I'll be on that hill

A non-satirical article about the engineering behind the Taco...

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:23:00 -0700

A non-satirical article about the engineering behind the Taco Bell Doritos Locos Taco, one of the most successful satires of food ever unleashed on the masochists who eat at these f***ing places.

Some quotes:

“So we had to get that formula changed, then we had to find a way to deliver the flavoring, and then the seasoning. I mean, it was actually important that we left the orange dusting on your fingers because otherwise, we’re not delivering the genuine Doritos [experience].”

He gave his staff until March 2012—slightly under three years—to pull off a complete rethink of traditional Mexican cuisine.

In fact, the companies ended up creating a proprietary seasoner in the process, not least because for workers on the manufacturing line, the plumes of Doritos seasoning would create an almost Nacho Cheese gas chamber. “We realized pretty quickly that we had to seal that all in, because in the facilities, we couldn’t have all that stuff in the air,” Creed says. “It would’ve been too much seasoning and flavor for our workers…

Customers began blogging about their experience; a slew of video reviews hit YouTube; and one Taco Bell addict even drove 900 miles from New York to Toledo, OH for an early taste of the DLT.

Like Android is to Google or iOS is to Apple, Doritos-based flavors represent a whole new framework for Taco Bell to build on. “It’s not just a product; it’s now a platform—Nacho Cheese, Cool Ranch, Flamas,” Creed beams. “We’re going to blow everyone away in the next few years in terms of how big this idea and platform will become.”

Another one from Tarkovsky.

Fri, 10 May 2013 09:17:32 -0700

Another one from Tarkovsky.

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light:...

Thu, 09 May 2013 15:17:49 -0700

Polaroid by Andrei Tarkovsky from the book Instant Light: Tarkovsky Polaroids from Thames and Hudson. Discovered here thanks to ayjay.

Coming and going. McCoy, Whitman County, Washington.

Wed, 01 May 2013 15:05:03 -0700

Coming and going. McCoy, Whitman County, Washington.

For the freshest Gatorade at the best price, you can’t...

Wed, 01 May 2013 11:20:05 -0700

For the freshest Gatorade at the best price, you can’t beat Crossett’s Food Market in Oakesdale, Washington.

"Pardon me for being so reactionary, but religion itself was never as shaming nor as degrading as..."

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:32:00 -0700

“Pardon me for being so reactionary, but religion itself was never as shaming nor as degrading as this society we’ve built for ourselves. At least the Christian religion (in its original form) had a mechanism to cope with these pressures; you speak to a priest, you confess your sins, you do penance and are forgiven of those sins so that you may live your life. But nowadays we’re not just asked to be our own priests; we’re told implicitly by society that if we do anything wrong whatsoever, we’d better damned well keep it a secret, because if the public finds out, we will be forced into a kind of shame and self-loathing that will make life so unbearable that death will seem preferable. And every single person we know, everyone we meet, everyone we see will encourage this perception of ourselves. We tell ourselves that we’ve freed ourselves from morality and moralism, that we’re no longer held hostage by those ideas from the past; what we’ve really freed ourselves from is mercy, forgiveness, compassion, and love. And disturbs me in a way that I have trouble adequately expressing.”

- Astounding that this reflection on ever-remembering social media and modern culture’s lack of forgiveness could be found on, of all places, Metafilter. Despite the depiction of “the Christian religion (in its original form)”, the whole bit is worth reading.

"It happened one day when we was coming on to some holy feast or other. I was in the kitchen yard..."

Tue, 16 Apr 2013 11:11:27 -0700

“It happened one day when we was coming on to some holy feast or other. I was in the kitchen yard helping cut up a pig they’d slaughtered for it the day before. I’d been there for the slaughtering as well, catching the blood in a pail for black pudding when they shoved a knife in its throat and helping drag it over to the pile of straw where they got twists for singeing off the bristle. We poured water on the carcase and scraped it and singed it again and finally with a gambrel between the hind legs hoisted it up to a crossbeam. Then a monk with yellow braids sliced open its belly and groping around up to his elbows delivered it of a steaming tubful of pink slippery insides I carted off to the kitchen in my two arms. They left it hanging overnight to cool with a sack wrapped around its long snout to keep the cats from it and the next day after matins the yellow-braid monk and I set to cutting it up, Ita being at her quern across the yard from us. Hams, trotters, eyepieces, ears for making brawn with, brains, chops—we was laying it all out in the straw when Ita come over and drew me aside to where we kept a black stone on the wall for whetting. She told me with Jarlath’s leave she wanted me to go with Brendan though she didn’t so much as know my name then.
“It’s a smirchy sort of business you’re at with that pig, some would say,” she said. “There’s many a monkish boy either he’d beg out of it or turn green as a toad doing it. But it’s neither of those with you, I see. You could be laying the holy table for mass the way you set those cuttings out. That’s the deep truth of things no matter or not if you know it.”
Ita’s eyes disappeared entirely when she smiled.
“Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear,” she said. “I doubt Jarlath has taught you that. Monks think holiness is monkishness only. But somewheres you’ve learned the truth anyhow. You can squeeze into Heaven reeking of pig blood as well as clad in the whitest fair linen in the land.””

- From Frederick Buechner, Brendan, pages 34-35.

Smirchy and holy is all one, my dear.

Democratic capitalism is only a way station along the way of the destruction of the ancient world.

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 13:59:08 -0700

Democratic capitalism is only a way station along the way of the destruction of the ancient world. :

Rich Bledsoe, “Christian Imperialism”, over at Trinity House Institute. A dense and at times opaque article studded with some absolutely thrilling distillations of what it means for Jesus to be King—the above quote is among the least of these.

Crop duster over fields around Mill Road, Latah County, Idaho.

Wed, 27 Mar 2013 10:46:24 -0700

Crop duster over fields around Mill Road, Latah County, Idaho.

Jason Molina is dead.

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 10:23:24 -0700

Jason Molina is dead.

"I think that industrial livestock processing is, like all technology, a kind of magic. Peasant..."

Tue, 19 Mar 2013 11:08:26 -0700

“I think that industrial livestock processing is, like all technology, a kind of magic. Peasant meatsmiths, on the other hand, worked miracles, not sleight of hand. Rather than turn pigs into pork at an astonishing rate and in unfathomable quantity, they multiplied fishes and loaves and this feeds more people with less and more deeply.”

- Brandon Sheard, the Farmstead Meatsmith, putting into words a thought I’ve had banging around my head for some time. The Bible speaks of magic and sorcery as a kind of counterfeit miracle: the appearance of something arriving ex nihilo that disguises a considerable material and spiritual cost. Modern industrialism, agricultural and otherwise, is a kind of sorcery. But miracles take that same material and spiritual burden and make something new and good out of that raw material. That butchering your own pig fits that definition of miraculous will take more defending than I have time for here, but I will say that when I butchered my hog last October, we took up twelve large baskets full of fragments and scarcely had the space to store it all.

"I’m made for this summer logging,” said Arn Peeples. “You Minnesota fellers might..."

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 00:18:05 -0700

““I’m made for this summer logging,” said Arn Peeples. “You Minnesota fellers might like to complain about it. I don’t get my gears turning smooth till it’s over a hundred. I worked on a peak outside Bisbee, Arizona, where we were only eleven or twelve miles from the sun. It was a hundred and sixteen degrees on the thermometer, and every degree was a foot long. And that was in the shade. And there wasn’t no shade.””

- From Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams (p. 16)…

"I hefted the chain and swung it at the table like a biker taking out an unsuspecting member of a..."

Fri, 01 Mar 2013 10:44:46 -0800

“I hefted the chain and swung it at the table like a biker taking out an unsuspecting member of a rival gang. It rattled across the surface and the nails and chainsaw pieces bit fast into the wood. Extracting the weapon, I examined my work. In just three seconds I had added forty years’ worth of hard-won experience and poignant memories to about two square feet of the tabletop. The center board had a terrific gouge from where a chainsaw tooth had torn up a chunk of pine from around a nail hole.”

- Me, from “Selling a Table”, published at the worthy Curator Magazine.

The Moral of Pierre by one Timothy Burke

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 16:21:03 -0800

The Moral of Pierre by one Timothy Burke:

I’m not sure who Timothy Burke is or where exactly he’s coming from, but this is a superb piece on how neoliberal societies try to get people to change:

“If you want an explanation of the meanness of 21st Century American public discourse, for the fractures in the body politic, this will do as a starting place. “Get that guy to wear his helmet, because otherwise he’s going to cost you money.” “Get that woman to lose weight, because otherwise she’s going to cost you money.” “Hassle that couple because their kid plays too many video games and might slightly underperform in school and not make the contribution to net productivity that we are expecting of him.”

Questions concerning how people treat one another, I believe, are ultimately theological. Whatever we think people are will determine what we think the problems are and why we must solve them. If we think of people primarily as gobs of material or units of economic activity, then we’ll get diagnoses like the above-quoted.

But what would happen if we acknowledged man as the image of God, as capable having his humanity completed and fulfilled in Christ, brought into the fellowship of the Trinity, and finally able to live at peace with himself and his neighbor?

Audio

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 11:06:21 -0800

From American Guide: THE WORLD’S GREATEST MINERAL SEA SOAP...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 09:53:47 -0800

From American Guide:

THE WORLD’S GREATEST MINERAL SEA

SOAP LAKE, WASHINGTON

“For Stomach Troubles, Constipation, Headache, Rheumatism, or whenever a thorough constitutional remedy is needed, take Soap Lake Capsules. Price 25 cents per box.”

— 1906 advertisement for Soap Lake Remedy Company

At the south end of Washington’s ancient river bed, the Grand Coulee, you’ll find the healing waters of Soap Lake tucked among the columnar basalt cliffs and rim-rock slopes of the central shrub-steppe desert.

Containing 23 different minerals, researchers have determined that the chemistry of the lake has more in common with outer space than it does with Earth’s water. Because the alkalinity of Soap Lake resembles the moons of Jupiter, scientists have studied the lake in an effort to learn about the possibility of life on Mars.

Our human experience of the lake was nothing short of miraculous, as we polar-bear plunged the coastline on a windy day that topped off at cool 38 degrees. The soap-like waters leave behind an oily film that promises to cure what ails you. The plaque at the beach boldly declares that “…This is indeed a god-given body of water for to cure all the ills of mankind.”

And if all that isn’t remarkable enough, the city of Soap Lake plans to install a 50-foot Lava Lamp on Main Street. Just because.

Mullein on a clear Winter day.

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 21:46:52 -0800

Mullein on a clear Winter day.

“Parking garage, Adolphus Theater” by William Reagh,...

Thu, 24 Jan 2013 10:14:03 -0800

“Parking garage, Adolphus Theater” by William Reagh, a photographer who lensed Los Angeles and its surroundings from the late 30’s until about 1991. I don’t know L.A. very well, but stuff like this is nevertheless just fascinating. The Los Angeles Public Library has a collection of his images that you should go get sucked into now. It’s good, solid, documentary stuff, with a fine sense of composition and light.

The Lord’s Prayer from Rachmaninov’s world-stopping...

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 10:52:31 -0800

The Lord’s Prayer from Rachmaninov’s world-stopping Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, performed by the Cambridge King’s College Choir.

Eastbound BNSF stack train races out of Spokane in the failing...

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 10:27:29 -0800

Eastbound BNSF stack train races out of Spokane in the failing late December light.