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April 17 2011
Fear of Falafel
Are you afraid of falafel? Well, if you is or if you ain’t, I direct your attention to a bout of the limeduck national sport, overthinking, going on over at the Clover Food Lab (and trucks), where they sell a sandwich called “chickpea fritter” that might actually be… falafel.
There doesn’t seem to be much debate that the chickpea fritter sandwich is in fact falafel. I can also say that it seems quite popular and is in my opinion, a delicious lunch and quite satisfying for $5, too. So… why not just call it falafel? Clover opened that can of worms themselves in a blog post in February, which I’ll quote most of here:
Yesterday at MIT one of our customers, Nittin, was giving us a hard time about the chickpea fritter. “Why don’t you just call it falafel,” he was saying. “It’s just like the falafel I’ve had in the Middle East.” It’s not the first time we’ve gotten this comment. I think Nittin felt like calling it a chickpea fritter made it seem gourmet, or like we were trying to rename something that already exists.
I was telling him (Ayr and Rolando, let me know if I have this right) the reason we don’t call it falafel is pretty simple. We don’t want to alienate anyone with our food, and a word like falafel might make someone walk away at first glance. We don’t want the only people who eat our food to be those who know what falafel is. Calling it a chickpea fritter almost forces a discussion between you and the person taking your order.
You’re operating a food truck outside of MIT (and a restaurant in Harvard square, plus more trucks in Boston) and are worried that people won’t know about falafel? I’ve got to say, this just doesn’t hold water for me. Sure, Clover is pretty plain-spoken about their food, but would it hurt anybody to put one more word on the menu board? You can look up the nutritional content of Clover’s fritters and find mention of tahini and hummus and even Israeli salad, but a strange absence of the word falafel.
Two of my friends had identical but oddly opposite darker interpretations, wondering if Clover were somehow anti-arab or anti-israeli. I’m certainly not going to take sides on the falafel origin debate, and I don’t buy this unpleasant take on Clover’s choice of words either. So what gives? Why is Clover so defensive about the issue on their blog?
I’ve got a funny story to add. On my first visit to the Clover truck was back in August, before garbanzogate, I opted for the BBQ Seitan sandwich because I didn’t know what a chickpea fritter was. That’s right, I chose seitan, a food whose actual composition I cannot describe or explain [it's wheat gluten, dude, also known as mock duck, go figure] but one that I had eaten before, over the chickpea fritter which I did not recognize as familiar falafel. Also on the menu board that day were tabbouleh and quinoa, make of that what you will. So I guess food ignorance can go both ways, but the last thing you want at a food truck’s lunch line is to have to take time to discuss the menu with your order taker.
The way I see it, Clover has three choices on this:
- Admit a mistake, change it, move on.
- Outgeek us all by pointing out that some falafel is made with fava beans, so by calling theirs chickpea fritters, they’re being more precise and descriptive and catering to those who wish to avoid fava beans in their diets.
- Test it. Change the menu item to falafel for a day, a week, even an hour, and compare it to a comparable time period. You either sell fewer sandwiches or you don’t.
So what’s it going to be? Until something changes (and I’m not holding my breath) I encourage both of my loyal readers to visit your nearest Clover truck and order the falafel. It’s delicious.
April 03 2011
Mammoth tintypes and the magic of the meniscus
Yesterday I attended a rare demo of the 19th-century tintype photographic process by photographer Nathaniel Gibbons at (or at least just outside) Gallery Kayafas, where Gibbons’ “Mammoth Plate Tintypes” are on display.
For those of you who are not civil war re-enactors, it’s worth mentioning that the tintype process was popular in the mid to late 19th Century as a relatively cheap, fast, portable, durable, and faithful mode of photographic reproduction. An ordinary citizen of even a medium-sized town could get a tintype portrait made for money equivalent to $20 today. A tintype (a kind of wet-plate collodion print) is a metal plate coated with collodion (a cocktail of nitrocellulose and ether), photosensitized with silver salts, exposed in a camera while still damp, developed and then fixed with a cyanide solution. Not for the faint of heart of sloppy of hand in any century as these ingredients can explode, poison and/or blind you, as well as ruin a good pair of pants.
I’ve covered both vintage and modern tintypes before, but this was the first time I’d seen one made in person. Most of the action – coating and developing – happened in a dark box built into the back of Gibbons’ truck, but we were able to see the setup of the shot and then watch plate go into the fixer and witness a breathtaking reversal and transformation of tone.
Besides the magical reveal of the image, it’s also interesting to see the level of craft required. It takes months or years to get even competent at coating a plate, and the same skill is needed to apply the developer evenly enough to avoid various artifacts. Nobody will ever know or care if I hit these keys right in the middle or on the edges as I type, but it’s that sort of finesse that makes the difference between good and great tintypes.
Gibbons called it “the magic of the meniscus.” I think he might have meant surface tension, but it’s no less impressive what a skilled hand can do with simple materials. Go see the work, but don’t try this yourself without professional help.
March 28 2011
Empty desk, beginners mind
Apparently, it’s time for my biennial office shuffle, as in the spring of 2009′s deckchair destiny and the great cube shuffle of 2007, we’re moving the office. But this time, just after we got everything packed up and labeled, a last-minute hitch prevented the actual move. So here we sit at empty desks with only our laptops. No phones, no files. The water cooler and coffee maker have been removed. We’ve drawn down office supplies and kitchen snacks.
I, for one, am loving it. Minimalism FTW, I say. If only I could have accomplished a similar clean sweep of my email inbox and file system. Not having this stuff to futz around with helps us focus, and frankly, the office has never looked better (except for that stack of boxes in the hallway). A clean sweep lets you reconsider what you need and what you don’t. Reviewing old files usually means throwing most of them away, but it also means thinking about old projects in new light.
Every other year is probably not often enough, and you probably can’t work like this for too long, but as spring cleaning goes, it feels pretty good.
March 17 2011
Last purchases from Bob Slate
Yesterday, I popped in at the Church Street Bob Slate Stationers, which will close forever this Sunday. The other two branches will follow a week or two later. I bought these items.
Mini Binder Clips, 1/4″ capacity, box of 12, Charles Leonard Inc, Hauppauge, NY, made in China. $0.95
Dozens of household and office uses. I keep some in the kitchen for keeping bags shut.
Received of Petty Cash pad, Tops form # 3008, made in USA. $1.25
I have no earthly use for this. I don’t know how long it’s been since I even saw a “petty cash” box in use.
Tags with string, 12, $0.69
Tags. String. Unpackaged but for a rubber band. Price and quantity hand-written in pencil.
Erasing shield, C-Thru Ruler Company, Boomfield, CT, made in China. $1.25
To protect your architectural drawing when using a mechanical eraser. Does anybody still make architectural drawings on paper? I last touched one of these in 1991 when I bought it for a fellow architecture studio student who had helped me study for a dreadful art history exam.
Pilot Razor Point pen, dark blue, $0.95
I don’t actually much care for this sort of pen, but the sparkly plastic barrel and yellow top to the cap are utterly unchanged from 35 years ago when my mother kept a bunch of them in different colors in a long wooden drawer in the old sewing machine table.
I received a rare Guam quarter in my change and later noticed that I had been undercharged by a dollar.
March 16 2011
Thanks! :D
I was putting away my ducky thank-you notes from Mrs. L’s class when I noticed something else interesting. These kids hand-write something that I thought was only typed: sideways emoticons.
Way back in the pre-intertubal age, people might close an informal note with a smiley face not unlike the one on those yellow buttons, a circle enclosing two or three dots and a wide U shape. But once we all started keyboarding, we had to turn sideways (usually to the left) to make a smiley face out of a colon : sometimes a dash – and a right/closed parenthesis )
:-)
Of course, this has spawned endless variations. About half my DonorsChoose thank-you notes employed a hand-written noseless open-mouth smiley. An expression of joy and thankfulness if ever I saw one.
:D
Kudos to Karina for the triple standard smiley and a “correctly” oriented :D at the end. FTW, I guess. Interesting that she writes (: and not :) which seems more common in typing. Maybe she’s a lefty.
For those still befuddled, you can use Skype to convert a pretty good array of punctuation emoticons into round yellow faces. Some are even animated.
Lest you think “ugh, kids these days” note that these typographic sideways smiles have been employed by major corporations, notably in the naming of the Samsung :) best described by C|Net thusly: “If you don’t mind the small keyboard and can get past the cringe-inducing name, T-Mobile’s Samsung Smiley is an easy-to-use messaging phone.”
Also, at least according to some clever wags, the Scion xD was named for the eye-scrunching joy of driving a sporty compact. Your mileage may vary.
March 15 2011
Mass production at Lufthansa Studios
Recently, I popped in at Lufthansa Studios in Dorchester to see the work of four School of the Museum of Fine Arts MFA students, some of whom had studied with Prof. M. We saw the meticulously constructed coat check installation of Daniel Cevellos and perused Garett Yahn‘s Ruscha-esque book of commercial real estate for rent in the area.
Snow took a belt sander to the table, exposing the mostly cardboard innards. I can only hope that in future performances he eventually reduces the Lack to its namesake, like a three-dimensional Erased de Kooning. We also had a good laugh about the table’s claim to be “assembled in USA” — does that mean by you, the buyer? (and eventual destroyer)
Questions of authorship and cross-border trade also come up in the work of John C. Gonzalez, notably his amazing Self-Portrait Project. Gonzalez commissioned the artists of a Chinese made-to-order oil painting studio/factory to paint their self-portraits. In similar projects, Gonzalez hired the painters to paint their favorite color, happiest memory and their studios, but the self portraits stand out for me the most. What is it like to paint pictures to order for clients you never meet? Is it just a job or do they want to earn a living painting their own subjects? What do they think of their customers? What do they think about Gonzalez’ work? It’s fascinating to look at these faces and try to imagine their work and their lives.
March 13 2011
Buying British Books from my couch by way of Porter Square and Google
I noticed a while back that local indie bookseller Porter Square Books sold ebooks on their website. When I tried to buy one, I ended up with a format not readable on my Android phone, but the Porter Square crew did something I did not expect and promptly refunded me in full. Win, except that I haven’t bought any ebooks from them since.
Now, some time later, I’ve learned that Porter Square Books now “carries” Google ebooks, which means you can buy a Google ebook on Porter Square Books’ website (not yet in their store unless you bring your own computer) and have that book appear magically in your Google books application on your phone, computer, tablet, whatever. And just now I have done just that. Big win, and I was rewarded with the 10-point thank you memo at right.
I’m not really sure I (5) nurtured any community since I did it at home and alone, or (6) conserved any tax dollars since I didn’t pay any sales tax so MA missed out there, or (8) used much of PSB expertise, but I am otherwise quite glad I did it.
For those keeping track, I picked up David Mitchell’s Black Swan Green, which is listed in PSB/Google’s catalog as “Blackswangreen” in case you want to read along with my book club. I paid $12 for the ebook, compared to $15 for the trade paperback at PSB. The paperback was $10.20 on Amazon so I guess localism has its price.
How does Google’s ebook reader software, Books, stack up on Android against Kindle and Nook? The big difference in Google’s favor I see is the “original pages” function which can switch you from simple text to a scan of the original book and back. Pretty cool with older and illustrated books but of questionable use with the latest Tom Clancy. What Google Books lacks – and it seems really odd to me that Google would leave this out – is search. At least on the Android app, you cannot (at least I cannot) search for text inside a book. I figured that would be a slam-dunk for the Googles, but I’m sure it’ll be in an update soon enough.
So I urge you to support your local booksellers and your not-that-local ostentatiously-not-evil giant corporations next time you feel ebook fever coming on.
March 07 2011
Radio Ghosts
If you watch old movies or collect vintage photographs, you’ve probably faced the thought that everybody you’re looking at is dead. I recently realized that on Sunday nights at 10:30, I’ve been listening to a radio show of ghosts.
I should have known that the impossibly learned panelists of BBC’s quiz show My Word! were too well-read for this era – one guessed the meaning of “sciamachy” by sussing out the Greek parts of the word – but somehow it never quite dawned on me that the show aired from 1956 to 1990. It’s introduced simply as “a word game played by people whose business is words” but never gives any background on the panelists, most often Frank Muir, Denis Norden, Dilys Powell, and Anne Scott-James. Of that mixture of comedians and scholars, only Norden is alive as of this writing.
Tonight’s episode made seemingly contemporary reference to “sixpence” and also to having met somebody “during the war” but also called out a “communication satellite” and thanks to Wikipedia, I can trace its original air date to somewhere between 1962 and 1977.
As on Wait Wait Don’t Tell me, the best entertainment comes from the throwaway joke lines delivered before the real answers and the laughable coaching and arbitrary point awards by the questioner. One set of questions is introduced as being worth “two marks and a possible bonus mark for exceptional learning” – now that’s my kind of scoring system.
It’s a credit to the writers and panelists that this show is sufficiently timeless that I didn’t even notice its age for many episodes. Tune in for some ghostly erudition – it’s on many NPR stations.
===
In the process of researching this post, I found this essay from the Boston Globe and New York Times that says much of what I had in mind, even better, and two years earlier, too.
March 06 2011
Put it on my bill
Some of you might remember how I donated money to help a teacher buy classroom supplies and then got grumpy when the kids wrote me thank you notes. Some of you may remember that I learned that only donations of $100 or more get those notes and how I resolved to give gifts of no more than $99 in the future.
Well, I forgot and gave more when the project “Who says you can’t draw in English class” came to my attention.
When I got the batch of thank you notes in the mail, I realized that in my grumpy quest for anonymity in donations I had filled in “limeduck” as my name. And so some of the cards were addressed to limeduck, and some even tried to illustrate limeduck. For that, I give these kids extra credit.
I continue to back DonorsChoose projects from time to time, with a particular emphasis on helping schools bring maps and globes into the classroom. Please consider giving to one of these projects, and leave a comment here if you do.
March 04 2011
Brief chapters in the story of the end of paper
You’re probably not reading this on paper. I didn’t write it on paper. At some point in the future, paper will probably be as outmoded as real parchment – the kind made from split animal skin – is today, used mainly for antique forgeries, art projects and torah scrolls. Not that I would equate this document with any of those three, but I’m certain that paper is on its way out, and that if I live long enough, I’ll miss it when it’s gone. Just like Kodachrome.
Borders Books
We all know that Chapter 11 is far from the end for a business, much less for an industry (see: airlines), but the immediate closing of 30% of Borders bookstores is a big deal. The discussion on Boston Bibliophile shows that not everybody will miss them, but many will lose their closest (if not bestest) bookstore. When I dropped in at the expansive Washington street location, which is not (yet) slated to close, I think I saw part of why the chain is in trouble, and also why even I hope they pull through.
The first thing you see coming in is a big e-reader display. Borders is pushing e-readers hard, but not the familiar Nook or Kindle. They’ve got some Sony models and another brand I never heard of, starting price $99. No color displays, no instant delivery over 3G networks. No name-brand online bookstore or magazine subscriptions. The demo unit I picked up had no books loaded on it. Telling.
What else is there at Borders besides disappointing e-readers? There’s a cafe. There’s a magazine section. The combination of those two probably means it’s a de-facto library, and safe and well-lit meeting place for online dates and low-budget business meetings.
But I bury the lede. There are books. You can smell them. Literally tons of them. You can touch them. And there are people looking at them, reading them, judging them by their covers, buying them. And I’ll be sad to see all that go.
Bob Slate
Bob Slate Stationers, a 3-store family-owned chain, is closing in about a month after 75 years in business. The owners wanted to sell it but could not find a suitable buyer. This hits closer to home. There’s nothing like a stationery store. Staples and Office Max, likely the proximate causes of Slate’s condition, are not stationery stores.
Stationery stores have hundreds of pens with little pads mounted beneath the display where you can try them out. Stationery stores are where you find hang tags, index cards with actual index tabs on them, rubber finger cots for shuffling paper without licking your finger, raffle tickets, metal chalk holders, green ledgers, interoffice envelopes. Stationery stores don’t look at you like you’re insane when you ask about 6 squares to the inch graph paper and 3mm lead. Or so I hear.
There’s no ebook version of stationery or office supplies. You can buy them online but you either need them in the flesh as it were or not at all. If you’ve replaced your file cabinet with a hard drive, you don’t need pendaflex tabs anymore. If you’ve replaced your paper with silicon, you don’t need carbon paper anymore. Everyone is saddened that Slate is closing, but everyone is also surprised to hear it, and that means they haven’t been there recently. Telling.
Stores like Slate kept hobbyists like me happy for a long time, but with big and small businesses needling less of what they sell and others selling it faster and cheaper, it’s the end of the line for small stationers. It’s a plain as the QR code on the back of a Moleskine notebook package, and I will miss them.
Boston Printing Office
The City of Boston’s Printing Office, which includes a full-on printing plant, closed recently and I stopped in at the preview for an auction to dispose of all manner of printing equipment. I thought I might score a cheap oddity or funky bit of kit of some kind, but what I found was a workshop that looked like it had been abandoned suddenly in the middle of a workday, as if a bomb threat had been called in.
They had linotype machines that in their day kept pots of molten lead cooking to be molded into type which would be printed, then melted down again. They had a Vandercook press, a larger version of one I used in college, closer to Gutenberg than to Google. There were racks of cold type. They had a wooden phone booth, wallpapered inside with women cut from decades of swimsuit magazines. These are from the days when it took strong men and heavy machines to forcibly stamp letters into (not onto) paper.
A typesetter’s bench with a partly competed deed registry form. Ten foot long blades for cutting machines. Drawers full of proofs. Stacks of forms. Incongruously hand-lettered prayer cards tacked up. The detritus of good union jobs and Irish-Italian Boston. May the wind be always at your back.
I don’t know what killed the Boston Printing Office. Maybe it was outsourced or just moved across town to more modern digs. Government might be among the last to give up on paper, but they will do it some day. When I handle an official document and it’s smooth, ink intangible, engraved only in name, that will be a sad day too.
What’s next?
What’s closing next? Maybe card stores. What’s going away next? Maybe wedding and birth announcements, maybe business cards. What’s next after paper? Hard to say. I bet it will be better in every practical way, but never the same. Progress marches on and I welcome it, but I won’t forget paper, either.
February 24 2011
I now have a two-port USB kitchen
Since fancy smartphones seldom last more than a day on a battery charge, I often carry a USB charging cable so I can get a quick phone charge boost from a nearby computer without having to haul around the little charger adapter. I leave that plugged in to an outlet under a counter near my front door, the “landing strip” or ad-hoc charging station area of limeduck world headquarters.
So imagine my glee at discovering the U-Socket, a humble standard double AC socket fixture with two USB ports built right in. I don’t remember if it was bookofjoe or Apartment Therapy Unpluggd that first tipped me, but for the longest time, the good folks at Fastmac teased me with “coming soon.” A couple of weeks ago I was finally able to place my order, and yesterday I took the plunge and installed it.
And I did not electrocute myself or cause a city-wide blackout. Fastmac’s instructions are top-notch. I cannot emphasize enough the need to cut power at the circuit breaker before proceeding with such an operation. Reference photos, even ones as crappy as the above, can also be a great help in keeping track of what went where.
I fear that the USB sockets might be a little close to the regular AC plugs and might crowd one another out, but it can’t possibly be as bad some of the huge (and power-sucking) adapter bricks I used to have to plug in to to that socket to charge my phone or ipod.
Bonus round: I got this excellent USB car adapter for a song and also enjoy USB charging on the go. Yes, it’s orange.
February 22 2011
Put down the color swatches and step away from the logo
Whether you manage a global brand or just run a dinky little blog like this one, you’ve probably at one time or another thought to yourself, “it’s time to redesign the logo/website/theme/brand.” Here are some reasons why you were probably wrong.
Familiarity breeds contempt.
As much as I’d like to think people look at this site as often as I do and pay as much attention to it as I do, odds are that I am the number one reader by a wide margin. Similarly, hardly anybody lives your brand or views or your design work as much as you, its owner or custodian, do. Just because you got bored with it does not mean that anybody else has. (Remember when you opened your overflowing closet and declared, “I have nothing to wear!”) Do your homework and your research before embarking on a redesign.
There’s a real risk that you’ll just duck it up.
You know that flowchart that starts with “does it work?” then goes through “did you fuck with it?” and ends with “you poor bastard”? Think New Coke. Think Gap logo. Think hard about whether you can really make it better.
Consistency is the hobgoblin of successful branding.
Change is good. Don’t get me wrong. I change my clothes every day. Of course, I also wear the same colors every day. Your brand and design are like that. If you change too much or too often, nobody will recognize you. Carefully weigh the cost of change against the miracle of compound interest on your identity.
Expense is not just money, it’s also time and focus.
A redesign is seldom a cheap project. Big brand work costs megahubys, and even redoing a humble header graphic yourself can be a terrible time sink. Ask yourself, are you sure this redesign is the best use of available money and time? Your graphic identity is a manifestation of your brand; your brand is a manifestation of your product, your customer service, your content. I’m betting that you’ll do more for your brand by improving your offering (if you’re a blogger, that’s your writing, folks) and how you deliver it than by refreshing your colors.
Polish pixels or push product? The choice is yours.
February 20 2011
Are you Rear Admiral of a landlocked navy?
I am a cartography nerd. I like maps. I like globes. I like pondering questions like “what countries have land borders with just one other country?” (There are 17 such nations, including two mutual pairs and two Italian enclaves. How many can you name without consulting a map or intertube?)
It was while pursuing just such an item of trivia that I stumbled on the turgid wikipedia entry, Navies of Landlocked Countries. Just my kind of thing! There are 10 countries floating such navies. Most are small but all have the distinction of being independent branches of their nations’ armed forces.
- Azerbaijan
- Bolivia
- Central African Republic
- Kazakhstan
- Laos
- Paraguay
- Rwanda
- Serbia
- Turkmenistan
- Uganda
These are as totally loony as you might think. Three have coastlines on the Caspian sea (Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan), three have major border lakes (Bolivia/Titicaca, Rwanda/Kivu and Uganda/Victoria), and four float their navies on big rivers (Laos/Mekong, Paraguay/Paraguay, Serbia/Danube, CAR/Ubangi). Imagine if you will, an independent landlocked Illinois having a navy on Lake Michigan or on the mighty Mississippi. But one of these landlocked navies stands out to me for its Quixotic irredentist nature: Bolivia.
Sure, Bolivia’s navy patrols Lake Titicaca – which is about half the surface area of Lake Ontario, the smallest of the North American Great Lakes – and keeps its shores safe from drug smugglers and invading Pervian frogmen. But the real reason for Bolivia’s navy is the hope that one day they will float free in the Pacific, an ocean whose coast Bolivia lost to Chile over 100 years ago in the War of the Pacific. That’s right, generations of Bolivian sailors have come and gone, motoring about on Lake Titicaca (I never get tired of typing that), pining for a chance to chip off a chunk of Chilean coast and ply the Pacific.
I don’t mean to make light of a nation’s historical wounds or dreams, and I commend Bolivia for not taking any rash military action against Chile, but don’t you think that maintaining a navy is a bit much? Does inner tubing around Lake Titicaca really prepare you for the Pacific Ocean? Or does focusing the nation on regaining lost coastline take people’s minds off other problems?
At any rate, I’ll conclude this curious cartographic lesson with a deeper head-scratcher: what impossible dream are you devoting resources to? Are you to be commended for holding fast, or mocked for living in the past?
February 18 2011
Foods without nouns
Joining all-star marketeers R, L, H and J at Tom Can Cook in scenic Waltham, I was struck by the laminated special sheet on the table. I mean, how often do you see a food with two adjectives and no noun?
Sure, you can walk into any Waffle House in the world and ask for “smothered and covered” and everybody knows you’re talking hash browns, which, now that I think about it, might also be a nounless food. It depends, as Bill Clinton used to say, on what you mean by “hash.” Not wanting to pass up a chance to try such an unusually constructed app, we ordered up some Crispy Puffy. It certainly looked more appetizing than either the description or the photo on the specials sheet, especially the sauce.
As it turns out, the folks at Urban Dictionary are ahead of me on this one, but I have to say I found the Crispy Puffy pleasant and flavorful. Definitely more crispy than puffy, with a nice sweet curry flavor. Some of the best grounded chicken I’ve had.
February 16 2011
February 14 2011
Boston winter
Gleaming glassy glob
Reflecting the steely sky
A frozen loogie
February 09 2011
Red velvet with that slow southern style
Red. Velvet. Fried. Chicken.
I heard the rumor that somebody at OMG Red Velvet would be serving red velvet fried chicken and assumed it must be the clever folks at Hungry Mother, what with their southern thing. But when I arrived, I found none other than the estimable Will Gilson of Garden at the Cellar happily topping a tray of crimson-coated chicken chunks with creamy (blue) cheese. Hungry Mother dished up some delightful macaroons.
My misunderestimating should do nothing to diminish the event, and credit is more than due the other participants (The Chocolate Tarte, Flour Bakery, Poe’s Kitchen, SoCo Creamery, Sportello, Susu Bakery, Sweet Cupcakes, and Union Bar+Grille) for delivering a range of cakes and sweets, even if none broke ground quite as new as red velvet fried chicken. OMG sold out, generating a nice chunk of change for Lovin’ Spoonfuls Food Rescue.
It’s also notable that Will is raising money to help his mother rebuild her greenhouses destroyed by recent snow. If you’ve been to Garden at the Cellar, you know the Gilson family business is the Herb Lyceum, and if you’ve been around the food benefit/charity scene, you know Will is a regular, so please read about it at Band of Chefs.
From my pre-OMG glass of wine and bowl of (red) soup at Sportello to the last macaroon, it was a delightful evening of colorful cooking.
February 08 2011
Five ways to duck the question
“So, what do you do for work?”
Surely this is the most hackneyed and unimaginative of all possible conversational gambits. Yes, it’s polite to inquire about your interlocutor instead of blathering endlessly about yourself, but in a social setting, talking about work is just passe. Worse than that, in this crummy economy, asking a stranger about work can put somebody unemployed on the spot. There’s plenty to talk about besides work while still avoiding religion, politics and sex. (But if you’re still avoiding those topics, you might be going to the wrong kinds of parties.)
Here are five stratagems for coping with this outre question.
1. Redirect
The softest approach, but be warned that it doesn’t always stick. Acknowledge that you’ve been asked the annoying question, but answer an adjacent question of your own that has something to do with it. Be warned that this can turn the entire conversation to work stories, but it can also transmit the idea that you don’t want to talk about your work, or lack of it.
“So, what do you do for work?”
“Have you seen that movie with Zach Galifianakis, the one where people explode from the stress of their dystopian jobs?”
2. Ignore
This one is easy to pull off in a busy setting with lots of people talking all together. Just keep going wherever you were going as if the question was never asked. You can be nice, and ask a more appropriate version of the getting to know a stranger question, or just wing it. Either way, it helps to counter as soon as possible or even before the bore gets finished with the work question.
“So, what do you do for-”
“I just saw a really good show of canopic jars – do you get to the museum often?”
3. Stun
Answer directly with a show-stopping lie. This isn’t very sustainable, so if nobody else saves you by redirecting, you should be prepared to bolt or feign sudden illness.
“So, what do you do for work?”
“I work on the stun line at a slaughterhouse.”
4. Distract
This is the most fun. You can acknowledge the question or not, but you just have to have a topic of discussion that’s more interesting and more urgent to talk about right now. Or you could just point at something behind the bore’s back, and run away when he turns to look.
“So, what do you do for work?”
(whisper, point conspiratorially with your chin) “Wait, see that guy there, at the buffet? He just did it again, he double-dipped! With a chicken wing!”
5. Mis-hear
If the scene is loud, you can pretend to mis-hear and answer your own question.
“So, what do you do for work?”
“Are there Jews on planet Ork? Well, Robin Williams never explicitly said so, but there are clear signs of Yiddish in the Orkan dialect…”
In summary, there’s no reason to be trapped in a conversation you don’t like. If there’s nothing interesting in your life besides work, and you can’t think of anything to ask others about besides their work, maybe you should reconsider your life choices. Get a hobby. Or a personality.
PS Thanks to the good folks at Grub for inspiring and then paring this post.
February 07 2011
Red velvet if you please
“Hey, aren’t you limeduck?”
I froze like a raccoon caught hot-wiring a Mazda coupe. I was with ubranaut C at Flour Bakery and one a table of women making valentine decorations thought she knew me. As it turns out, it was none other than @trishofthetrade, and she had seen – and remembered – my Podcamp presentation from 2009 with the estimable @gradontripp. I was gobsmacked.
Her friend C asked my friend C, “do you like red velvet?” He fumbled for a moment until I elbowed him and inserted myself, The answer is yes, I said. “Yes, he does like red velvet.” I thought he was just tongue-tied, but it turned out that he had never had a red velvet (cup)cake and did not even really know what Red Velvet is.
Turns out Trish was part of a group organizing an event called “OMG Red Velvet: a pretty sweet benefit for Lovin’ Spoonfuls” tomorrow night at the selfsame South Boston bakery. It’s a benefit for a food harvest organization (they gather up food from restaurants and other good businesses and bring it to those in need) , and it will feature Red Velvet creations (not just cake!) by local culinary luminaries such as Wil Gilson of Garden at the Cellar.
So, for C and anybody else not fully clued in, Red Velvet is a kind of cake that’s red. It used to be red from a chemical reaction of a type of cocoa, but during world war II, beet juice and later food coloring came to be the reddener of choice. It’s pretty much cake flavored but some variations are chocolately. For maximum drama, it’s usually set off with white buttercream or cream cheese icing. What exactly non-cake Red Velvet foods might be, I guess you’ll have to get yourself a ticket to tomorrow’s event and find out for yourself. Perhaps I’ll see you there.
And in case you’re wondering, no, red velvet doesn’t taste like beets at all. Not that that would be such a bad thing.
February 03 2011
Live action duckroll
Presented with minimal commentary, a video I found via Gizmodo. People with nets chasing ducks on wheels.
I guess it’s all for a good cause. What I want to know is, is that an autonomous duck robot (programmed with real duck behavior patterns of course) is there some sadist holding the remote control? As you may know, the duckroll preceded the Rick Roll.
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