It somehow came up following our staff meeting this morning that vampires are sexy. (Work morale has been a lot better the past few months, have I mentioned?) This started us on a fairly lively discussion about how other monsters generally are not sexy. (We did decide that werewolves can be sexy too, depending on how they are portrayed.)
This of course led to some musings on what constitutes a “monster” vs. a “non-monster”, e.g., are faeries/goblins monsters or not? Because if monsters, then they can belong in the “sexy” column (e.g., David Bowie’s Jareth in Labyrinth (technically a goblin), Roiben in Tithe).
So, I know Macromediocrity doesn’t have a lot of readers, but I’m looking for nominations of “monsters that are sexy besides vampires”, with the above caveat that we don’t have a very stable definition of what a monster actually is.
Stupid sexy Vikings.
Recent theory about the placement of Viking brooches has gotten all sexed up by some newspapers. This blog has the best [1] article I’ve ever seen about Viking sexiness.
[1] Okay, so it’s the only article about Viking sexiness I’ve ever seen. But it made me laugh out loud.
I guessed wrong!
I was walking down Old Georgetown Road this morning and passed a newspaper box for the Montgomery Gazette, and I started wondering if “Gazette” was a newspaper name in the same way as “Mirror”–e.g., if “gazette” was some kind of archaic word for mirror, like “little gazing glass”. I liked the idea, but I was completely wrong. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it’s because of magpies, and coins.
Three things.
1. I have somewhere to go if I’m ever in Cincinnati.
2. There’s plaid collar crime.
3. I had a needle stuck an inch and a half deep into my rotator cuff yesterday, and I feel fine about it.
HFCS rant.
Here’s my contribution to the massive blogospheric response to the “Sweet Surprise” pro-high fructose corn syrup ads. HFCS is not a food choice I would make. I think that “food” should be “something you can figure out how to make yourself, in a normal kitchen, starting from pieces of plants and/or animals.” (Admittedly, I don’t know how to make baking soda, but then, I use it mostly as a cleaning product.)
I also feel strongly that food should be artisanal, not industrial. I was waiting for a freight train to pass at the intersection of Seminary Road and Capital View, and I was watching the cars go by, and I got a bit alarmed at one point by the progression of petroleum product-petroleum product-some kinda sulfate-some kinda sulfate-petroleum product-corn syrup-corn syrup. Just kinda freaked me out.
This is a “best of all possible worlds” rant. I’m not naive. I know I’m privileged beyond the dreams of most humans ever in history in terms of the options available to me in choosing food. I don’t think everyone in the world (or even everyone in my neighborhood) has regular, affordable access to fresh fruit and vegetables and protein sources; I just think they should. I’d rather see social changes to encourage that than corporate profit-driven monoculture schemes to feed the burgeoning masses as cheaply as possible, and the stockholders as richly as possible. It’s a giant weird Malthusian/Hieronymus Bosch nightmare to me, the way economics and agriculture have twisted around each other.
The ads say it’s “made from corn”.
Well, yes, in a way.
But it’s not made from corn in the same way as, for example, maple syrup is made from maple trees.
Maple Syrup:
Step 1- Tap tree.
Step 2- Boil sap.
Done.
Corn Syrup:
Step 1- Mix dried corn kernels with water and sulfur dioxide for a day or two.
Step 2- Grind up the corn.
Step 3- Separate the germ (oily part) from the pulp (starchy/protein/fiber part) using a centrifuge.
Step 4- Filter off the fiber with some more milling and screening.
Step 5- Centrifuge the remainder, to separate the gluten from the starch.
Step 6- Keep diluting and centrifuging the starch mixture up to 14 times to make sure you’ve got just starch. (I’m pretty sure I could handle this recipe myself up to this point, but I don’t have the right screens and I don’t know where to get sulfur dioxide.)
Step 7- Get some bacteria (Bacillus sp., but I don’t know what the sp. stands for) to make some alpha amylase (that’s an enzyme that occurs naturally in saliva and pancreatic juices).
Step 8- Mix the alpha amylase with the starch. This breaks it down into polysaccharides. I guess if you were trying to do this at home, you could spit in it.
Step 9- Get some aspergillus fungi to make you someglucoamylase.
Step 10- Mix the glucoamylase with the polysaccharide solution. This gets you glucose.
Step 11- Get some D-xylose isomerase. (I don’t know where you get this, or how it’s made.)
Step 12- Mix the D-xylose isomerase with the glucose. This gets you a mixture of about 42 percent fructose and 50-52 percent glucose (and some other sugars).
Step 13- Using liquid chromatography, get your fructose level up to 90%. (I don’t think you can get a liquid chromatograph setup for the home kitchen. Not even at Sur La Table.)
Step 14- Blend some of your 90% fructose with the 42% fructose/52% glucose so you have a 55% fructose solution. (SAT mixture problems, anyone?)
Done.
So, corn syrup is sort of made from corn. But I’d argue that it’s made from corn even less than Velveeta is made from milk. (Acknowledged: Beer and cheese are produced in multi-stage processes involving bacteria and/or fungus, too. Also acknowledged: I don’t know what liquid chromatography is, and it probably isn’t scary.)
And it makes rats’ hearts get really big. (I couldn’t find a proper scientific study that actually says their hearts exploded, but this study says “fructose feeding induced significant increases in…left ventricular weight.”)
Giant Art Crush
Lanea, Anubh, and I had a great time performing at the Pennsylvania Celtic Fling, thanks in large part to the primal ecstasy that is Albannach. I have a big crush on them.
Articles and geography
In the movie we saw last night about Bela Fleck taking the banjo back to its African context (which was very moving and deserves more than the off-hand mention it gets here), it struck us that the country we thought of as “Gambia” is actually “The Gambia”. Which led to a brief bit of research into what other countries have a “The”. Officially, just The Bahamas. Unofficially, Ehren decided, it should be all countries that start with “United”, plus all plural island chains.
Ecoguilt parameters, continued
Eating local good; eating veggies better.
This article from Science News discusses the various sources of greenhouse emissions in the farm-to-table chain.
Sadly, the online version does not include the fab pie chart from the print version, but you’ll get the idea: eating less beef and dairy does more to reduce your ecoguilt total than only buying local.
I guess it’s time to start phasing out the lattes…
Outraged, and mollified
Outraged: What happens to unsold books.
Mollified: Inspired, even. These people were outraged too, and look what they did. (I think their domain name is a little bit of a stretch, though.)
The Mysteries of Google, continued
Google has changed its favicon in Firefox, but not in Internet Explorer. [1]
Puzzling.
In IE it’s still the boxy capital G we’re all used to.
In Firefox, it’s suddenly the lower-case g (“good girl’s glasses”).
Weird how such a small thing can be such a big distraction.
(Not unlike corn in Italian wedding soup.)
[1] Is this a geek badge?