Two exotic-sounding ingredients have been making repeat performances on Bravo's Top Chef this season.

Ras el hanout has shown up in beet salad with goat cheese and in a foie gras mousse with peaches.

According to Larousse Gastronomique, ras el hanout is "a complex mixture of twenty or more ground spices, used mainly in Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The literal meaning is "head" or "top of the shop." Since the mixture was traditionally made from a market's superior spices, the name is fitting.

A call to Casablanca Restaurant in Arlington, Virginia, revealed what exactly is in the mix. Chef Nadir Elhajji, who is Moroccan, explained that the combination includes paprika, ginger, black and white pepper, curry, coriander, nutmeg, and cumin. Depending on the country, ras el hanout might also include garlic, rosemary, lavender, or saffron. It's available in some Middle Eastern stores and online, but chef Elhajji prefers to make his own from his battery of ground spices. He's not so sure about mixing ras el hanout with beets or peaches but does like it with lamb. He’ll combine four pounds of lamb chops, a sliced onion, and two teaspoons of ras el hanout in an ovenproof pot. Coat the meat, onions, and spice liberally with olive oil and cover the pot tightly. Cook for two to six hours in a 250-degree oven. Or, if you happen to be in Marrakesh, do what the locals do and place your pot in the smoldering fire used to heat the local Turkish bath.

The other unfamiliar guest ingredient is something called yuzu. This fun-to-pronounce fruit has been blended into a butter sauce for a chicken dish, tossed with fish, and—my favorite application—used to dress a "sexy banana salad."

Whole Foods' online citrus guide was helpful: "Quite popular in Japan where it is typically used in place of lemons, the bright yellow yuzu is occasionally found in ethnic markets in North America. In Japan, its highly acidic juice is used to flavor mushrooms and its zest is added to clear soups or atop fish or cooked vegetables. Whole yuzus wrapped in cheesecloth are placed in hot bathwater to celebrate the winter solstice, a highly aromatic and sensuous experience." Fresh ones are only available in the U.S. in winter; yuzu-enthusiasts can tide themselves over until then with bottled juice. At a Japanese grocery store in Virginia, seven ounces goes for $10. That’s a lot more than lemon juice! The grocer doesn't seem surprised by the cost of yuzu. "It has more flavor."

As for ras el hanout, Chef Elhajji, a fan of the show, isn’t that impressed: "I call ras el hanout the easy spice. It gets you all the flavor at once. Like having your coffee and sugar already mixed."

Perhaps its appeal is all in its unusual name. After all, bouquet garni is just a bunch of parsley and herbs. But top chefs love it.

-Catherine Barker

I can’t sing, sew, dance, smile with my eyes, or make fire without a match, so really, I’m not reality show fodder. But now I have new hope: Fox TV is casting for Hole in the Wall, an American version of a Japanese program.

Let’s see if I can describe the show using my words. A player stands at the edge of a pool as a big pink wall comes sliding over. In the wall is a cutout shape. The player has to jump, leap, or contort himself into the proper position to sail through the cutout. If the player fails, the wall knocks him or her into the pool of water. Ha ha ha! So funny! And the screen flashes the word “Not Clear,” just in case you weren’t sure what happened. Elsewhere in the show the player and two teammates have to get through more complicated shapes, like a cutout of three people jumping. If you’re not clear as to what the show is like, see it for yourself.

No wonder the show is number one in its Japanese time slot.

Hole in the Wall is clearly part of Japan’s plan to  dominate world media. There are versions in Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, Colombia, Denmark, Germany, Hong Kong, India, Israel, Malaysia, Mexico, Russia, Sweden and the U.K.  Fox hasn’t yet set an airdate, but if you believe you are a skilled wall-jumper-througher, you can audition at the Dave & Buster’s in Irvine, California, on June 1 (11 a.m. to 6 p.m.), at the Dave & Buster’s in New York’s Times Square on June 14 (9 a.m. to 4 p.m.), and at the Marriott Atlanta Perimeter Center, also on June 14 (10 a.m. to 5 p.m.).

And if jumping through a hole in a wall seems a bit daunting, you can petition Fox to adapt another Japanese reality show: Folks are tied to a wall, marshmallows are dangled on a string, and they have to try and take a bite.

-Marc Silver

I recently saw a hippo and rhino go head to head in the heart of Washington, D.C.

To be more precise, I saw a band called Flight of the Conchords perform their rap-folk crossover hit "Hiphopopotamus vs. Rhymenoceros."

If you choose to proceed
You will indeed concede
Cause I hit you with my flow,
the wild rhino stampede ….

They call me the Hiphopopotamus,
with flows that glow like phosphorous
popping off the top of this
esophagus
rockin' this metropolis …

I've been a diehard fan of this two-man folk novelty band from New Zealand since I first saw their HBO series, also called Flight of the Conchords, last June. The show chronicles their hilarious efforts to break into the New York City music scene. These brilliantly awkward everymen are gifted musical satirists, with a Grammy to show for it, and a newly released eponymous CD.

Meanwhile, it turns out that the two big-boned vegetarians, by which I mean the rhino and the hippo, have a long history in the Big Apple. Scott Sendrow, a park historian for New York City, helped me uncover the early years.

It seems a hippo was the first of the two to mark the city's turf. In the 1800's the zoo was more or less a parking lot for circuses. The big top kept ownership of their animals but conveniently lent them out for display (and feeding) during the off-season. A hippo was the first zoo animal to belong to the city; in 1892 a new director bartered off the hippo's calves to build a city-owned menagerie. The exchange rate at the time: one young hippo was worth a lioness, a Siberian tiger, two leopards, two Indian antelope, two pelicans, and, showing some prescient fashion sense, a pair of pumas.

Then came the rhinos. A team sent from New York to nab one from eastern Africa in 1911 described their task as the equivalent of  "lassoing a locomotive." A few years later a double horned rhino with the handle "Old Smiles" retired to the zoo from a country circus but still had enough grit to menace a group of keepers trying to dress him with a crown made from parsley. A rhino named Bessie, in residence in the Bronx Zoo in the 1930s, caught the eye of renowned animal sculptor Katherine Lane Weems, who was commissioned by Harvard University to immortalize her in bronze – twice.

The Conchords ultimately don't settle the rhino-hippo showdown, but it's fair to say both animals end up better off than the elephant, who gets a shoutout in the track "Robots"—a good news/bad news glimpse into a robot-dominated world where there is no more unethical treatment of the elephants, because, well, there are no more elephants.

-Brad Scriber

Photo by Amelia Handscomb

Alex Trebek is a do-it-yourself host. On a lunchtime break from his duties as chief interrogator for National Geographic’s National Geography Bee on May 20 and 21, he picked up a dictionary and got busy. He had his list of questions (and answers) in a binder. If he saw a name he wasn’t sure how to pronounce—like Jengish Chokusu, a mountain peak on the China-Kyrgyzstan border—he’d look it up and insert diacritical marks to guide his tongue (the accent goes on the middle syllable of Chokusu). A consummate multitasker, he agreed to be interviewed while juggling questions and place names and sipping a glass of wine. “I have to work, so I must be half-tanked,” he joked.

Have you learned a lot of geography from hosting the Geography Bee for 20 years?
I’ve learned some stuff. But I’m not likely to retain the information. Keep in mind I have another program I do based on information that takes up a lot of my available random access memory. [Hosting the Bee] has taught me that many of our young kids are very well informed about the world. But I get to see the crème de la crème.

How would you do in the Bee?
Not particularly well. Any of the kids could beat me.

Most Bee contestants are male – as they are on Jeopardy, right?
There are now more women on Jeopardy than men, though that’s not always been the case. I think we’re about 55/45 women to men. Maybe it augurs well for the Geography Bee.

You’re Canadian. If you had to write a question about Canada for the Geography Bee, what would it be?
Most people don’t realize that this Canadian city lies directly south of a major American city.

Is it … Windsor?
Yes, it is Windsor … and Detroit!

Will there ever be another Jeopardy contestant like Ken Jennings, who won $2.52 million on 74 consecutive shows?
How do you even begin to dream that there is the possibility of another Ken Jennings? There might be, but it took us, what, 20 years to get Ken, and it might well take 20 more years to come up with somebody who will achieve or surpass Ken’s mark. Unless we find some contestant on steroids.

Do you have any favorite place names you get a kick out of saying?
Some names just sound great. Samarkand. In Asia. You cannot say Samarkand without thinking of something exotic. Just the sound of the word: Samarkand.

Any favorite North American place names?
Piscataway, New Jersey. Pis-CAT-a-way. Not PIS-ca-tawee. You drive through New Jersey and you want to exercise your pronunciation skills, just try to correctly pronounce a lot of the Indian place names. Your normal approach to pronounciation is thrown a curve. What’s the one in Florida? Kis-SI-mmee. Looking at it you’d think Lake KISS-a-mee!

It’s impressive that Jeopardy has become such a part of the fabric of people’s lives.
I got a letter recently from someone who told me about his mother dying. She went into a coma. They knew she was on her last hours. And his sisters went in and spent time. And because she had always watched Jeopardy, they turned on the program. One of the clues came up. She opened her eyes, and gave the response. And died. Came out of a coma and said, you know, “What is Panama … whatever.” Boom. Gone. I thought it was an amazing story.

Are you always being recognized by fans who go, “Alex, I’ll take potpourri for $100?
A lady recognized me on the street here in D.C., and she said, “Pat Sajak!”

Think you can match the 11-year-old who won the 2008 National Geographic Bee? Test yourself with the five questions from the championship round, then watch video of the tense final minutes.

-Marc Silver

Ah, Nebraska. The 37th state’s name conjures any number of iconic Midwestern images: homesteaders spilling over the Great Plains, Cornhuskers rushing to gridiron glory, undead pole-dancers in thrall to European existentialism. Wait, what?

No, it’s true: Zombie Strippers is a new film about a reanimating virus—developed to resurrect cannon fodder for the Bush administration’s various wars—that escapes from the lab and takes root in a strip club called the Rhino in the mythical Nebraska town of Sartre. The club’s employees read Nietzsche and mirror the conformity-minded characters in Eugène Ionesco’s absurdist play Rhinoceros.

But let’s get back to that Nebraska angle. After all, we at Pop Omnivore are dedicated to “the increase and diffusion of geographic knowledge” (our magazine’s original mission statement). So naturally we want to know how Nebraska—the state responsible for Arbor Day (established in 1872 by one J. Sterling Morton of Nebraska City) and Kool-Aid (1927, Edward Perkins, Hastings), among other wholesome things—feels about being the setting for the first-ever zombie-stripper movie.

“Honestly, this is the first I’ve ever heard of it,” says Barry Kennedy, president of the Nebraska Chamber of Commerce. “It’s called what—Zombie Strippers? Don’t know anything about it.”

Fair enough: The film’s only in limited release, and will probably be out on DVD before it screens in Omaha. Maybe someone more “in the know” would know, someone like Laurie Richards of the Nebraska Film Office.

“Regarding your inquiry,” she tells us via e-mail, “we have not been contacted by anyone with reference to a film you suggest to have been lensed in Nebraska called Zombie Strippers.”

Who said anything about “lensed in Nebraska”? We just said the movie’s set there. Anyway, we get the picture: Nebraskans in Nebraska don’t seem to know anything about this flick. But what about a Nebraskan not in Nebraska, someone like Shelley Sperry, a researcher and writer here at National Geographic? We asked her about the film—and hit the state-pride jackpot.

“This movie is a total fantasy and really insulting,” she says, “what with the majority of zombies in Nebraska being wholesome, girl-next-door types who know how to keep their shirts on. These are elitist, Hollywood, Paris Hilton–wannabee zombies who probably eat their human flesh with truffle oil and arugula. [Film tagline: “They’ll dance for a fee but devour you for free.”] Your average ’Husker zombie is more interested in raising a blue-ribbon calf for the state fair than showing off in a g-string.”

Then again, she did follow up by sending us a link to Nebraska strip clubs. It’s like the state slogan says: “Nebraska, possibilities … endless.”

- Jeremy Berlin