing of the past-Davis even agreed to appear on the show.

Still, Davis remains a bit of a lone wolf, self-coached and self-represented. He has no ties to the US Speedskating Federation, and by request does not even appear in the media guide. His mother handles his press, which is to say: she is the one who denies the requests. (This go-it-aloneness, apparently, is like catnip to the Dutch: this ABC piece introduces us to characters like Ruud Bakker-no relation-the “leader of Kleintje Pils, a [Dutch] band that travels to most major skating meets and has serenaded the American for years.”)

The issue of Sports Illustrated pictured above contains lengthy profiles of Davis as well as Vonn; expect them, along with Ohno, Evan Lysacek, Shaun White-and who knows, maybe the bobsledder dudes?-to dominate coverage.

And in spite of my reluctance to reward the SI cover designers for their uninspired choice, it’s worth getting a copy of the Vonn-fronted SI, if only as a guide to who’s who in all the random sports, but also so you can flip to a second photo of her on page 52.

Because while much is the same as the cover shot-Red Bull screams prominently from the front of her head, her legs splay in impossible angles, and she’s still wearing pink; no word on the earrings though-in this one she is actually in motion, leaning into a turn, glaring out from behind her goggles, pressing her tongue against the roof of her mouth with the concentration of a four-year-old learning to write out her letters.

It’s a much better look.

Katie Baker writes mostly about sports and weddings and so the Winter Olympics just kind of seemed like the next logical step.

I’m not sure why I find myself so affected by the news that Timothy McSweeney has died. As John Donne meditated, any man’s death diminishes me, but I think there’s probably something about the poignancy of his story that gets me too. [Via]

I know that most of you will be watching “Project Runway” on your DVRs or rereading “Middlemarch” during Sundays’ Superbowl. But in the interest of helping you fit in with any football-lovers you may encounter, well, we can help. Just make sure to drop a few of these golden ditties.

BEFORE THE GAME:

1. “Dwight Freeney is the key. If he can’t play, or plays but can’t push coming off the edge, the Colts are going to have to get better interior pressure on Brees.”

2. “I heard CBS was going to run a pro-abortion commercial, too. It starred the entire cast of ‘Jersey Shore.’”

3. “If Reggie Bush is going to get to the House, he’s going to have to be much more elusive in the Red Zone.”

4. “The Saints defense is rated 25th in the NFL. That’s below both the Snorks and the Smurfs.”

DURING THE FIRST HALF:

5. “We might be witnessing the greatest aerial assault since Manfred Albrecht Freiherr von Richthofen held his ‘Bloody April’ in 1917!”

6. “Well, this game sucks. But there’s only 11 days til pitchers and catchers report for Spring Training.”

7. “If that gray ash stuff keeps the smoke monster away, why don’t they sprinkle a little around the entire circumference of the island?”

8. “I haven’t seen a Saint get burned on coverage that bad since Joan of Arc!”

HALFTIME:

9. “Man, I miss Prince-I mean, I miss Janet Jackson’s rack.”

DURING THE SECOND HALF:

10. “Peyton Manning is only pretending to change the play at the line of scrimmage. He’s actually composing a Language Poem.”

11. “The Saints’ only hope is that, at some point during the third quarter, Caldwell decides to rest his starters for the offseason.”

12. “That tackle was so homoerotic, it could have been a commercial for that Mancrush or whatever the hell it’s called website!”

Word is that crazy news about New York’s governor is coming down the Times pike in the possibly very near future. (Déjà vu, anyone?) The Daily News’ Liz Benjamin hears: “The rumor mill has been running overtime in recent weeks about Paterson and the possibility that a major newspaper is about to drop a bombshell story about his personal life that will be far worse than his acknowledged extramarital affair with a former state employee.” And Observer media reporter John Koblin says: “anyone hearing about NYT bombshell on Paterson?” Don’t you love Fridays? As a counterpoint: don’t expect this to be as mindblowing as the Spitzer thing. For one thing, I mean, well, our standards with Paterson are kind of low. Also, we hear we might have to wait a while. The life of Mr. Paterson is a complicated thing to unravel, apparently!