Hey there,
Today's archive shot is not a photo, but an essay that turned up when cleaning out the old documents tub recently. Pretty sure this was written by The Boy and is entitled Stupid Essay
Heavy duty...but guilty as charged. I am an idiot and a hypocrite. Takes a twisted little turn at the end, no?
Some consumable talk today. Is there a more widely distributed chocolate candy that no one really likes than Ferrero Rocher? Has anyone looked at a wall of candy and said, gimme the Ferrero Rocher? How do you even pronounce Ferrero Rocher? Yet if you are buying candy to share, this is the crap people bring more often than not. Most folks like chocolate and hazelnut, but these things taste like little chocolate fart balls.
Planning for summer trip always includes thinking about all the food we're gonna eat. Arranging the schedule to hit old favorites is required, but when traveling to new places, thinking about sampling their specialties is what gets my juices flowing. For no particular reason, have three nights in Nashville on the calendar and that means Hot Chicken. Have heard about it for years and got my first taste of it at a dive joint in Seattle last summer. I liked it a LOT. Have read that hot chicken places are popping up across the land but that it is a Nashville creation and institution. An acquaintance forwarded me an article titled The Burning Desire For Hot Chicken: Three days, three Nashville restaurants and three revelations about why we love what hurts. That I will be there for three days makes this article perfect and will be adhering to the recommendations put forth. If you like spicy food, that article offers quite a good history and analysis (at a couple points to the molecular level) of the stuff.
Oh yeah, my beloved Yo Lo Tengo have not one, but two songs about Hot Chicken.
Flying Lesson (Hot Chicken #1)
Return to Hot Chicken
Staying with the food/drink theme, I drink a ton of milk. Probably way more than I should. I don't like to know things about milk cause all I hear before I stick my fingers in my ears and go 'la-la-la' is that it is bad for adults, and that it contains high amounts of pus. I hesitantly clicked on this Why We Drink Milk article. Pretty interesting and somewhat horrifying, but as I finished it all I could think of was 'I have nipples Greg, can you milk me?"
Following up an argument detailed here a year or two ago about what constitutes tea. We were touring tea plantations and I asked the group, including our guide, if "teas" not made from the tea plant (camellia sinensis) are really teas. Jasmine, chamomile, etc. Recall that I was alone is saying no, but according to the most reliable of sources, Buzzfeed, these 15 facts about tea confirm that they are not tea but rather should be called infusions. Not mentioning this to gloat that I was right, cause I always am, but am just here to educate.
Not really a food, although am sure that you can drink it as an infusion, but in my opinion there is nothing that smells better than a gardenia. It's gardenia season around these parts and a giant bunch costs 3 bucks. They are littered throughout the house these days and life just seems better.
In my news feed was this article from the Taiwan News. Reading the thumbnail headline before clicking on it, said a little prayer that I wasn't the guy. A foreigner kicks elderly woman and curses the Taiwanese on the MRT. Ran through my mind if I ever did that and while I couldn't imagine ever going that far, my mind is starting to slip and I do get ragey at time. Here is the setting...
On May 5 at around 5 p.m., a 44-year-old man surnamed Huang witnessed a foreign national at the Ximen MRT station wearing a baseball cap and tattoos on his arms kick the suitcase of a woman in her 60s that was in his path at the bottom of an escalator. Huang says that the man then cursed the woman in English.
Tattooed arms are a tell. The stopping at the bottom of escalators, in doorways, etc. move isn't limited to the Taiwanese, but they have turned it into a kind of performance art. I think that an 'excuse me' is too tame in this case. When people are artery clogging due to their forgetting that they are in public spaces and aren't the only people in existence, I typically say "don't stop" and will break out "move it" on occasion if the offense is egregious, but would never kick a woman (or her stuff).
Huang says that he then asked the man to apologize, but the man responded by saying "It's none of your business." When Huang asked him again, the man said "F**k you Chinese," and as he waited behind a large crowd of people to get on the next escalator down, he shouted "F**k all you Chinese" and thrust his middle finger at Huang.
While it doesn't send me into a rampage, something that has been bugging me more and more these days is people that use the word 'actually' and has now reached the stage that whenever I hear it, I attack the user reflexively.
By most measures, people are technically using the work correctly...the definitions.
- —used to refer to what is true or real
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—used to stress that a statement is true especially when it differs in some way from what might have been thought or expected
For example...we don't watch a ton of TV together as a family, but when we do will often turn on Let's Make a Deal for some mindless laughs. Whenever host Wayne Brady calls down a contestant, he'll ask what they do. For the young and underemployed, they will say something lofty with the caveat that "I'm actually working as a...." Watching the other day, a lady says she is a singer but is 'actually' doing telemarketing now. I make my typical comment and groan, and the very next person is asked what they do and they say they're a writer, but 'actually' working as a barista. Classic Los Angeles.
The other usage is when something is different than what was expected, yet it feels that every time actually is used it is showing surprise by someone that hates something for no empirical reason yet their minds are changed once they become engaged with it. Most benign example would be something like, 'I went for Thai food for the first time and actually, it was pretty good.' Here is another one I am guessing you have heard in some form...I met this person that was (different than me ethnically/religiously) and they were actually very nice. Everyone is telling you something and you refuse to entertain it for no reason other than your beliefs and preconceptions. Once you find out how great it is, you can't say how dumb you were for denying yourself such a treat, so you have to act surprised as if it still makes your baseless assumption still valid. I am guilty of this too and I hate myself for discounting stuff for no reason. Knowing that this is a self defeating endeavor will help to not make the same mistakes going forward and open ones mind to the rich wonders the world has to offer. At the Boys pre-school, his teacher was this amazingly wise woman (second from the right below) and one of her mantras was that you can never say you hate something without trying or experiencing it 11 times. This was in reference to food the kids refused to eat, but can be extrapolated out to most of life. This photo was on his last day at the school he went to from 3 months old to leaving for Kindergarten and were his Infant, Toddler and pre-school teachers. They were all incredible people and I learned a ton about everything from listening to their teachings.
I task you with taking the No Actually challenge...don't use that word yourself and silently examine motives of the person that uses it whenever you hear it said.
Closing out today with one more bit of language talk. Are you tuned into these Incel guys? The nut job that ran down people in Canada recently is being associated with them. Incel is short for Involuntary Celibate, which means that they are such losers that they can't get laid. In that article, it goes into how they hate women for not sleeping with them as they are such great men that the ladies (hotties only need apply, no fatties) should be getting wet when they walk into a room. They cannot fathom why women don't drop trow so they go out and slaughter them. There are a lot of messed up folks out there, but these guys have to be the most pathetic (ly dangerous), no?
We were talking at dinner the other night about language and things that were common when I was in school that are (correctly) horrific today. I am not only not proud that we used certain words but often think of times I did that I have serious regrets about and wish I could go back and tell them how awful I was to them. This came up for some reason in relation to the word gay and I told B-doll that in school, whenever another fella would show any sign of empathy, kindness, love, artistic proclivity, etc., we'd call him a Fag. We'd do this matter of factly and obviously cause we were insecure little effers and use words to demean others to hide our feelings and boost our own low self esteem. Not saying it was justified in any way, it just was. I like to think I have evolved but realize that a lot of that stuff is so deeply wired that it is gonna turn on at times no matter how hard I try to shut it down. Am no engineer, but my understanding of a capacitor is that it is part of a lot of machinery that holds a charge even when the device is completely removed from a power source and is why things can shock you even when they turned all the way off. There are these capacitors of our past experiences that activate without warning. Was communicating with one of my fellas from the olden times the other day and he said something where I would have replied back then by calling him a fag. This time, I called him an Incel. Is that personal growth or just the same white boy from the valley?
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