Missing the regular coffee posts? Don’t forget thebeanstalker.com – where you’ll also see this video posted. Amongst other coffee related gems.
The video claims, rightly or not, that the Enlightenment was fuelled by caffeine. Don’t believe it? Check out this further video.
Chess Boxing looks tough, but it’s too cerebral. What real men want when they turn to pugilistic pursuits is fireworks. Literally.
People were tougher in the past.
Here’s the reworking of a classic old poem for the occasion.
The boy stood in the burning ring
Amidst the flames and flickers.
He ducked and dived, but did not stress,
For he wore asbestos knickers.
This is a pretty impressive toy-dance-off-stop-motion-video-featuring-Michael-Jackson-and-Mr-Bean, I can say, almost without hesitation, that it’s the best toy-dance-off-stop-motion-video-featuring-Michael-Jackson-and-Mr-Bean on the internet.
Michael Jackson vs Mr. Bean from Pascal Blais Animation Studio on Vimeo.
Celebrations about Rebecca Black’s decision to remove her phenomenal smash hit from YouTube citing some sort of “copyright dispute” (we all know she just realised it was awful) will be short lived. Why? Well. Watch. The question “can this song possibly sound worse” has been answered in the affirmative.
Paranoid Android is one of those iconic song covers that everybody who is anybody has in their repertoire. Or so it seems. This is a very cool pastiche of extant YouTube covers of Radiohead’s hit.
Apparently Radiohead loves it. Which isn’t surprising.
Pretty cool – there’s a bigger piano jam featuring Lang Lang (a Chinese piano prodigy/superstar) on YouTube, but it’s almost unwatchable because someone shot it on a shaky mobile phone camera.
It’s a strange time to be a person. Apparently the solution to all of our sexism problems is to remove the gender distinction. We are all the same. Now, I’m going to take my Christian hat off for the moment, and ignore that the Bible suggest gender is part of the created order (male and female he created them…). And I’d like to open this post by acknowledging that there are disparities in the way men and women are treated that are wrong.
I don’t even care that much if women want to fight on the front line. If a woman is big enough, and strong enough, and is able enough to take the place in a unit that would otherwise have been held by a man, on merit, then who am I to tell them they can’t. I just don’t think that’s particularly likely, and I think it opens a Pandorah’s box of issues within a unit, which isn’t, of itself, a reason not to allow it. Do I think women should be on the front line? No. But if some want to, then that’s their decision, not mine. This whole push to revolutionise the military’s gender agenda off the back of some demonstrably shoddy sexual ethics seems like the symptom of a broader social push to mimimise the difference between genders. I think this move is driven by good motives – but it’s just incredibly stupid.
Doesn’t this just seem completely loopy to everybody else. Boys and girls are obviously different. They don’t just have different parts. They have different hormones. Hormones that produce different emotions. Gender is predominantly a “nature” issue, sure, there are “nurture” aspects to it – but the social side follows the natural side in this case.
I’ve held off saying anything on this topic for a while. But events in the last few weeks are tipping my hand. I just feel annoyed as I watch this issue have bizarre and dangerous outworkings.
A few months ago a Christian student in the US sparked a massive furore in the blogosphere, and probably on talkback radio, when he refused to wrestle a girl on religious grounds. The Friendly Atheist thinks he should have grappled the girl into submission (and a follow up). Angry commenters there suggested it is wrong to recognise differences between the genders. And in many cases it is. I’d say issues of physical strength aren’t one of those cases – the world records in every athletic event out there are pretty clear.
Now. I was told, all my life, not to hit girls. It didn’t stop me bullying my sisters, sometimes physically, until I was old enough and big enough that the physical disparity was clearly unfair. This happened when I was about 15. It should have happened earlier. In hindsight I feel pretty bad about the way I treated my sisters. The older me would beat some sense into the younger me in a number of areas. This would be one of them. Hitting girls is wrong. Guys are stronger. It’s just facts. There are some girls who are stronger than some guys. I’m not denying that there exist myriad women who could beat me in a fight. A girl in my grade 9 class beat me in an arm wrestle. And I was trying. It wasn’t humiliating. She was strong. But there would have been 30 guys in my year who would have beaten her.
I’m sorry, but boys and girls are different. I would have thought that was pretty clear.
It seems that gender is now a fluid concept (unlike sexuality, which you’re apparently stuck with, if recent furores surrounding gay-to-straight conversion apps on the Apple App Store are indicative). Some have suggested that gender is the new frontier post the gay marriage debate. It’s post-modernity meets feminism. And it’s weird. A Swedish couple made headlines in 2009 when they refused to apply a gender label to their child Pop. Or, at the very least, they refused to tell people if Pop was a boy or a girl. A Canadian couple followed suit with their thing, Storm. Part of the problem, I think, with de-genderising a child is you end up dehumanising them as a by-product, in terms of what options are left.
“In an interview with newspaper Svenska Dagbladet in March, the parents were quoted saying their decision was rooted in the feminist philosophy that gender is a social construction. “
A behavioural psychologist pointed out that this exercise was almost entirely pointless.
Pinker says there are many ways that males and females differ from birth; even if gender is kept ‘secret,’ prenatal hormones developed in the second trimester of pregnancy already alter the way the child behaves and feels.
She says once children can speak, males tell aggressive stories 87 per cent of the time, while females only 17 per cent. In a study, children aged two to four were given a task to work together for a reward, and boys used physical tactics 50 times more than girls, she says.
Now, a Swedish preschool is doing its bit to destigmatise gender by refusing to describe boys and girls as boys or girls. Because we wouldn’t want to assign anything to a child that they haven’t asked for – this post was actually prompted by rumours of a similar thing going on somewhere in Australia, but I can’t find it anywhere.
Few would argue that gender stereotypes aren’t in some way the product of social conditioning – stuff like boys wearing blue and girls wearing pink, or even skirts being girls clothes, are products of particular cultures operating in particular times and particular places. Ads for boys and girls toys demonstrate a sort of circularity here where culture reinforces natural differences and essentially amplifies them (some have suggested these ads are essentially symptoms of a disease rather than simply a reflection of nature), that’s what I reckon is going on. I don’t feel like I was manipulated to want to hit stuff with sticks, or to enjoy fire and explosions. I had plenty of opportunity, with three sisters, to play with girls toys, but they were boring, and I was much more interested in more combative play with sticks and glove guns. It was all my choice. Back in my day we had to make our own fun with bits of wood we picked up in the yard. But all the brainwashed people say that.
Boys’ toy ads look like this:
Girls’ toy ads look like this:
Boy, oh boy (or person, oh person) this whole issue is stupid and it makes me want to pull out my Playstation and shoot some bad guys (or people).
That is all.
The internet is now saturated with infographics and visualisations. I’ve done my fair share of propagating this. So, at what point does this become meaningless clutter, rather than clarity cutting through the communication noise of the world wide web.
Who knows, but I’m starting to enjoy humourous visualisations more than the real thing… and so is the New Yorker.
You could do worse than perusing some of the efforts of this guy named Ben Greenman.
This one is actually interesting, though largely pointless.
Serious Eats may have shown us how to build a better Big Mac at home. But what would happen if a string of fancy pants restaurants had the opportunity to turn the iconic burger into something, well, a little bit fancy (a la Fancy Fast Food).
The Challenge
“We asked four chefs to turn a Big Mac combo (burger, fries and a Coke, plus lots of condiments) into a five-star dish. To our surprise, they agreed. The only rule: other than oil and water, no extra ingredients allowed. The result is four meals that won’t be seen on a specials board anytime soon.”
The Results
Local Kitchen’s McLumi Platter
“It took chef/co-owner Fabio Bondi three tries to get this dish right. He made mortadella (an Italian cold cut) out of emulsified patties, lettuce, onions and sweet-and-sour sauce. But when he poached the sausage, it exploded. The same thing happened when he put it in a hot pan. In the end, he prepared it in the restaurant’s backyard smoker. The buns were toasted and made into crostini (the sesame seeds were mixed with ketchup to resemble mostarda, a fruit and mustard condiment). The nodini (bread knots) were made from fries.”
Aravind’s Open-Faced Samosas
“Father-and-son team Raj and Aravind Kozhikott wanted their creation to reflect their restaurant’s Indian cuisine. To make the samosa filling, they diced the meat, mixed it with the onion and used barbecue sauce as a binding agent before wrapping it in two rolled-out-and-fried burger buns. The fries were bundled up using strips of a cut-up fry box. The cheese from the burger was scraped off the patty and used as a sauce.”
There are a couple more here at The Grid, and some behind the scenes info about the project here.
It’s scientifically proven that awesome people read. Now it’s proven photographically as well.
Still no Kim Jong Il looking at things…
For those parents who want to foster their children’s imagination on the cheap, who simultaneously don’t have any issues with children playing with violent toys, will join me in appreciating the simplicity of this invention which turns any stick into a sword.
From a designer named Naama Agassi.
Well, more like what a week. Blogging has taken a back seat. Sorry dear readers. Let me explain. And then you can leave words of comfort and encouragement in the comments…
Here’s a snapshot of my week…
On Monday I had what was possibly my only day of holidays this semester. That was nice. I don’t remember what we did, so it must have been good.
On Tuesday the future of the Queensland Theological College, my educational home, became clear with the announcement that Gary Millar was going to take over as principal. I also took some photos for a story that was going in the local paper about a Hymns afternoon we had at church today. The story was based on a media release that I wrote last week, and was good (but small) except for a pretty minor factual error.
On Wednesday I gave a “devotion” (I hate that word) at the Presbyterian Church of Queensland State Assembly. I spoke on Romans 14. I wrote the talk on Tuesday, I’d done a sermon and an essay on the passage already so I thought it would be ok, but it seemed like a dangerous passage to choose to preach on as a student to a room full of old and experienced ministers. Then Robyn and I met up with somebody to discuss where we might end up as student ministers next year.
On Thursday I woke up having had a pretty restless night’s sleep to write my sermon for church, I’m preaching tomorrow on Revelation 19-20. Two exciting chapters. You should read them. I also had a few deadlines to meet for a PR consulting contract I’ve got on the boil, which is all coming to a head in a couple of weekends. The stress I was already feeling was compounded by an email from our landlord wanting to conduct an inspection we’d been trying to line up for about two months this Saturday (today). Given that we’re not going to be around much in mutually agreeable times in coming days, I said yes.
Yesterday I woke up and jumped in a car with a few college friends for a tour of some breweries and cafes on the north coast of New South Wales and on the Gold Coast. It was a terrific day. I really enjoyed it. And I’ll review a couple of the cafes on thebeanstalker.com tonight. Check them out. I got home late because peak hour is horrible and it hates me. And got stuck into tidying up a few rooms that we never use that have essentially become store rooms, and a house that had been a little neglected due to endofsemesteritis. I had a long conversation with the boss about some problems with my sermon, and when I went to bed after midnight, the house wasn’t finished.
We got up before 8 this morning to finish off the tidying ahead of an 11am inspection. The inspection came, the landlord and his wife are chatty, the inspection went. My parents turned up for a visit, right when we were due to leave for my 1pm soccer game. A 1pm soccer game which was the first of the season to be scheduled an hour away on the other side of the city. And I had the team kit. So I had to be on time. I also had to leave at half time, and our team was already short of players (and I’m the manager). We had to go to the hymn day, because I was making coffee (coffee I’d roasted during an already busy week). I’d promised to be there at quarter past 2. But because I was late to our soccer game with the shirts, the kick off was late, half time was late, so I was already running late when we got in the car. And then. We took two wrong turns (or missed two turn offs and had to do a u-turn) because google maps and street signs didn’t really agree. So I was late. The hymn day program was thrown into disarray. Fifty plus oldies who were visiting our church had to wait until the end of the program to get their coffees. And I smashed out 40+ coffees in 30 minutes.
Then I came home to finish/fix my sermon. Which I’ve now done, though it’s too long. Like this post. You’re probably tired just reading it. You probably didn’t make it to the end. Mostly because it was boring. But I hope it explains why I haven’t blogged much this week.
Now I’m sitting in front of the TV and I’m too tired to complain about the Bondi Vet and his stupidly trite cliches, his overly good looking face and his all too pleasant demeanour.
Why am I more stressed on holidays than during semester?
I love Serious Eats. Especially the work of J. Kenji Lopez-Alt, who has single-handedly brought the secrets of McDonalds into the hands of the masses. Here he turns his attention to the Big Mac.
Here’s the story. He even figured out the perfect number of sesame seeds.
And cracks the recipe for the Big Mac’s special sauce.
Essentially, it’s a mix of mayonnaise, relish, and mustard with sugar, onion, turmeric colorings, and a bit of hydrolyzed vegetable protein thrown in. It’s this last bit that might throw you for a bit of a loop.
Hydrolyzed vegetable protein is made by breaking down proteins into their constituent amino acids, resulting in a product with a distinctly savory flavor. Indeed, it’s very similar to bottled yeast extracts (which are made by autolyzing yeast) such as Marmite, Vegemite, or Maggi seasoning. Any of those will do.
Yum.
There’s a robot for that. In the day an age of every intangible calculation being performed by an iPhone app, it seems fitting that there are also robots for almost all tangible activities. I for one welcome our technological overlords.
Radiohead has just released a new track. Called Staircase. In an interestingly Justin Bieberesque fashion. It’s available as a video before it’s available anywhere else. I love the way they’ve continued to play around with distribution.
