This should totally be a tumblog. But it’s not. It’s just your run of the mill blog. Oh well. In our family awkward family photos involved bad hair. Big hair. Big bad hair. I don’t have any to share. But check out some of these family moments. Captured for posterity through the wonders of photography.
Like many people of my vintage who were introduced to computer games in their very early stages, I played quite a few text adventure games in my youth. Back in my day games didn’t even have pictures. You had to use your imagination. And type relatively specific commands to achieve even the simplest of functions.
I haven’t watched Get Lamp, this 2 hour doco yet, because I’m on my in-laws’ farm, and doing so would wipe out their mobile internet quota. Somewhat ironically. Given it is about text. But I’m filing this in the “watch later” pile. Get lamp gets its name from the first command one would type when finding themselves in the eponymous dark room at the start of just about every text based game known to man.
Did you play any text based adventure games? Get nostalgic in the comments.
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.
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…
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.
Part three of the previously featured excellent web series “Everything is a Remix”…
There’s something a little compelling about people within a profession, whose focus is the written word, writing words about others within the profession. It’s why I perversely enjoy reading book reviews in peer reviewed journals. You always get the sense that one writer feels like they’re a little better at things than another. Here’s a collection of 30 writer v writer insults.
Mark Twain on Jane Austen is probably my favourite.
“I haven’t any right to criticize books, and I don’t do it except when I hate them. I often want to criticize Jane Austen, but her books madden me so that I can’t conceal my frenzy from the reader; and therefore I have to stop every time I begin. Every time I read ‘Pride and Prejudice,’ I want to dig her up and hit her over the skull with her own shin-bone.”
What an image, and what a shame that Pride, Prejudice, and Zombies wasn’t around in Twain’s day.
