When you booked a 6 am flight
and just realized that means you have to leave for the airport at 3:30.
Via Have a biscuit, Potter
April 5, 2012
February 22, 2012
iPads in Cabs
I read this article in AMNY about “the people” of New York being excited about the possibility of installing iPads in cabs. Which people exactly?
When I think on every cab experience I’ve had, I’ve sometimes thought “I wish it smelled better in here,” or “I wish this guy would stop breaking so hard, I’m getting nauseous.” Never have I thought “I wish I had a tablet device to make the time pass and/or improve my cab riding experience.”
First of all, I get incredibly carsick. I hate TaxiTV. An iPad won’t be any better in the nausea-inducing department.
Second of all… there is just no reason for it. At all. Even “the people” struggle to find a legitimate reason to be excited.
Monique Graham says “I want an app when you say ‘Flatbush,’ they take you there.” I’m confused as to what this app would do exactly. My understanding is that the way things are, your mouth would say ‘Flatbush,’ and hopefully they (cab driver) will take you there.
Kenrick Chan says “I’d like to see [voice] ID technology, so I could make calls.” I would suggest taking the subway for a while instead of the cab, to save money for a cell phone.
Someone else wants a “map app,” which TaxiTV already has. Another wants “an app that lets me enter my destination and choose my own route.” To that last one, I say “good luck getting cabbie to adhere to said chosen route.”
The only two “wishlist” items that I see as actually being useful are traffic reports and games to keep your kid entertained. But if this upgrade is costing any money, which I’m assuming it is, I’d much rather see it be put into the upkeep of the actual vehicle. If I really had a choice, I’d just make cab fares a tad cheaper (not gonna happen.) All I’m looking for in a cab ride is to get me from A to B, as fast as possible, with as little nausea as possible.
February 8, 2012
I just signed up for early access to MockupEverything, a realistic mockup tool for designers.
Seems like a useful tool. Sign up!
February 7, 2012
Haven’t been on tumblr in a while. This I deem appropriate for my comeback.
(Source: dancingplagueof1518)
October 21, 2011
September 11, 2011
September 9, 2011
September 7, 2011
Happy 65th Birthday Freddie Mercury! I would have loved to experience a concert like this…Incredible performance!
August 29, 2011
One of the things I’m always looking at as I travel around the world is “where the cooks come from”. And if there’s a regular feature, a common thread wherever you go in this world, it’s that the best cooks and often the best chefs come from the poorest or most challenging regions. And it is without doubt that the greatest , most beloved and iconic dishes in the pantheon of gastronomy—in any of the world’s mother cuisines—French, Italian or Chinese–originated with poor, hard-pressed, hard working farmers and laborers with no time, little money and no refrigeration.
Pot au Feu , Coq au Vin, Sup Tulang, Cassoulet, pasta, polenta, confit, —all of them began with the urgent need to make something good and reasonably sustaining out of very little. So many of the French classics began with the need to throw a bunch of stuff into a single pot over the coals, leave it simmering unattended all day while the family worked the fields, hopefully to return to something tasty and filling that would get them through the next day. French cooking, we tend to forget now, was rarely (for the majority of Frenchmen) about the best or the priciest or even the freshest ingredients. It was about taking what little you had or could afford and turning it into something delicious without interfering with the grim necessities of work and survival. The people I’m talking about here didn’t have money—or time to cook. And yet along with similarly pressed Italians, Chinese, Spanish, Portuguese, Indians and other hungry innovators around the world, they created many of the enduring great dishes of history.
So the notion that hard working, hard pressed families with little time and slim budgets have to eat crappy, processed food –or that unspeakably, proudly unhealthy “novelty dishes” that come from nowhere but the fevered imaginations of marketing departments are—or should be—the lot of the working poor is nonsense.
Anthony Bourdain: SOUTHERN COMFORT (via andrewfm)
I agree with Bourdain on this because I’ve also experienced it in traveling and living in different parts of the world. That isn’t to say that poor folks in the US are individually responsible for the societal conditions which have created the US food system and its gastronomical and nutritional degradation. But I know from my time in China that being poor doesn’t mean eating poorly. And when I say “poor”, I’m talking no plumbing or electricity.
When I was a child I spent time living with relatives in China, in a house made of stamped earth, with no plumbing or electricity, next to fields fertilized with night soil, in a village where folks had never ridden in a car or seen a TV and could not possibly imagine a supermarket. And I discovered that poor rural Chinese probably eat better food than many middle-class US Americans. I loved that food. Later on, as a student in rural China as well as Hong Kong, I was able to eat amazing, delicious, nutritious food for nickels and dimes.
Obviously, China has the advantage of thousands of years of accumulated food knowledge; and don’t get me wrong, life is tough in those conditions and I’m not nostalgic for Third World poverty. But the point is that poor people around the world demonstrate ingenious ways of making food work for them, and the US could probably use a few lessons from those food cultures.
(via zuky)
Yeah I think “working poor” is a bit too simplistic a nomenclature. The difference with poor people in America and Europe is that, well, there are officially no poor people in America and Europe, there are people who have failed to get rich. The diet reflects this. We’re very alienated from our food culture. I can imagine in the US it should be extremely rich because of all the various traditions over there. In France it’s certainly still very present, but in the UK it’s been totally annihilated by WWII and rationing and appropriated by the aristocracy. Also a lot of luxury dishes are basically what poor people would have eaten back in the day. I mean, at Christmas, in France, we eat snails and chestnuts, which would definitely have been poor people foods in autumn and winter, it’s like that food that came from the ingenuity of having to do a lot with very little has become a luxury for people who need to atone for their riches, and the working classes are left eating pasta and frozen stuff.
(via strontiumchienne)
Good points from strontiumchienne. In the US, it was also pretty much after WWII that food culture was traded in for industrialized mass processing which had been set up for war rations (e.g. SPAM!). In the 1950s, the popular family ideal was consciously shifted through propaganda from growing Victory Gardens to popping open canned, frozen, irradiated, chemically preserved food products from corrupt subsidized agribusiness. Then came the chain franchises piggybacking on subsidized agribusiness, and pretty soon the corporations had squeezed original food cultures out of the picture. So it’s true, it’s too simplistic to equate the working poor in these various contexts around the world. In other words, the fundamental problem with food culture in the US is embedded in its political economy, so reviving or reforming food culture can’t really be addressed in isolation from some sort of political-economic upheaval.
(via zuky)
I want to throw in that there were some good things about the advent of “canned, frozen, irradiated, chemically preserved food products.” This essentially meant that many families were no longer dependent upon subsistence farming—which didn’t always produce enough food, and often required extensive amounts of labor, which prevented things like children obtaining an education or gaining access to a different level of social mobility. The mass-produced foods were also less expensive, which at the time helped people buy more of it. If you could buy an 88-cent loaf (in today’s money) of bread that you didn’t have to worry about going bad for 2-3 weeks, or longer, then that was money saved and food in your belly. Some food is better than no food, and bad food is also better than no food.
Not that I’m typically one to defend mass-produced food or the fact that today, the poor rely disproportionately on bad food that causes them to suffer disproportionately from a variety of problems that stem from bad food. At the same time, I have to compare the post-war situation to the pre-war situation, and the fact is, even before the Depression, many people in the US regularly went without getting enough to eat. So, while understanding all of the problems with the current food system, we also have to understand where it benefits people. I can’t condemn it as 100% evil, because the truth is, it has helped prevent hunger from being a huge problem here—and that is something, even if it’s not enough.
The question is: how do we create a system/culture that makes sure that people are getting both enough food and good food?
(via robot-heart-politics)
