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Well, Who Wouldn’t Stare?
I think this guy would highly approve.
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Would You?
“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.
While Seifer’s project is a bit wishful, there are real efforts to understand how to manipulate or mitigate memories using pharmaceuticals like the beta-blocker propranolol (which is normally prescribed as a blood pressure medication). As this Wired interview with Anders Sandberg points out, the ethical complications are enormous, and we as a society are probably not ready to engage in them constructively enough, but that doesn’t mean there won’t continue to be efforts to bring memory-altering drugs to the marketplace.
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.
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Sing Along With Mitch-ski!
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!”
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Obligatory Food Post Of The Week
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.
I enjoyed this pair of posts on The Atlantic’s food “channel” from local chef Chris Parsons about competing in the Bocuse d’Or USA cooking competition. Cooking competitions are not just Food Network reality show fodder; the Bocuse d’Or competition has been around since 1987, and last year the Bocuse d’Or USA Foundation was set up by some of the best chefs in the United States to encourage young American chefs to participate. Chris Parsons had toyed with the idea of competing for years before finally giving it a serious go last year. Parson’s own restaurant recently transformed itself from a fine-dine seafood place to a more casual “comfort food” theme (though he plans to re-open Catch somewhere in Boston or Cambridge at a later date).
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Joims! Who’da Thought Joims Wuz Our Friends?
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.
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 [...]
