Good Reads

[kotori]

It does! I like that one a lot. And I adore the idea behind jayus even though the actual word sorta bugs me.

Culaccino is excellent and necessary. We need an English version.

I misread "jayus" as "jaysis", which is Dublin Irish for just about everything from the weather (jaysis) to the government (feckin' jaysis).

 

[Aquagal]

Culaccino is excellent and necessary. We need an English version.

I misread "jayus" as "jaysis", which is Dublin Irish for just about everything from the weather (jaysis) to the government (feckin' jaysis).

Like "chingadera" in Spanish.

 

[Laurel]

http://myds.jp/illustration/cuisines/salad/a.jpg

Even the more willing salad-eaters among us tend to think of salad as the culinary equivalent of floss, i.e. as a depressing incarnation of grim, miserable healthfulness wagging a finger of admonishment from the most boring sector of the table. At family functions, you scoop some onto your plate with the same shrugging resignation with which you put in your yearly appearance at a church service: Ah hell, better heap some of this crap on there so Grandma won't get on my case.

Hey, maybe if I dump half a bottle of ranch dressing on it, you think, brightening, then it'll be more like somebody just spilled a harmless fistful of lawn clippings into an otherwise delicious puddle of mayonnaise!

Friends, that's not what a salad is meant to be. A salad, well executed and embraced as an opportunity to stuff more things that are good into our bodies, should be a carnival of lively flavors, textures, and colors. It should excite your eyes, exercise your teeth, and make your palate sing with joy. You should stare at it intently while you eat, lustily mixing and matching its various ingredients on your fork; you should finish before you're ready to be done and then nudge your dumb salmon toward the edge of your plate to make room for more salad. It should be a glorious, indulgent feast: healthful, sure, yeah OK, but mostly delicious and diverse and fresh and ecstatic.

* * *

The real tragedy of salad's abysmal reputation among people who otherwise know what is good is that it's neither challenging nor particularly pricey to construct a salad that is tasty enough to literally—literally!—cause your eyes to come together and fuse into a single enormous Cyclops eye when you taste it. Commonly, at restaurants and in cookbooks, salads are presented to us as long lists of fancy ingredients—this is a combination of shaved jicama, fresh bonsai leaves, blood orange-marinated apricots, and chicory root, dusted with fennel pollen and drizzled with fermented lingonberry dressing, served on a bed of albino mesclun and angel fingernail clippings—and you think you're supposed to get all that stuff, or at least know what it is, in order to put together a salad of your own that doesn't need to be served with a chair and a pre-tied noose.

That's not true, though. You don't need to know what the hell an endive is to make a salad that really and truly will distract you from damn near anything else you put on the plate with it, up to and possibly including a live hand grenade. What you need to know is that variety—genuine, consequential variety: variety of flavor, texture, color, food group—is your friend. And you need to know some easy ways to assemble that variety.​

- read the full article How To Make A Salad That Doesn't Suck: A Guide For The Nutritionally Unvirtuous (from Deadspin)​

 

[Laurel]

And don't miss his instructions in the Comments section on how to make Salad Poppers from the extra salad!!

 

[Saint Peter]

...and the wonderful little crumbles will shrink down to nothing, and you'll be sad...

This.

 

[trysail]

NAPLES, FL—Describing it as a “real close call,” a local seagull suffering from an acute case of diarrhea told reporters that he was barely able to make it to a crowded public beach in time to relieve himself Monday. “Oh, man, I really had to go and there wasn’t a sunbather or occupied picnic table in sight—I honestly didn’t know if I could hold it,” said the gray and white seabird, who reportedly uttered a deep, contented sigh of relief upon finally reaching a densely packed group of beachgoers and releasing a voluminous torrent of loose fecal matter.​

- read the full article Seagull With Diarrhea Barely Makes It To Crowded Beach In Time (from The Onion)​

This Bill Bryson anecdote came to mind immediately:

_____________

...Katz was in a tetchy frame of mind throughout most of our stay in Paris. He was convinced everything was out to get him. On the morning of our second day, we were strolling down the Champs-Elysées when a bird shit on his head. "Did you know," I asked a block or two later, "that a bird's shit on your head?"

Instinctively, Katz put a hand to his head, looked at it in horror, and with only a mumbled "Wait here," walked with ramrod stiffness in the direction of our hotel. When he reappeared twenty minutes later, he smelled overpoweringly of Brut aftershave and his hair was plastered down like a third-rate Spanish gigolo's, but he appeared to have regained his composure. "I'm ready now," he announced.

Almost immediately another bird shit on his head. Only this time it really shit. I don't want to get too graphic, in case you're snacking or anything, but if you can imagine a pot of yogurt upended onto his scalp, I think you'll get the picture. It was running down both sides of his head and everything. "Gosh, Steve, that was one sick bird," I observed helpfully.

Katz was literally speechless. Without a word he turned and walked stiffly back to the hotel, ignoring the turning heads of passersby. He was gone for nearly an hour. When at last he returned, he was wearing a poncho with the hood up. "Just don't say a word," he warned me and strode past. He never really warmed up to Paris after that...

-Bill Bryson
Neither Here Nor There: Travels In Europe
New York, New York. 1992.​

 

[Laurel]

This.

Wasted blue cheese! The horror!

 

[Laurel]

How Do You Begin Your Being and Nothingness Experience?

You already have. You were born, and your inheritance is pain. Make sure you are connected to the Internet.

Your Being and Nothingness Network Friends List

It is empty. It will always be empty. BNN is a social network designed to connect you with people who have not joined—and never will join—the Being and Nothingness Network. Your loneliness is transcendent and almost holy, so do you want to allow pop-up ads from this website? Your browser must support Flash.

Your Being and Nothingness Profile

Enter your relationship status and the BNN will list you as “radically free.” Your body is a prison and you are surrounded by nothingness. You only have your conscious choices. Your birthday also doesn’t matter.

Our Existential Calendar Feature

You are ontologically defined by what you do: existence precedes essence. Your Existential Calendar can thus hold up to 50 individual entries for various day-to-day events, though the calendar will not display any of these entries after you have created them. This is why the “publish calendar entry” button has been re-labeled “delete mockery of meaningful activity.”​

- read the full article The Being and Nothingness Network: Social Media for Existentialists. (from McSweeney's)​

 

[Laurel]

http://24.media.tumblr.com/297f3331a940bdf93a37040b7b2fb915/tumblr_mqnq2fWWLE1rx70ego1_500.jpg​

- an awesome resource found at MIT Open Courseware (from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology)​

 

[Laurel]

This Bill Bryson anecdote came to mind immediately:

_____________

-Bill Bryson
Neither Here Nor There: Travels In Europe
New York, New York. 1992.​

hahaha!!

 

[Aquagal]

And don't miss his instructions in the Comments section on how to make Salad Poppers from the extra salad!!

Deep fried salad balls....eeewww

 

[Laurel]

Deep fried salad balls....eeewww

Don't hate!

 

[lovetoread]

It's always edible when fried.

 

[Aquagal]

http://o.onionstatic.com/images/19/19589/original/700.jpg?0431

NAPLES, FL—Describing it as a “real close call,” a local seagull suffering from an acute case of diarrhea told reporters that he was barely able to make it to a crowded public beach in time to relieve himself Monday. “Oh, man, I really had to go and there wasn’t a sunbather or occupied picnic table in sight—I honestly didn’t know if I could hold it,” said the gray and white seabird, who reportedly uttered a deep, contented sigh of relief upon finally reaching a densely packed group of beachgoers and releasing a voluminous torrent of loose fecal matter.​

- read the full article Seagull With Diarrhea Barely Makes It To Crowded Beach In Time (from The Onion)​

Still blended hot fried salad ewwwing....

My last visit to Puerto Vallarta, I was heading back from the beach to the room, and a seagull decided to splatter my entire left shoulder and chest. I was the sunbather du jour. I thought it stunk pretty bad of two week old rotten fish til I got in the full elevator in 80+ degree weather. It was like that awesome scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and everyone has darting eyes.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

http://myds.jp/illustration/cuisines/salad/a.jpg​

I eat a big salad almost every other day.

































But then, this is why. V V V V V

Hey, maybe if I dump half a bottle of ranch dressing on it, you think, brightening, then it'll be more like somebody just spilled a harmless fistful of lawn clippings into an otherwise delicious puddle of mayonnaise!

 

[Laurel]

Still blended hot fried salad ewwwing....

My last visit to Puerto Vallarta, I was heading back from the beach to the room, and a seagull decided to splatter my entire left shoulder and chest. I was the sunbather du jour. I thought it stunk pretty bad of two week old rotten fish til I got in the full elevator in 80+ degree weather. It was like that awesome scene in The Good, the Bad and the Ugly and everyone has darting eyes.

That sucks!

My worst birdpoop experience actually ended happily. We were touristing in Tralfagar Square when I felt something warm hit my head not once, not twice, but FOUR times. One splat on my forehead, three in my hair. I pulled my the hood of my jacket over my forehead and we unhappily trained back to the hotel. Between the transport and the shower/makeup (and a quick lunch in the room), it took two and a half hours to get back to Square, which was suddenly really crowded. We asked a guy what was up and he told us that 1) there was a big concert for Nelson Mandela that evening, and 2) he was a scalper selling tickets (he didn't phrase it like that, of course). For two tickets, he wanted twenty pounds more than we had in our wallets, but grudgingly settled.

So I got to see REM and Billy Ocean play, and Mr. Mandela speak - AND a Scary Spice nipple slip - all because a bird shat on my head.

Off topic for reads. Sorry!

 

[Laurel]

I eat a big salad almost every other day.


But then, this is why. V V V V V

I love ranch dressing.

 

[Laurel]

The first independent film to gross more than $200 million, Pulp Fiction was a shot of adrenaline to Hollywood’s heart, reviving John Travolta’s career, making stars of Samuel L. Jackson and Uma Thurman, and turning Bob and Harvey Weinstein into giants. How did Quentin Tarantino, a high-school dropout and former video-store clerk, change the face of modern cinema? Mark Seal takes the director, his producers, and his cast back in time, to 1993.

http://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2013/03/making-of-pulp-fiction-oral-history/_jcr_content/par/cn_contentwell/par-main/cn_pagination_contai/cn_image.size.pulp-fiction.jpg

In late 1992, Quentin Tarantino left Amsterdam, where he had spent three months, off and on, in a one-room apartment with no phone or fax, writing the script that would become Pulp Fiction, about a community of criminals on the fringe of Los Angeles. Written in a dozen school notebooks, which the 30-year-old Tarantino took on the plane to Los Angeles, the screenplay was a mess—hundreds of pages of indecipherable handwriting. “It was about going over it one last time and then giving it to the typist, Linda Chen, who was a really good friend of mine,” Tarantino tells me. “She really helped me.”

When Tarantino met Chen, she was working as a typist and unofficial script consultant for Robert Towne, the venerable screenwriter of, most notably, Chinatown. “Quentin was fascinated by the way I worked with Towne and his team,” she says, explaining that she “basically lived” at Towne’s condominium, typing, researching, and offering feedback in the preparation of his movie The Two Jakes. “He would ask the guys for advice, and if they were vague or disparate, he would say, ‘What did the Chink think?’ ” she recalls. “Quentin found this dynamic of genius writer and secret weapon amusing.

“It began with calls where he was just reading pages to me,” she continues.​

- read the full article Cinema Tarantino: The Making of Pulp Fiction (from Vanity Fair)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.robotic-lab.com/blog/uploads/2013/04/roxxxy-the-sex-robot.jpg

As for Roxxxy, she weighs in at 60lb (27kg) is 5ft 7in (1.70m) high and comes with a variety of hair colours, moveable limbs and 'lifelike' skin.

She is the brainchild of electrical engineer and computer scientist Douglas Hines, the founder of TC Systems and True Companion, who formerly worked in the artificial intelligence lab at AT&T Bell Laboratories.

He says the sex robot developed from his firm's line of healthcare robots, which were designed to look after elderly or infirm patients.

"Our skill-set is based on commercial and military robotics and what we did is we looked for an opportunity in the marketplace to apply that technology.

"One very obvious market is healthcare - but there's a less-known which is gaining more and more momentum which is the sex industry."​

- read the full article Will we ever want to have sex with robots? (from the BBC)​

 

[lovetoread]

You should sell those in the lit store.

 

[Laurel]

That would be awesome if we could!

 

[Laurel]

Girl, I’m tired of playing around. I’m ready for that real deal romance. Flowers and butterflies and fireworks. Baby, I want to make love to you like in the movies.

That’s right, girl. I want to serve you that good-ass Billy Crystal dick. That sweet, tender lovin’ that’ll make you feel like Meg Ryan from 1989 or 1995, depending on which era of Meg Ryan you relate to more. I want to tear that up after a long and dramatic courtship where I slowly gain your trust, but lose it at the worst possible moment by revealing our relationship was part of a bet or that I have destroyed your small independent business. Then I’ll earn your confidence back with a grand, breathtaking gesture that was foreshadowed months earlier. I want to knock boots with you the way you do after holding a boom box outside someone’s window in the rain.

I want to take you home to my apartment. Though my living space is unfeasibly large and furnished well beyond my means with Crate & Barrel accouterments, you’ll find it unacceptably messy because men, right? Once we get inside, I’m going to tear your clothes off. But, I’ll leave the bra on. Women always talk about how they hate wearing bras. How they squeeze and shape and constrict them. But in the movies they always wear them during sex, which seems silly, because lots of great sex things can happen once you remove your bra. I’ll take my shirt off, revealing a body which is either way too good considering what I do for work or one that’s comically dumpy. I’ll leave my pants on. That’s how it works in the movies. Girls keep their bras on. Guys leave their pants on. My dick ain’t afraid of no zippers.

I want to go at it under the sheets no matter how hot it is. Our feet will extend past the end of the bed, even though you get no leverage that way. We will not notice any unexpected moles or embarrassing tattoos. Everything that happens will be sexy. There won’t be any gross sounds or sights. Just like in the movies, our sex will be tasteless and odorless. I will not kiss your neck and get a mouthful of perfume and then you’re like what’s wrong and I’ll be like nothing and you’ll get all distant and I’ll be like sorry it’s the taste of your perfume, and you’ll be sad because you only wore it because I said I liked it one time and then all of a sudden you’re not in the mood and I think about sneaking off to the bathroom to furtively masturbate but I don’t and I just hold you limply until you fall asleep then I check Twitter for like an hour. That doesn’t happen.​

- read the full article I Want to Make Love to You Like In the Movies. (from McSweeney's)​

 

[Laurel]

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/issexnecessary_thurberwhite.jpg

In 1927, E. B. White pulled some strings at The New Yorker, where he had been working since shortly after the legendary magazine’s birth in 1925, and arranged for his friend James Thurber to be hired as an editor. Over the decades that followed, Thurber would go on to produce some of the magazine’s most beloved literature and art. But arguably most delightful of all is his collaboration with White himself: Is Sex Necessary?: Or Why You Feel the Way You Do (public library), originally released in 1929 as White’s very first prose publication, is an unspeakably wonderful joint collection of prose poking fun at the conventions of marriage, romance, and love, but not without channeling through the charms of wit some profound truths about the human heart.

Featuring forty-two lovely drawings by Thurber, reminiscent in both style and cultural progressiveness of Kurt Vonnegut’s favorite Danish guide to sexuality and secretly, systematically picked up from the floor beneath Thurber’s desk by White, the essays explore such subjects as feminine types, the sexual revolution, the perils of marital claustrophobia, and frigidity in men. But perhaps most notable is a chapter titled “How to Tell Love from Passion.” It begins:

At a certain point in every person’s amours, the question arises: “Am I in love, or am I merely inflamed by passion?”

It is a disturbing question. Usually it arises at some inopportune moment: at the start of a letter, in the middle of an embrace, at the end of a day in the country. If the person could supply a direct, simple, positive answer — if he could say convincingly, “I am in love,” or, “This is not love, this is passion” — he would spare himself many hours of mental discomfort. Almost nobody can arrive at so simple a reply. The conclusion a man commonly arrives at, after tossing the argument about, is something after this fashion: “I am in love, all right, but just the same I don’t like the way I looked at Miriam last night.”​

http://www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/issexnecessary_thurberwhite1.jpg​

- read the full article How to Tell Love from Passion: A Timeless Litmus Test from E. B. White and James Thurber, 1929 (from BrainPickings)​

 

[Colonel Hogan]

I love ranch dressing.

I fibbed a little. I typically do a mixture of poppyseed and Russian dressing. In my sincere and considered opinion, the "high" in high fructose corn syrup designates a condiment that exists on an elevated, metaphysical plane.

 

[Colonel Hogan]

http://www.robotic-lab.com/blog/uploads/2013/04/roxxxy-the-sex-robot.jpg

She is the brainchild of electrical engineer and computer scientist Douglas Hines, the founder of TC Systems and True Companion, who formerly worked in the artificial intelligence lab at AT&T Bell Laboratories.​

I worked at Lucent about a year before it was bought out by Alcatel. Most of the guys I met from Bell Labs had honest to goodness REAL intelligence.

I think this guy must have been a UPS driver who sneeked into the back after dropping off a delivery.​