Cloak and Chef's Knife

A few days ago I saw the funniest ad while working out. It was a recruitment ad for the CIA and its tagline was "Why work for a company when you can serve the nation?" I almost fell from the treadmill.

I am pretty sure that they wanted to do "Why work for a company when you can work for The Company", but then decided that not everyone would understand the humor. Intelligence community slang always cracks me up. They could do an ad spot with a dude looking for a place to send his resume and getting the response "No Such Agency".

I wonder if chefs call their school "The Company". I own a book called The Professional Chef's Knife Kit published by that CIA. I also know a guy that owns an official CIA chef's knife (which is very cool), but I can't find one online - searches for CIA and knife return very wrong results.


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What's All this Then?

My name is Michael Krakovskiy, and this is my blog.

Here's what you might find interesting:
100 Views of the Empire State Building project: I try to take 100 interesting photos of Manhattan's (sadly) tallest building.

My Gastronomic Adventures: I eat weird food - from 13 year old New Coke to Durian and parasitic fungi.

My attempts to grow exotic plants: pineapples, coconuts, etc.

My photos, mostly of New York City.

My musings about architecture mostly illustrated with my own photos. Would you like to learn about a mental patient who died at 103 who served as a model for some very famous sculptures? How about Brooklyn's ugliest building? How about a wooden skyscraper?

I find myself frequently writing about logos. The most popular article I ever wrote is about the redesigns of the Starbucks logo.

I wrote a series of "Best Sci-Fi You Haven't Read" posts:

Psywarrior
Yes, Virginia There Is Synergy
Call Time Police - We've Got a Time Traveler

Other topics that interest me include NYPD, New York City subway system, Japan, and things made out of titanium. On top of all of that, I seem to be interested in pigeions and Rupert Murdoch.

Dear reader, please browse around. You are sure to find something interesting. I could really use some help in bringing in readership: subscribe to the rss feed, digg the stories (there's a convenient button at the bottom of every article), link to my blog from yours, write some comments. I put in a lot of effort into writing, and I really appreciate your attention.

If you don't want all this pseudo-intellectual bullshit and want some lolcats? Please don't go away. Here, I have that stuff too. Here, here's another. And another. And another. I lied about not posting cat pictures.

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