• • • google suggested • • •
• • • some of the things I read in antisocial isolation • • •
The Gastro Obscura Guide to Cooking School-Lunch Classics
You’re the lunch lady now.
Wellesley Fudge Cake dates back to 19th-century school shenanigans. Embiggenable, perhaps.
THOUGH STUDENTs ARE STILL STUDYING for finals and finishing up their term papers, they’re not doing it on campus this year. Instead, dorms are empty, quads are deserted, and playgrounds are covered in caution tape.
Instead of cafeterias, students are now eating lunch in their own (or their parents’) kitchens, which, depending on the school, might be a step up or down. But a few schools have treats like no other, from an Albuquerque school district’s legendary peanut butter bar to a way of barbecuing chicken that has spread throughout Upstate New York. With prom on ice and graduations likely to take place over Zoom (if at all), our own kitchens can provide a taste of academia until school’s back in session. But whether your 25th high school reunion just got cancelled or you’re currently sweating over your grade point average, the following recipes can provide a dose of nostalgic comfort.
Jersey Dirt is much more appetizing than it sounds.
Jersey Dirt
University of Richmond, Richmond, Virginia
It started as a prank. In the early ’90s, Tina Lesher heard that the University of Richmond was holding a “Recipes From Home” contest. Lesher, the mother of a UR student, copied a pudding recipe from one of her cookbooks and sent it in as “Jersey Dirt,” claiming it was her daughter’s favorite dessert. Combining cookies, pudding, whipped topping, and cream cheese, the dessert was a winner.
One day, Melissa Lesher walked into the dining hall and saw Jersey Dirt (which she had never tried) on display, along with signs stating that it was her favorite. “I was mortified. I lost it. I turned the cards over so no one would see my name associated with it. I was livid,” she told the alumni magazine years later. But the dessert lives on at UR. Writes alumnus Catherine Amos Cribbs, “That glorious mix of cheesecakey pudding and crushed Oreos could calm an overstressed brain or soothe a broken heart.” For our overstressed brains and broken hearts, you can use this recipe from the university itself. …
RELATED: Feast Your Eyes on Delectable Clay Replicas of Asian-American Foods
In the past two years, Stephanie Shih has folded more than 1,000 ceramic dumplings.
This entire ‘meal’ is made of clay. “The most important dipping sauce is not soy sauce, but black vinegar,” Shih says.
ISOLATED IN HER BROOKLYN APARTMENT since March, Stephanie Shih has folded dozens upon dozens of dumplings. “I find it soothing,” she says. “I can do it without thinking, so it’s almost like meditation.” But Shih’s dumplings aren’t made of dough—they’re made of clay, and the results are delicate and porcelain-white.
In the past two years, Shih has made more than 1,000 ceramic dumplings, as well as many other replicas of Asian foodstuffs, from jars of chili oil to boxed tea drinks, each hand-crafted and hand-painted. Her work is a visual excavation of the Asian-American pantry, a space steeped in nostalgia and shaped by the experience of diaspora.
“I want to make groceries that feel iconic and are immediately recognizable to people within the community,” Shih says. “Because we have a limited number of brands to choose from—it’s just what was imported—a lot of us have the same memories. I think the pull is so strong for people in the diaspora because these objects really do remind them of home.” …
The beach-going Grim Reaper on his Florida protest: ‘Someone has to stand up’
Lawyer Daniel Uhlfelder explains why he protested against the reopening of beaches – and that his costume is actually made out of linen.
Daniel Uhlfelder dressed as the Grim Reaper.
Times are truly strange when a man dressed in a grim reaper’s costume in 90F (32C) heat is the most sane person around. But last week, as people flocked to Florida’s recently reopened beaches, Daniel Uhlfelder had a message for beachgoers.
“The grim reaper represents death. This is a deadly virus. It’s a global pandemic,” he said in a televised news broadcast.
It’s not in Uhlfelder’s nature to want to keep beaches closed – as a lawyer, he has campaigned to keep beaches publicly accessible in the past. But as the coronavirus death toll reaches 75,000 in the US and global shutdowns help to slow the spread of the deadly virus, Uhlfelder felt he had to say something.
“I’m worried about the pandemic getting out of control and killing a lot of people … I couldn’t sleep at night [if I just did nothing],” he says.
holy shit pic.twitter.com/rVw24plXTp
— Adam Parkhomenko (@AdamParkhomenko) May 1, 2020
And so, he came up with an idea to dress up with a cloak and scythe, and take a Grim Reaper tour of Florida’s beaches. …
RELATED: ‘It’s irresponsible’: Washington state sees sudden rise in Covid parties
Gatherings held with the intent of catching, and overcoming, coronavirus are jeopardizing public health says state official.
You can call them BYOC parties. That’s bring your own Covid-19.
Health officials in Walla Walla, Washington, are admonishing the sudden rise in so-called “Covid-19 parties” where non-infected guests mingle with those who have tested positive for the virus, ostensibly in hopes of speeding up the process of catching, and overcoming, the virus.
“Walla Walla County health officials are receiving reports of Covid-19 parties occurring in our community, where non-infected people mingle with an infected person in an effort to catch the virus,” the county said in a press release Tuesday.
As of Tuesday, 94 people in the county have tested positive for Covid-19, including employees who worked at a nearby Tyson Fresh Meats plant who were infected.
Some of those cases can be linked back to parties, Meghan DeBolt, director of the county’s Department of Community Health, told the Walla Walla Bulletin.
“We don’t know when it is happening. It’s after the fact that we hear from cases. We ask about contacts, and there are 25 people because: ‘We were at a Covid party’.” She added: “It’s unacceptable. It’s irresponsible.” …
Record grocery sales are coming at a cost for supermarkets
TAKEAWAY
People wait in line to shop at a Sainbury’s Local in London.
After a rocky start, UK online grocer Ocado has become a standout performer during the coronavirus pandemic.
Revenue is up 40% from the previous year, and the stock has soared a similar 40% since January. Ocado still can’t fully meet demand from existing customers and its virtual shop remains closed to new ones. Customers are ordering bigger baskets. Warehouses are running at peak efficiency. And yet, Ocado chief financial officer Duncan Tatton-Brown told investors in an update May 6, the company is no more profitable than before the pandemic.
This is the new challenge for grocery stores. While demand for their goods and services has never been higher, the costs of meeting that demand are also high. Grocery companies are paying staff more to come in, investing in protective measures for customers and employees, and shouldering logistics costs as they expand delivery and pickup operations. That means record sales haven’t necessarily translated into fatter margins.
French supermarket Carrefour beat expectations with €19.4 billion ($21 billion) in sales in the first quarter. Like other grocers, Carrefour saw demand for online groceries soar, while customers shopping in stores visited less frequently and bought more each time. But costs also ballooned, with staff bonuses, new equipment, and new processes to create services for vulnerable shoppers. …
Watch Cleveland, Ohio Accidentally Destroy Itself With 1.5 Million Balloons
In 1986 America was facing an airborne plague of a different sort. While much less severe than our current issues, it had all the makings of a cataclysmic event for Cleveland, Ohio. That plague, of course, was balloons.
Balloonfest ’86 was a fundraising publicity stunt by the city of Cleveland that backfired so spectacularly you’d think it was commissioned by the Browns. The idea was for Cleveland to release almost 1.5 million balloons over the city, which itself is the type of PR stunt so crazy that you’d imagine Don Draper pitching it after plowing through half a full bottle of gin. In actuality, it was coordinated by Balloonart by Treb, an LA-based company headed by, not too surprisingly, a guy named Treb Heining. The idea was to set a world record for the number of balloons released at once because setting world records was the type of thing people had to do for fun before everyone had an Xbox.
What resulted was a catastrophe of Acme level proportions. Things started smoothly as the balloons were released in unison and cascaded upward in vivid multi-colored harmony. It was honestly quite beautiful.
But then the balloons hit a massive cold front, and suddenly Cleveland turned into the Balloonacolypse. …
UNRELATED: Don’t Let ‘Big Meat’ Freak You Out Over Shortages
A whole lot of meat-eaters out there are getting a little worried lately. Supermarkets are limiting how much meat you can purchase at once. Wendy’s is now removing beef from its menus in some places. Tyson has a big ol’ blog post about how they’re worried about a meat shortage, and it prompted the White House to mandate that meatpacking plants stay open, despite the awful conditions and chance of getting sick inside.
Here’s the reality, though: we’re not running out of meat anytime soon, and it’s worth addressing some of these bigger storylines with some additional context.
It is totally fine if Wendy’s wants to yank the Baconator off the menu, but they should at least be upfront about what the score is here. Their slogan for so long, the one that forced the hand of everyone else in the fast-food burger biz, was “Fresh, Never Frozen,” and they’re sticking to their guns. If they’d rather serve nothing before serving frozen burgers, that’s their prerogative. Frankly, it’s kind of admirable in its own way — which is all the more reason to get out in front of these stories that are doing nothing but inducing panic in a country that relies so heavily on burger consumption just to feel something. …
RELATED: Surprising Scientific Explanations For The Things You Love
Why do we like the things we do? Sorry to ruin your existential crisis, but it mostly comes down to good ol’ science. Here are 12 reasons you like the things you do. …
Frontier Airlines will drop open-seat fee that drew attacks
In this April 23, 2020 photo a Frontier Airlines jetliner taxis to a runway for take off from Denver International Airport in Denver. Lawmakers on Capitol Hill lashed out Wednesday, May 6, 2020 against Frontier Airlines over the budget carrier’s move to charge passengers extra to guarantee they will sit next to an empty middle seat while flying during the coronavirus outbreak.
Frontier Airlines is dropping plans to charge passengers extra to sit next to an empty middle seat after congressional Democrats accused the airline of trying to profit from fear over the new coronavirus.
“We recognize the concerns raised that we are profiting from safety and this was never our intent,” Frontier CEO Barry Biffle said late Wednesday in a letter to three lawmakers. “We simply wanted to provide our customers with an option for more space.”
Biffle said the airline will rescind the extra fee, which Frontier called More Room, and block the seats from being sold.
Earlier in the day, Democrats had railed against Frontier’s plan to charge passengers at least $39 per flight to guarantee they would sit next to an empty middle seat. The offer was to begin with flights Friday and run through Aug. 31. …
‘It’s useful for viewers today’: the film about a two-year voluntary isolation
Documentary Spaceship Earth focuses on an early 90s, hippie-inspired project to live sustainably in a contained biome, with nothing coming in or out
A still from Spaceship Earth, which chronicles the Biosphere 2 project.
In September 1991, the final year of the Soviet Union and the beginning of a significant decline in trips to outer space, four men and four women donned bright red, Nasa-style jump suits for launch day in Arizona. They waved to masses of cameras, said their long-term goodbyes to a cheering crowd, and stepped beyond an air-tight door. But their mission, heavily covered in the press, was not to the moon, or into orbit, or even out of the state. The eight pioneers, part of a privately funded project called Biosphere 2, were to be locked in a 3.14-acre enclosed, self-sustaining structure for two whole years, on a mission to collect data and garner insights to aid Martian-style projects in mankind’s (presumed) extra-terrestrial future.
Documentarian Matt Wolf, whose new film Spaceship Earth chronicles the Biosphere 2 project from its counter-cultural origins to controversial legacy – was nine when the experiment began, and missed the substantial media attention at the time. When he was poking around the internet several years ago and stumbled on a photo of the jump-suited Biospherians in their glass-paned habitat, he assumed it was from a science fiction movie. He soon realized the project was indeed real, and that many of its participants remained at a commune-style ranch in New Mexico.
“I became determined to tell their story,” Wolf told the Guardian, particularly once he witnessed the cache of archival footage – reels of tape in a temperature-controlled room – kept by those involved in Biosphere 2. “I was just astounded that they recognized the historical significance of what they were doing and were so rigorous in documenting it,” he said.
Biosphere 2 was an ambitious endeavor, to say the least – a collection of sealed-off biomes under a glass pyramid in the Arizona desert, intended to demonstrate the viability of self-sustaining microsystems on an inhospitable planet (or, as many participants warned, an inhospitable Earth). Biosphere 2, named as such because participants believed Earth to be Biosphere 1, featured a desert, a mangrove forest, a 9,000 square-foot ocean with its own coral reef, and a savannah grassland; its eight inhabitants were expected to cultivate their own food and drink, and to maintain livable atmospheric conditions of oxygen and carbon dioxide. …
What Does Elon Musk and Grimes’ Baby Name Actually Mean?
Is it legal? Is it even the baby’s name at all?
Elon Musk and Grimes attend the Met Gala in 2018 in New York.
You have to imagine that the pressure was on for Elon Musk and Grimes when it came time to name their baby. He is an eccentric, flamethrower-hawking billionaire tycoon who’s obsessed with Mars. She is the kind of pop star who releases songs written from the perspective of a vampire Al Pacino. Even two years on, their beautifully bizarre coupling continues to boggle minds and confound pop fans, tech hobbyists, and celebrity watchers the world over. Everyone is still confused about that whole drama with Azealia Banks. (Though, interestingly enough, Grimes did foretell her pregnancy back then.) Anyway, suffice it to say there were great expectations for this baby name—expectations beyond even “Apple” or “Elsie Otter.” Factor in that the parents themselves have uncommon names and might have wanted to pass Mom and Dad’s weird-name tradition onto the next generation. So no, they couldn’t just call their baby something normal.
The baby, a boy, was born Monday night, and if Musk’s hazy tweets are to be believed, he has been christened X Æ A-12 Musk. Rather than issuing a press release, a Notes app statement, or just keeping the news private, Musk has chosen to mete out updates on the newborn in the somewhat chaotic way he often does, by replying to select tweets his fans have directed his way. (It’s like he is so committed to being a “reply guy” that he insists that all his communications must be replies.) “Mom & baby all good,” Musk tweeted to @Gaelic_Neilson. When @priscillabanana asked for the name, that’s when he wrote “X Æ A-12 Musk.” To @TeslaGong, he offered a picture of the baby, but edited so it looked like he had face tattoos. Oh to be a billionaire with no impulse control and a Twitter account!
We really need to see picture of the baby !! Please do share.
— Tesla in the Gong (@TeslaGong) May 5, 2020
A pic of you holding the baby would break the internet … please share one
— Viv
(@flcnhvy) May 5, 2020
(@flcnhvy)
Was Musk serious about X Æ A-12? Given what we know about Musk and Grimes (see above), it’s not out of the realm of possibility. Traditionally reliable news sources are sure going with it. Some of those outlets have speculated that the name is meant to be pronounced “X Ash Archangel”—again, based on ambiguous Twitter behavior on the part of Musk: He liked a tweet positing this. It may look more like a math equation than a name, but the character Æ is apparently said as “ash,” and A-12 has been used as a codename for a type of plane. …
Video Goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
and not-so-goodnesses
Florida-based security firm Silvercorp USA has come under scrutiny following a failed attempt to topple Venezuela’s president.
THANKS to SHOWTIME and VICE News for making this program available on YouTube.
Three weeks after Lil Bub died, her owner Mike Bridavsky sat disheveled in his recording studio listening to his audio archive of the cat’s meows, purrs, “chirpy purrs”, snorts, and snores. “No other cat makes sounds like that” he said with unabashed pride. “There’s like, syllables and stuff.”
Bridavsky started building his collection of Lil Bub’s noises after adopting her from a feral litter near his home in Bloomington Indiana. The cat’s sounds have been used in stuffed animals and bobble-heads, and a full-length electronic music LP record.
Fast food restaurants face a beef shortage, Jared Kushner may be to blame for America’s botched PPE response, and a would-be coup in Venezuela is foiled by a mercenary live tweeting it.
THANKS to Comedy Central and The Daily Social Distancing Show with Trevor Noah for making this program available on YouTube.
Trump tours a mask factory without a mask, and goes on the defensive in an interview with David Muir.
President Trump was ready to disband his coronavirus task force but came to see things differently yesterday when he saw how popular the team has become.
THANKS to CBS and A Late Show with Stephen Colbert for making this program available on YouTube.
In response to the crisis brought on by COVID-19, our country seems to have adopted the “be the change you wish to see in the world… but only once a global pandemic forces you to” approach.
THANKS to TBS and Full Frontal with Samantha Bee for making this program available on YouTube.
You know the saying, those who can’t do, teach? Well, unfortunately for parents across the country, that saying has become a way of life. Allana Harkin interviews education experts and teachers to get a lesson in teacher appreciation.
Seth takes a closer look at the president giving up the fight against the coronavirus to reopen the economy.
THANKS to NBC and Late Night with Seth Meyers for making this program available on YouTube.
CAUTION: Some language may not be appropriate for work or children.
Here’s me commentary on more self isolation videos. Keep being weird legends. Cheers!
まるとはなが並んでいたので、前足を比べてみました。As Maru&Hana relaxed together, I compared their forefoot.
FINALLY . . .
The Wide World of Disease-Based Dutch Profanity
“Get the corona!” is starting to make an appearance.
Some people are surprised, even offended, by the Dutch tendency to include illnesses among their curses.
TWANNA HINES, WHO GREW UP in rural Illinois, moved to the Netherlands to pursue a graduate degree at the University of Amsterdam in 2000. Not totally used to the stream of bicycles and trams in the streets of Amsterdam, she wandered into a bike lane and got a mouthful from a passing cyclist. “And my Dutch roommate shouted back, in the Dutch translation, ‘Get cancer, man!’” she remembers. “And I was like, ‘What the hell? That doesn’t make any sense, why would you tell someone to get cancer?’”
This was not some bizarrely creative insult that her roommate came up with. The Netherlands, in fact, is home to a shockingly extensive list of swear words, and the ones you might use to yell at an errant pedestrian are largely medical in nature. You can tell someone you think they’re suffering from cholera, smallpox, or tuberculosis, you can tell them to “Typhoid off.” It is a truly strange quirk of the Dutch language, one that can be off-putting or offensive to those not used to it, and even some who are. Especially today.
“Even ‘Get the corona’ is in use already,” says Ewoud Sanders, a journalist and author who writes about language for NRC Handelsblad, one of the most important Dutch newspapers.
In some cases, Dutch speakers resort to using English swears, but when when it comes to anger toward a person or situation, diseases are often involved.
In general, cultures tend to form their profanity around concepts that they fear. In puritanical America and Japan, sexual terms are common. In Quebec, long ruled by the Catholic Church, it’s religious terminology. In the Netherlands, it’s illnesses, at least for some use cases. …
Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Probably. Maybe. Likely, if I find nothing more barely uninteresting at all to do.
Good times!
Does next Monday work for you? https://t.co/7BI1urFN3l
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) May 7, 2020
The first step in overcoming stupidity is admitting you're stupid.
— God (@TheTweetOfGod) May 5, 2020
Need something more barely uninteresting at all to do?
Right now there’s one bird sitting on what appears to be a bunch of eggs. The other bird seems to be looking for something tasty to kill.
Ed. Yes, that’s a cut-and-paste of another day.