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Would You?

3 comments By Brian Filed in Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , March 10th, 2010 @ 12:41 pm

“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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Obligatory Food Post Of The Week

4 comments By Brian Filed in Food, Links Tagged with , , , , , , , , , , March 10th, 2010 @ 12:18 pm

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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Hello, My Name Is Brian And I Am A Civ Addict

2 comments By Brian Filed in Life, Links, Misc Tagged with , , March 9th, 2010 @ 12:12 pm

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.

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Unclear On The Concept, #596015

3 comments By Brian Filed in Links Tagged with , , March 9th, 2010 @ 11:02 am

Via Fast Company

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.

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Invasion Of The Burger Snatchers

0 comments By Brian Filed in Food, Life, Links, Misc Tagged with , , , , , March 4th, 2010 @ 1:06 pm

They’re building a Sonic Drive-In on Main Street in my town. It’s just the latest in a number of retail constructions on the main drag in the past couple of years; you’d have no idea the entire economy was in the crapper by the number of construction sites. Sadly for the property developers, though, once they get the sites built, they don’t always have tenants ready to move in, and so there’s a lot of brand-new-but-half-empty retail space waiting for the time way, waaay off in the future, when somebody might want to move in. But I digress a little…

The Sonic is being built right next door to the McDonald’s, which cannot have the McDonald’s franchisee too happy. Previously, the space housed a car dealer. When the car showroom building was torn down a couple of weeks ago, everybody was abuzz wondering what would take the space, but now that the frame of the building is up, so is the large banner on the front of the site. No doubt the cognoscenti of our little suburb knew exactly what was going on well in advance, but for us hoi polloi it came down to a six-foot strip of vinyl tied to a temporary fence to bring the news.

It’s kind of a big deal, not just because our town lags behind all of its neighbors in sheer density of fast food chains that aren’t Dunkin’ Donuts, but because it’s only the second Sonic location in the entire state of Massachusetts. Indeed, it is only the second Sonic in ALL SIX New England states. The first Sonic opened last summer to much attention from cherry-limeade-starved souls, who were willing to endure two-hour lines, valet parking, and unholy traffic congestion on a major thruway (the infamous Route One strip). Needless to say, there is much tut-tutting and clucking by the villagers, who are worried that the already-busy section of Main Street will turn into a parking lot from all the looky-loos who will descend on us like a plague of french-fry-devouring locusts.

Having grown up in Maine in the 1970s, I have been down this road before. When we first moved to Lewiston-Auburn in the summer of 1971, there was only one McDonald’s for a “metro” area of about 70,000, and it was way on the outskirts of Lewiston, close to the Maine Turnpike exit. It was a huge deal when, several years later, a second McDonald’s was built on the Auburn side of the river, and then equally big deals ensued when Burger King arrived a few years after that, and finally, when I was in high school, Wendy’s. Maine, however, is always late to the party for the expansion of national retail chains; there are still only a small handful of Starbucks in the whole state (our town in Massachusetts got its Starbucks two years ago, but they are numerous in the Boston area).

In a bit of serendipity, this infographic is making the rounds online. It shows the distribution of the major fast-food burger chains in the United States. Here’s the Fast Company article that brought the map to the attention of the Internet, and here’s the original blog post from a site called WeatherSealed.com. The Fast Company version changed the background color to make the McDonald’s locations (which were plotted in black against a black background in the original) stand out better. It’s interesting to see that McDonald’s base is so tightly concentrated in the Northeast, but even more interesting to see the predominance of other chains in other regions: Dairy Queen, which is a rarity here in the Northeast and operates almost exclusively in its form as an ice cream stand, OWNS the South Central region in a way that McDonald’s can only dream of.

For the sake of the franchisee, I hope the arrival of Sonic goes better than the arrival of Krispy Kreme donuts a few years ago. The anticipation behind the opening of the Krispy Kreme in Medford was nothing short of insane, and the initial customer response was enormous, but after about a year the whole thing died right off and the Kripsy Kreme chain itself went into bankruptcy. The retail location sat empty for a long time before finally being picked up by the beloved local chain of roast beef sandwich shops, Kelly’s. Meanwhile, the Ghost Town Plaza across the street sure could use half a dozen tenants.

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Keep The Grass Off!

2 comments By Brian Filed in Links, Misc, News Tagged with , , , , , March 3rd, 2010 @ 12:47 pm

Even though winter has been hanging tough this year, spring will inevitably arrive, and, with it, the annual question of what to do about the lawn. I am not a fan of lawns, and not just because I am a lazy bastard, either. The American obsession with lawn care rates very high as a significant source of pollution: all those fucking chemicals people dump on their grass to keep it looking like the 7th Hole at Pebble Beach account for 90% of the chemical runoff that destroys rivers, ponds, and other watersheds, while the exhaust from an hour of using your gas-powered lawn mower is equivalent to driving 650 miles in a 1992-vintage automobile. Weed killer products contribute to undermining biodiversity in local plant life, allowing aggressive invader species like purple loosestrife to flourish and crowd out even more plants. All in all, kiddies, that fine manicured lawn is an environmental disaster, an advertisement for everything that is bad about our insistence on our unsustainable lifestyles.

Via Slashdot, of all places, I ran across this L.A. Times story this morning about a couple in the Southern California city of Orange, who are being sued by the city itself because they converted their lawn into a landscaped yard using bark and drought-tolerant plants. The couple say that their motivation was to use less water (the city has very tough watering restrictions in the first place) and they succeeded in reducing their water consumption by 75%, but the city also has an ordinance requiring homes to have at least 40% of their yard covered by living plants (e.g. grass). Even adding more plants did not assuage the officials. One would think that in Southern California, of all places, anything that contributed to lowering municipal water usage would be seen as beneficial, but once again the overarching short-sightedness of the value of grass overtakes common sense.

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An Aggregation Of Nincompoops

0 comments By Brian Filed in Links, Politics Tagged with , , , , , , , , , March 3rd, 2010 @ 12:22 pm

According to Alex Massie, writing in Foreign Policy, that’s how the Obama Administration is seen by counterparts in Europe, having piddled away the enormous political capital among those groups much the same way he has with the American public: an inability to turn an overwhelming legislative majority into forward progress, lack of follow-through on foreign policy reforms and initiatives that were seen as “must-haves” by the European public after eight very long years of George Bush, and waffling on global issues like “cap and trade” policy for climate change…all due to what is perceived as political incompetence. What we see as “insider baseball” with stories about in-fighting between Obama advisors like Rahm Emanuel, the rest of the world sees as fiddling while Rome burns.

Posting at True/Slant, journalist Jamie Malanowski brings a more American perspective:

Sometime, somewhere, some friend of the president needs to give him a swift kick in the ass. Somebody ought to explain to him that the country is hopping mad, and it’s mad not because `government is too big’ but because people don’t have jobs and the government isn’t doing anything about it and—here’s the kicker—highly bonused investment bankers whose skins were saved by the public continue to wager and collect without impunity. It would do the president a world of good if instead of inviting Republicans to come over for milk and cookies, he began directing throwing his weight around—ordering this, directing that, opening an investigation on something else. He must stop yielding his authority to compose the national narrative to tea baggers and Fox Newsmen.

The publisher of Harper’s Magazine, John R. MacArthur, suggests that maybe what Obama needs to get his skinny ass in gear is a primary challenge in 2012, and he offers a specific suggestion: Howard Dean. Dean, who got the boot as DNC chairman after his 50-state campaign strategy helped Obama win in 2008, has been very vocal as the progressive opposition to the hopeless health care reform legislation, and has been winning back support from the disaffected liberal Democratic voters who feel badly betrayed by Obama. MacArthur implies that Dean would only be needed to rattle Obama’s chains a little, not actually offer any stiff resistance to Obama’s re-election bid, but this Politico profile from a few weeks ago points out that Dean might have the juice needed to be a serious contender. Either way, what should be painfully obvious to anyone is that appeasing the Republicans and continuing to try to move to the right is a losing proposition, and if Obama won’t take the hint himself, then maybe somebody else needs to.

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