Friday, June 1, 2012

Best of the Week #61

Get up at 6 am? Check.
Bike 24.22 miles before work? Check.
Mentally prepare for an awesome Friday morning? Check.
Get psyched for the LLC/6x6/myself dinner party planned for tonight (it involves my patio, rhubarb bars, and cinnamon whipped cream). CHECK!

(View route details on MapMyRun.
As you may have deduced, I’m feeling pretty awesome on this lovely morning.

My most popular post this week was, no surprise, the Sluttier Brownies. One of my co-workers is making them this weekend, I imagine at least a few of you are too?  Enjoy! And if you like the picture, click here to Pinterest it!


And to ironically follow-up on my intense baking creations, this post about an “anti-diet” is very thorough. I particularly like the “cravings” section. Here's a breakdown of what your cravings really mean: (read more)

Nicholas Kristof's “Markets and Morals.” What is it ok to sell?
  • Is it right that prisoners in Santa Ana, Calif., can pay $90 per night for an upgrade to a cleaner, nicer jail cell?
  • Should the United States really sell immigration visas? A $500,000 investment will buy foreigners the right to immigrate.
  • Should Massachusetts have gone ahead with a proposal to sell naming rights to its state parks? The Boston Globe wondered in 2003 whether Walden Pond might become Wal-Mart Pond.
  • Should strapped towns accept virtually free police cars that come laden with advertisingon the sides? Such a deal was negotiated and then ultimately collapsed, but at least one town does sell advertising on its police cars.
Wow. I never knew that “gorp” was an acronym! I always just thought it was a silly name for my all-time favorite food (i.e. trail mix). But apparently it stands for "Good ol' Raisins and Peanuts." So now you know.


I am sorry to report about your workday Olympic viewing:
  • If you want to watch NBC’s streaming coverage of the Olympics this summer, for example, you’ll have to log in to the NBC Olympics website with your cable or satellite account. Having paid $4.4 billion for the exclusive broadcast rights, the peacock wants to make sure it isn’t giving away the goods for free. It can afford to shun the cord-cutters because live Olympics coverage isn’t much threatened by piracy. (source)
Go JCPenny! Featuring two dads Father’s Day ad campaign:
  • Back in February, the department store chain faced criticism from the American Family Association's One Million Moms project for its hiring of Ellen DeGeneres to be the company's new spokesperson. JCPenney refused to submit to the group's bullying, and stuck by DeGeneres.

Inescapably, You’re Judged By Your Language” from the New Yorker.
  • In short, different audience, different dialect. The key to linguistic acceptance is recognition and adaptation. Know thy audience, know thy friends. It’s not a matter of which sentence is “correct”—“for whom are we rooting” versus “who are we rooting for”—so much as which sentence is correct for the given situation. 
  • Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn prescriptive English because that’s the way the people in power communicate. As far as daily survival is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether the origins of this linguistic power structure are racist, classist, or élitist, or whether they’re based on the whims of dead white males. This is how the system works right now, today, and in order to best get the attention of those in power, to begin to effect change, we must be able to use their dialect. We must know their rules. 
  • People who say otherwise, who say that in all situations we should speak and write however we’d like, are ignoring the current reality. This group, known as descriptivists, may be fighting for noble ideas, for things like the levelling of élitism and the smoothing of social class, but they are neglecting the real-world costs of those ideas, neglecting the flesh-and-blood humans who are denied a job or education because, as wrong as it is, they are being harshly judged for how they speak and write today. 
Somehow I don’t think I’ve ever had cacao nibs before…and now I want them for breakfast.



A new 2.5-hour epic about Hemmingway and his third wife. This is an interview with the director, Philip Kaufman.
  • Hemingway & Gellhorn, which premiered on HBO on Monday and will be showing on the network throughout the coming month...
  • She never gave interviews about her marriage with Hemingway and famously said "I do not see myself as a footnote in someone else's life." How did you find a way to show the story from her point of view? 
  • Were you a Hemingway aficionado?
    When you're growing up, you have to read him, especially my generation. He had the thing with the perfect sentence, and you can smell the outdoors. He had a way you always felt. Sort of like an acupuncturist, he could hit exactly the spot that freed some of your senses. He was great, there's no question. He changed things, virtually every writer after him was influenced by him. Mailer, Nelson Algren, John O'Hara. J.D. Salinger had a whole fascination, a whole correspondence with him.
On NPR's Morning Edition about Ben and Jerry's: "The Graveyard Of Shelved Ice Cream Flavors."

  • In what may be a nod to the current zombie fad, Ben and Jerry's also offers customers a chance to make the case for resurrecting a favorite flavor.
  • "With aching heart and heavy sigh, we bid Rainforest Crunch goodbye; that nutty brittle from exotic places got sticky in between our braces. 1989-1996. It was a really, really good flavor."
Love this. (source)

  • On Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012, I told my girlfriend to meet me at my parent's house for dinner. When she arrived I had stationed my brother to sit her in the back of an open Honda CRV and give her some headphones. He "wanted to play her a song"...What she got instead was the world's first Live Lip-Dub Proposal.




Have a good weekend!