Wednesday, February 09, 2005

A Cheesy Database

If you are lactose intolerant read no further. As an amateur cheese aficionado and lover of databases, I have a database of the cheeses I've tried, various qualities of them like flavor, aroma, hardness, wine pairings, etc. I decided to see if anyone else had done something similar, and, not surprisingly, someone has. In fact, it's probably the first place you'd look —cheese.com.

Cheese.com claims to have 652 cheeses in its database. You can use the basic search tool or browse by country, texture, milk, and more. Each entry includes a description, country, milk, recommended wine, and producer (although wine and producer appear to be "undefined" in the ones I tried).

The site itself is straightforward with unobtrusive ads on the right. However, while the database is fairly large, the lack of further information (serving suggestions, pairings, recipes, etc.), photos, and style make cheese.com a bit underwhelming.

A better bet is igourmet.com, which is an e-commerce site, but offers a great deal of information (and photos!) of cheese. Also, it offers serving suggestions, recipes, and related items. When the related items button is clicked it brings up similar cheeses and foods, which is pretty cool if you're putting out a cheese plate.

IFfanyone know of a better database, I'm all ears!

Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Lost in Translation

I think this is a fairly popular site, but maybe you haven't yet run across it. It's called http://www.engrish.com and it's all about the sometimes flailing attempts by Japanese marketers to translate copy into English.

It's a pretty large collection of examples and I strongly suggest you check out much of it. You'll be laughing loud and often.