Check out this awesome turn on the jazz bass theremin (and there’s a phrase you thought you’d never see) by theremin virtuoso Pamela Kurstin:
She did this as part of a TED talk, which you can watch on the TED website in its entirety.
Tag TED Talks
The Occasional Food Post
If It’s Not Scots, It’s CRAP!! — Scottish food importer Great Scot International recently announced plans to begin selling haggis-flavored potato chips here in the U.S. The chips are made by a British ice cream maker looking to expand into the snack category by launching a handful of “Scottish flavors” including Scotch Bonnet Chili Pepper (hmm…), and Aberdeen Angus (beef flavor). Apparently it’s the number one selling potato chip in Scotland, but that was to be expected in the first place.
Erich Vieth at Dangerous Intersection recently pointed to this TED Talk video featuring Dutch agricultural specialist Marcel Dicke, who explains why Westerners should learn to eat more insects as a source of protein. The ultimate reason is a no brainer:
The main reason that we should eat insects is that “we will have to.”
Okay, but if they come in haggis flavor, I might have to think twice about it.
Serious Eats editor and chef J. Kenji Lopez-Alt offered a counter-argument to the widespread belief that the production of foie gras is cruel with this piece about a tour he took of one of the three farms in the U.S. that produce foie gras. It’s generated a lot of controversy as both sides of the debate have used it as a touchstone for their arguments; I thought MetaFilter’s thread about the piece did a very good job of highlighting the arguments, as well as both the strengths and weaknesses of Lopez-Alt’s article.
As a sidebar to that, just to give you a sense of the inherent cruelty in all industrialized meat processing, and to highlight how wrong things can go, please read this Atlantic.com food blog post about reported animal abuse at Smithfield Foods pork processing facilities.
Looking backward for a moment, John Ptak dug up an old advert for Lea & Perrin’s Worcestershire Sauce that inspired him to consider the evolution of the humble hamburger in the pantheon of American cuisine. The ad, which he dates to 1956, comes from a time, he says, when the hamburger was not yet quite the icon of food that it would become, but even now it holds on to its origins as inexpensive, everyday fare.
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Anagnoresis And Peripeteia
You may or may not have heard of the TED Talks. I run across links to them all the time on a fair number of the more intelligent blogs I follow, but I don’t know if they’re well-known in a wider context. Anyway, it’s basically an invitational series of lectures by various Silicon Valley mover-and-shaker types and other assorted smart people, attended by their fellow Silicon Valley mover-and-shaker types and other assorted smart people. It’s been going on for 25 years, so it’s not just some “hey, let’s have a conference, dudes!” like SXSW, it actually offers quite a lot of top-name speakers spouting Very Important Stuff.
So why the heck is Mike Rowe giving a TED Talk? Turns out that Mike is actually a very smart guy; he plays a smirking everyman on his show, but if you pay attention to him you’ll eventually discover that he’s a nerd like the rest of us. It’s easy to see where the entertainment value of having Mike Rowe at your conference would come from: show a few clips of the various forms of shit he has had to handle, tell some cute anecdotes, entertain the crowd in between the “we’re all doomed” lecture from Al Gore and the “how to make a million dollars” lecture from some VC shark.
But that’s selling Mike short. In this talk, he does indeed do the anecdote about the episode where he had to castrate baby lambs by biting off their testicles, but instead of going for the big laughs, he turns the topic around and discusses how that particular job made him have a bit of an epiphany about the value of labor. He whips out the classical rhetorical terms anagnoresis and peripeteia to explain how he came to this realization, and I will leave him to define those terms for you in the video clip.
I don’t think he does a particularly good job of really explaining what his moment of anagnoresis was, but I think what he wanted to get across to the people in the audience is that as a society, we are going to have to re-evaluate our relationship to work, just as we are going to have to re-evaluate a lot of the basic elements of our life over the next couple of generations. Much of the material presented at the TED Talks is about the amazing world of the future, and what he is doing is giving them a very gentle nudge to let them know that the pie-in-the-sky visions of tomorrow are going to collide very hard with reality soon, and that even the high-falutin’ CEOs and wizards of Silicon Valley might need to reconsider the possibilities the world will present them with.
It’s a long video (about 20 minutes), but take the time to watch it if you can.