“Spray To Forget” is an art project-cum-product from designer/artist Reed Seifer; he’s blended some aromatic oils that are used for stress relief aromatherapy, with the idea that you can “edit your consciousness” to overwrite bad or unwanted memories.
My open question for your consideration is whether you’d consider using something like “Spray To Forget” as a way to deal with traumatic experiences that are difficult to process. To my own surprise, I am a little uncertain; once upon a time I would have vehemently said “no”, but now I sometimes find myself wishing I could simply wipe away painful memories that even the passage of time hasn’t fully managed.
Yes, I, too, have been lured in by the siren song of The Trololololo Guy. But for me it’s not the weird cadaver-like visage of the creepy Russian lip-sync singer, or his astonishing helmet-hair, or the late-1970s video production values…it’s that damned song! It’s an unstoppable earworm that keeps playing in my head over and over and over, and every time I run into another mashup of it I have to stop and listen to the whole thing.
Well, at least NOW I can sing along thanks to this captioned version on YouTube. I’d hate to think I was singing “trolololololo” when I was supposed to be singing “ya ya ya ya yeh aaaaaaaaaaaaaaiieeeeeeeeee!”
Why, yes, I am a little obsessed with pho, thank you for noticing. And I do try to keep it under control — I limit myself to having pho once every couple of weeks so that I don’t get tired of it, and I try to eat it at different restaurants so I don’t get overdone on one place’s version (even though there is one I like head-and-shoulders above the others). Over the last couple of months, I’ve managed to inculcate my love of pho in Charlotte, so now she often accompanies me when I go out for a bowl. I’ve even had pretty good luck making it at home thanks to this crockpot recipe for broth at Steamy Kitchen. This morning I ran across this article in Smithsonian Magazine from noted food writer Mimi Sheraton about hunting for pho in the food stalls around the city of Hanoi. She also connected with a chef named Didier Corlou, a French chef who has lived and worked in Vietnam for nearly 20 years and has become the go-to guy to learn everything there is to know about pho and Vietnamese cuisine in general. Vietnamese cuisine is a unique fusion of traditional Asian cuisine and French influences, and even though pho is essentially the national dish of Vietnam, it is directly inherited from the French pot-au-feu. Just reading the article makes me want to break my self-imposed restriction and go have a bowl of pho for lunch today.
Noted British chef Rose Gray passed away a few days ago. Gray and Ruth Rogers were the chef-owners of London’s famed River Cafe, which spearheaded the revival of world-class restaurants in London in the 1980s. Americans will probably remember Gray and Rogers best from their beautifully-filmed food-porn cooking show that ran on PBS back in the 1990s; it was one of the first cooking shows to break away from the Julia Child-style 3-camera video format and feature drop-dead gorgeous photography of the food rather than the efforts of the cook. River Cafe became a spawning ground for many of the best-known chefs in Britain today, like Jamie Oliver. Rose Gray was 71.
The human body is, to some extent, just a luxury cruise liner for microbes.
Science writer Carl Zimmer has a post at Discover’s science blogs about the increasing understanding among scientists about the symbiosis of the human organism and its assorted microscopic passengers. Indeed, there is a growing belief that the symbiosis might actually be under the control of the micro-organisms rather than ourselves. This Scientific American article reviews some of the same research as Zimmer’s piece and includes a variety of additional links to plumb through.
On a slightly different, but related, topic: this article in Slate considers whether or not hand sanitizers like Purell have any real effect in preventing the spread of diseases like colds and flu, then goes on to consider the weightier question of whether it’s really a good idea at all to be trying to de-germify every surface in sight.
Yes, for the next 6-8 months you are going to have to deal with me periodically going all fanboi and frothing at the mouth about the upcoming release of Civilization V. Once it does hit the shelves, you will then have to deal with me complaining about all the bugs and poor gameplay issues until the first few patches and mods finally shape it into something playable, whereupon you will hear next to nothing from me while I spend countless hours playing One More Turn.
Here is the first of what will undoubtedly be many previews of the game as the developers start feeding the gaming websites with sneak peeks and propaganda designed to whet the appetites of the fanbase. While some of the changes in the game that are discussed in the article sound fascinating, I am a little concerned that the focus seems to be pushing the game further and further along the path of being a war simulation game and less into the multi-faceted “many ways to win” model that Civ IV pursued. But it’s clear from the article that the developers are still addressing gameplay issues and aren’t committed to the final form of the game yet.
True personal story: I began playing Civilization in 1996, when the Mac version of Civ II first hit the market. The day I brought the game home was also the very first full day we had Maynard, when he was a tinky-winky li’l kitten only a few weeks old. He was so little that we had to feed him kitten formula from a dropper, and I wasn’t entirely sure that he would survive, but he turned out to be a very tenacious little kitten. The first weekend I had the game, I stayed up all night playing it on my Mac Performa, checking in on the kitten, who needed to be fed every four hours. Mister Maynard is now a senior citizen kitteh of almost 14 years of age, and I am not sure that he will be with us by the time Civ V hits the shelf, but I was wrong about his chances as a baby, so maybe I’m being too pessimistic again now.
I know old habits die hard, but at what point are we going to give it up, kids? A twelve-billion-dollar spending deficit for the month of January alone?? And Christmas spending (which this mostly reflects) was actually down 3% from 2008. It just makes me wonder exactly what it’s going to take to make people stop the madness.
It makes me proud to be a Northwestern University double-alum (S85, G89) and former assistant editor of the defunct campus humor magazine, “Rubber Teeth”, to know that the legacy of wild-and-crazy stunts lives on in the halls along Sheridan Road:
boobcheese
tickle fights
child actor suicides
Betty White
Zombie Farrah Fawcett
Canadian pissing habits
that milkaholic Lindsay
ChatRoulette
whatever half-assed thing Google did this week
out-of-control Toyotas
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
I recently posted about the use of menhaden in making fish oil dietary supplements and the potential risk that poses to the entire Atlantic Ocean ecosystem. One of the alternatives to using menhaden for omega-3 supplements is algae oil, because algae is the primary diet of the menhaden and is actually the source of [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
This week Barack Obama committed the United States to at least two more years of war, 30,000 troops in harm’s way for no other reason than saving face, and umpteen billions of dollars wasted FOR NO GOOD REASON WHATSOEVER and we are inundated with:
Tiger Woods proving he knows how to put it in the hole
GateCrashGate
Meredith [...]
Nowhere near enough responses to fill in all the blanks on the Mad-Lib Post game, so I guess we’ll chalk it up as a loss and try it again some other time. Maybe I’ll try it on Facebook instead.
More additions to the list:
Levi Johnston
Carrie Prejean
Blue Dog Democrats
The Entire Lohan Family
The 2012 Apocalypse
The Republican “Comeback”
“ordinary heroes”
More effluvia:
Those Northwest Airlines pilots
Zombie Michael Jackson
Sexy ____________ Halloween Costumes (in fact, anything to do with adults and Halloween)
Celebrity Twitters
Balloon Boy and His Crazy Dad (thankfully, this one has already faded quite a bit)
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]
Dear Harvey, Pete, Barry, Kevin, and every other weathermonkey on Boston-area TV: Enough is enough. The fucking blizzard was THIRTY-TWO YEARS AGO. It’s time to stop trotting out the same blurry videotape of cars stuck on Rt. 128 that is older than some of the people who are actually on your broadcast, [...]
It’s going to be a long two months waiting for the iPad to actually ship so that all the tech bloggers and their hangers-on will stop writing so much speculative bullshit about iT and turn their attention iNstead to some other thing that’s going to Change Life As We Know iT.
Since you cannot click a [...]
Please, please, PUH-LEEZE stop talking about “What do we call the last decade?” Nobody could come up with an acceptable choice ten years ago, and nobody’s going to come up with one now. “Aughties” and “Naughties” are contrived and stupid, and so is the very idea that anything wraps up all nice and [...]
Thanks to Shelley for alerting me that last night’s edition of the local TV newsmagzine “Chronicle” featured Harvard Humanist Chaplain Greg Epstein, whom I blogged about recently in conjunction with the various atheist billboard campaigns around the country. I was busy helping Charlotte do her homework, so I didn’t watch the show, but WCVB’s [...]
