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It’s a floor wax! No, it’s a dessert topping!

Although he denies that he’s a “cheese whiz,” which incidentally is the best pun I’ve heard since MeFi went crazy with horse humor a few weeks ago, reader Chris Thompson wrote in to point out that the World Cheese Index indeed has entries for the letters I’d missed in my cheese alphabet.

Kraft’s Cheez Whiz is no doubt a fine product, and I have no intention of disparaging it here, even if it is listed on Ray’s List of Weird and Disgusting Foods and contains as many types of preservatives as types of cheese and in addition to making a tasty snacktime treat, doubles as an effective laundry detergent.

Monday’s piece on kibibits inspired my friend Bim to unearth (heh) this amazing illustration of the powers of ten:

View the Milky Way at 10 million light years from the Earth. Then move through space towards the Earth in successive orders of magnitude until you reach a tall oak tree just outside the buildings of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee, Florida. After that, begin to move from the actual size of a leaf into a microscopic world that reveals leaf cell walls, the cell nucleus, chromatin, DNA and finally, into the subatomic universe of electrons and protons.

I pretty much loathe Java applets but this one is worth seeing.

After an evening playing Scattergories, in which the challege is to supply words, all beginning with the same randomly-selected letter, for each of 12 categories, my wife and I spent an obsessive few minutes populating the “cheese alphabet,” just in case “cheeses” was one of the categories in the game. (It isn’t, we learned with regret at the next session.)

Purely from memory, we got this far: asiago, american, brie, bleu, camembert, colby, cheddar, devonshire, dry jack, edam, feta, fontina, gouda, gruyere, goat, gorgonzola, green, havardi, jarlsberg, Kopfkäse, limberger, mozzarella, monterey jack, parmesan, pepper jack, provolone, provel, queso, raclette, romano, swiss, toe, tofurella, velveeta, wensleydale

I’m sure there are cheeses whose names begin with i, n, o, u, x, y, z, but I’m equally sure I can’t think of them!

The day after I spent four hours in the kitchen baking three dozen bagels and three baguettes, someone asked me whether I had any more bread in the works for the evening’s dinner. “No way,” I said, “I’m really fried on baking.”

We both looked at one another. “That came out oddly,” I said; “Let me try again: I’m really burned out on baking.”

I really said that. And if you give me a minute, I’ll cook up some more kitchen slang.