Half-demolished Kitchen of the Soul

Recent Posts

  • The Runaway Running Mates
  • Friday Photo (on Saturday)
  • Happy Song of the Week
  • The Bigfoot mystery
  • Pious irony
  • It's been done
  • No más esnobismo
  • Music Video Monday: Leon Russell
  • Unintelligent design
  • Friday Photo

Archives

  • June 2012
  • May 2012
  • April 2012
  • March 2012
  • February 2012
  • January 2012
  • December 2011
  • November 2011
  • October 2011
  • September 2011

Images

  • Básico
  • Zamas
  • Negril
  • Gershwin
  • Chet Across America
  • New York
  • Drive
  • Flightline
  • Mexico
  • And these...
  • Three from DC
  • Denmark & Sweden
  • Amsterdam
  • California
  • Paris
  • Gotham

About

Subscribe to this blog's feed

The Runaway Running Mates

Various highly respected, big-name Republicans have made it official they don't want to be vice president. At least not this time around. It isn't clear whether they don't want to be anyone's VP or just Romney's.

Whichever the case, it means Romney will have to go lower and lower down his wish list. That doesn't mean the potential running mates become less qualified, only less well known. Romney & Who? That would be only a little better than McCain & Please Tell Me You're Joking.

03 June 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday Photo (on Saturday)

Screen shot 2012-06-02 at 7.56.29 AM

02 June 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy Song of the Week

Mirror In The Bathroom / English Beat

01 June 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Bigfoot mystery

Bigfoot, Sasquatch, Yeti or whatever. The superstar of cryptozoology leaving tantalizing clues in the wilderness. A footprint. A tuft of hair. A shaggy shape disappearing into the underbrush. Eyewitness testimonies. Ooo, there’s something out there. But let’s talk about the evidence the Bigfoot believers aren’t finding.

The various versions of Bigfoot depict a missing link creature. Somewhat human, somewhat ape. Some type of primate, right? Okay, what do we know about primates? 

First of all, they reproduce sexually. That means there should be female and male Bigfoots, along with infants and juvenile offspring. Families. You can’t have just one Bigfoot, otherwise you have the very last Bigfoot.

File:SmalfutSecondly, primates travel in groups. They and we are social animals. Chimps, gorillas, hunter-gatherer humans and so on, moving together from food source to food source, stopping in a suitable spot to eat and sleep, then moving on again. Yet all that's ever found are tracks of a single animal, not the tramplings of a pack. No spots of mangled plant life littered with foot, hand and butt prints and the aftermath of a day’s meal, with droppings around the perimeter. Even if no one ever saw a band of the super-stealthy Bigfoots, one would eventually stumble upon where they (not it) had been. So where is this evidence? That’s the mystery.

Until such evidence it produced, I think it’s safe to say Bigfoot is a myth kept alive by wishful thinkers, hoaxers, opportunists and guys in gorilla suits.

30 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Pious irony

Man-tattoos-leviticus-1822-that-forbids-homosexua-28846-1298035133-2

Hmmm, but Leviticus 19:28 forbids tattoos.

30 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

It's been done

More than a couple of times in my advertising career, a client has said, "Let's copy that great ad/commercial/campaign that so-and-so did."

We would reply, "But it has already been done."

And they'd look at us like we were stupid and say, "Yeah, and it worked, so let's do the same thing."

Those would be the moments I'd remember that most businesses just copy what works. That's why there are more than one business offering essentially identical products and services.

Once in a blue moon, someone comes up with something new. Then others rush to copy it. Some will improve it, give it their own unique twist, but most will be happy with me-too products as long as they're profitable. After all, originality is expensive. Because it's rare.

Meanwhile, we creative people are driven by other things. First, we love thinking up new stuff. We love finding new solutions for the same handful of universal marketing problems. (Sorry, captains of business, your problems aren't unique.) Because new is more fun. New shows how smart we are.

But new also grabs the audience's attention. At least when new is also good. So that's the second reason we insist on doing something different.

The third reason is that if your campaign is a copy of a wildly successful one, people think it's for the original company. And if they realize it isn't for the original company, they will think your company makes knock-off crap.

(Okay, a confession:. Most creative people get sucked into trends and fads. Even creative people who aren't total hacks. But we usually try to work some morsel of originality into our "ironic homages." Sometimes dressing up a cliche requires more creativity than coming up with something totally original.)

I knew I was working at the wrong company when the president—a PR man who'd probably been recycling the same five marketing plans for decades—whined that the agency would be more profitable if we creative folks would stop trying to reinvent the wheel with each client. We were R&D but he wanted us to be manufacturing.

Maybe there's a deeper psychological force involved with some clients' willingness/eagerness to immitate. Maybe it's that thing from our teen years where we believed the key to popularity was being like the cool kids. Or maybe it's an authoritarian thing where one follows the leader and conformity is a virtue. And maybe the "trouble" with creative types is that we didn't think the cool kids were cool, and we didn't want to follow anyone. That's why we got into writing and art instead of business.

29 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

No más esnobismo

For years I've complained that most of the Mexican food served in the US wasn't really Mexican. Or that it was Mexican food dumbed down for American tastes. Or Tex-Mex. Or Mexican food appropriated by American businesses. I wanted la auténtica comida. Mexican food made by Mexicans for Mexicans.

TacousaBut my thinking got rearranged when I read Taco U.S.A. by Gustavo Arellano. He makes a great case that there is no single authentic Mexican cuisine, just like there's no single American cuisine. He celebrates the various intercultural adaptations and culinary misegenations that led to what we call Mexican food today. And what Mexicans call Mexican food. It seems Arellano's code is all that really matters is that it tastes good, whether handcrafted by old mujeres according to an ancient Mayan recipe, or mass produced in a Norwegian factory for vending machines in Taiwan.

So I'll pack up my Mexican food snobbery and just enjoy the fact I'm not stuck with only the culinary choices of my anglo-nordic ancestors.

29 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Music Video Monday: Leon Russell

Okay, it's actually Tuesday. The holiday messed up my routine a little.

29 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Unintelligent design

Our brain should be our ally, yet sometimes it's our enemy. Instead of filling our sleep with soothing impressions, so we rest totally relaxed—which is in the interest of the whole body—it likes to mess with us fairly often. It conjures up annoying, disturbing, even terrifying stuff. Because the brain is a jerk.

28 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday Photo

Getting smacked for forgetting the Friday Photo until Saturday.

Smack2

26 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is not a food blog. Really.

I get the "natural" type of peanut butter. Just peanuts and salt. No sugar, no other oils, no emulsifiers or whatnot. That means the peanut oil and the peanut paste separate. I used to try to stir it up in the jar, but it sloshed oil over the lip and made a mess of things. And the overall mixing results weren't that great.

Pb2

So now, when I get a new jar, I scoop the peanut butter out into a bowl where I can really go to town. Then it goes back in the jar and into the fridge to keep it from separating again.

Sure, the peanut butter gets stiff when it's refirgerated, but I work it around in the jar a little with the knife to warm it up before spreading it.

Mmmmm, peanut butter. One of my favorite proteins.

25 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Can't get there from here—again

Closure

I wanted to go to Target to refill a prescription before the long weekend. I am Point A. Target is Point B.  As you can see, Target is tucked in amongst some main streets. As you can also see, those streets are in dark red, which is Google's code for very slow traffic. Google is optimistic, because in this case, traffic is totally stopped.

Silly me, I didn't think to check the traffic map before leaving the house. Why should I? It's a drive I make often. No problem. Except today.

I went one way and learned traffic was stopped. People up ahead were turning around. I thought they were just very impatient. Then I became impatient, too, and decided to turn around and go the alternate way.

It was stopped too.

I inched forward as space was made by people ahead turning around. U-turns were easy because no traffic was coming the other way either.

Thanks to the wisdom of our road planners, there are few streets here that actually connect to anything, almost zero shortcuts or connections to alternate routes. So, in situations like this, there are few options that don't just take you back to the same clogged street, or one just like it.

I got a peek at a policeman up ahead. He seemed to be diverting traffic rather than trying to expedite it. Aw, crap.

I turned around.

Now the return route home was clogged with people who had turned around. Most of them were trying to get to the street I had taken first. They will be unpleasantly surprised.

Why the problem? It could be that it's Speed Street downtown. But my fellow drivers didn't look like the NASCAR type. They just looked pissed. Maybe I missed the announcement that Target was giving everything away. Or maybe I messed the evacuation order.

Oh well. I'll try later this evening.

24 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hot diggity dog

Weiners2

When I buy weiners I usually get the all-beef kosher kind. Better quality, right? But, to me, they have sort of a metallic, acidic aftertaste. And they cost about twice as much.

I saw these turkey-chicken-pork weiners and figured they were worth a try.

Whatta ya know, I like them better. Purists might say they lack flavor, but I see hotdogs as a delivery system for condiments. These don't get in the way.

Also, kudos to Oscar Mayer for selling these things in a bundle of two 4-packs with zip top seals. Those of us who aren't going to be serving all eight dogs at once thank you.

24 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy Song of the Week

Misirlou / Dick Cale and His Del-Tones

24 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Party-mandated conformity

I was reading an article about Newt Gingrich's collapsing and bankrupt businesses. One was the Center for Health Transformation, dedicated to formulating and promoting healthcare policies.

Among its activities, the center and Gingrich helped push a mandate requiring everyone to carry health insurance. At the time, the position was beneficial to the center's healthcare industry members, but Gingrich later repudiated it as a candidate.

Mandatory health insurance used to be a Republican idea. You know, personal responsibility, no free rides and all that good conservative stuff. Until it became a feature of Obamacare. Then it was suddenly an evil big-government trampling of our sacred freedoms. Socialism! Communism! Fascism! Puppy killing! 

"Repudiated" might be the wrong word. That implies a genuine change of beliefs rather than crass pandering to a political base.

22 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

The real job creators

21 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Beep beep beep beep beep

Wheel-loader-in-action

Commercial vehicles and heavy equipment must have a back-up warning signal, right? I wonder how the people responsible for that regulation feel when they're subjected to prolonged beeping. Do they get annoyed, like the rest of us, or do they beam with pride the way that, say, an architect looks lovingly at a building she designed? "That's mine! That's my legacy to the world! Back it up again, mister. Oh yeah, music to my ears."

21 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Hitting bottom

One street where I ride my bicycle has a deep dip. Ordinarily, a cyclist could blast down one side and have enough momentum to make getting up the other side much easier. Hurray for the laws of inertia. 

Speedbump3

But the city has placed a speed bump at the bottom of the hill (arrow). So, instead of being an object in motion that tends to stay in motion, one becomes more like an object at rest that tends to stay at rest. This is especially true if one hits the bump at speed, taco-ing the front wheel and launching oneself into the pavement.

The speed bump is intended to keep motor vehicles from speeding, but I suspect some fitness fanatic at the street department put it there to give cyclists a better cardio workout. Um, thanks?

21 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Music Video Monday: Robin Gibb

21 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Out of step

Steps

For seventeen years I've been using the steps than go down to the driveway and garage. For seventeen years I've been developing unconscious muscle memory of how many paces and how long a stride it takes so that one foot is in the proper position to make the first step down. No looking, no compensating half strides.

But something has changed. Now I need to make a last moment adjustment about half the time. Are my strides too short? Too long? Is it both legs or just one? Trying to fix the problem is like consciously thinking about tying your shoes. (Wait, do I loop the left lace over the right, or right over left? Um... crap.)

Well, as long as I don't fall down the stairs.

Since the stairs were built in 1954, before the age of safety paranoia, there are no handrails, as you can see. Just unforgiving, sharp cornered brick waiting for my brain, legs and feet to mess up. Bwah-ha-ha!

20 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Friday Photo

5-18-12

18 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Happy Song of the Week

Money For Nothing / Dire Straits

17 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Here comes Baby!

Infographic-of-the-day1

Guess what's going on during those long cold winters when folks are snuggled up in bed. The arrival of Spring weather in April also seems to get some couples feeling extra frisky (though they seem to avoid delivering around Christmas but still try to make it before the end of the year so they get another tax deduction).

16 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Music Video Monday: Terence Trent D'Arby

14 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Elsewhere

Daily_picdump_86_pics-14

13 May 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Next »