Urban Homesteading

6,000 lbs of produce growing on an average city lot. These people live about a mile down the hill from me, so not only is this inspiring (and a little intimidating), it's potentially useful kicks-in-the-gardening-pants timed precisely for the microclimate. Note to self, plant the rest of the peas already.

yami · 20:09 · 26 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Links

Petty Consumer Activism

There's nothing quite like emailing the Campbell Soup Company to bring a little petty glee into an otherwise grouchy day.

Dear Campbell's Soup people:

I came home today in a lousy mood and hungry to boot, so I reached for a can of Where's Waldo? shaped pasta - hooray for convenient comfort foods! However, I was quite irritated when I turned the can around to find that claims about your product's nutritive benefits (which I do not dispute, as I'm sure you've run them past a sharp legal department with an extraordinarily well-developed understanding of the FDA's technical definition of "vegetables") were specifically - and, I feel, unecessarily - directed to mothers.

There is a social expectation that mothers will be the ones primarily responsible for their children's nutrition (as well as for the lion's share of other domestic duties), and I believe that this expectation contributes to women's continuing difficulties in the upper echelons of the workforce. I certainly don't blame food packaging for the effects of a complex culture, and I don't really want to spread evangelical feminism among the customer service department either (yes I do, but I think it'd be more fun to break in with pamphlets so we can microwave our bras in the break room); I'm just trying to explain why I was annoyed that your label was addressed to just "moms" rather than "moms and dads".

Happily, there are many tasty convenience meals in the supermarket that contain no gratuitous gender stereotypes at all (how do they ever create brand recognition without knee-jerk sexism? Their marketing departments must be geniuses! Or else they have an even better understanding of the FDA's definition of "vegetable" than you guys do, which would be amazing. Frankly I'm in awe of your legal team, because remember what happened when word got out as to how ketchup was counted as a vegetable on school lunch menus? And they only said that the tomato puree counted as one vegetable, not a single serving of multiple "vegetables"! You're not thinking vegetable oil or paprika, are you?) I hope that the Franco-American line of amusingly shaped pastas will join them.

Sincerely,
Yami McMoots
Infinite Crusader for Justice and the Blurred Gender Roles more Appropriate to the Subject of an Andy Warhol Painting, and also the Official Status of Tomatoes as a Legal Fruit to Further the Sophisticated Botanical Discourse of Our Great Nation!

Actually what I sent was shorter. Maybe I should've included more of those parenthetical asides - or maybe they were counting the high fructose corn syrup as one of their vegetables, I think I'd be okay with that.

Update: they wrote back.

yami · 19:16 · 24 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Feminism, I Hate Everything

Le Tutoiement des Blogs

Even former French finance minister Dominique Strauss-Kahn has a blog. Socialisme et democratie à gauche, hoorah! But of course the most immediately interesting thing is the complete indecision over formalities in the comment sections:

Il serait intéressant pour toi (on se tutoie sur les blogs Dominique) que tu rencontre d'autres personnes que Mr Lo�c Le Meur pour t'aider à comprendre le fonctionnement de cette nouvelle génération d'outils dont font partie les "blogs".

[It would be interesting for you (one uses the informal "you" in blogs, Dominique) to meet persons other than M L-le-M to help you understand the workings of this new generation of tools, to which blogs belong.]

vs.

J'utilise le vous, mais si un jour, vos réponses utilisent le tutoiement, je me permettrai de vous tutoyer, selon la tradition des blogs.

[I use the formal, but if one day your responses are informal, I will allow myself to use "tu" as is the tradition with blogs.]

The rest of the comments are all over the map, using either "vous" or "tu" without explanation. DSK himself has not weighed in on the matter, and continues to use the obviously-plural "vous" for his audience. I don't read enough (i.e., any) French blogs to know how it normally works, but the addition of an old and highly distinguished person to the (presumably) intimate bloggy-culture seems to have thrown the French for a loop. Not my problem, as I have nothing to add to the discussion anyway.

Surely someone has already written a comprehensive, cross-cultural discussion of (in)formal modes of address on blogs? And surely a clued-in reader can point me to it?

yami · 11:56 · 22 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Foreign

Mmmmm

How is it that feather blankets are always so much cozier than even the snuggliest synthetic fills? I think it might have something to do with the absurd fluffiness and/or little scrunchy noises - even the expensive synthetics are only somewhat fluffy, and they don't make the same scrunchy noises - but can't quite pin it down. (Har-de-har, down! I'm so clever.)

In any case, a nice rainy day + new duck-down blanket + tomato soup + grilled cheese sandwiches cut into triangles (triangles! not rectangles or loaf-shaped facsimiles thereof, triangles! I challenge anyone who disagrees with me on this to a duel) = fabulous. Adding a Kitchen Stories matinee makes me want to move to Norway where this kind of coziness is strictly enforced seven months out of twelve (in L.A. it is only grudgingly tolerated for two weeks in February).

yami · 11:18 · 22 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Diary, Movies

Someone’s Trolling My Bridge

And here we have mail from a few people who know where a few of my buttons lie, and a few more people who don't:

i love olivine

Button, button, who's got the - DUDE OLIVINE IS AWESOME!!!1!* Someday I want to live in a house with rock walls made of peridotite. Doooooood.

santa, i've been a good girl, please STOP!

Not a button. I really don't have anything interesting to say; I'm not sure an interesting response is even possible. At least not while this blog sticks firmly to its R rating. Next?

i need facts

Okay. Facts:

  1. There are 160 calories in a serving of tiny conversation hearts.
  2. The King of Cambodia was wearing a suit the other day while he made a pronouncement:

    After watching television images of gay marriages in San Francisco, the 81-year-old monarch has decided that single sex weddings should be allowed in Cambodia too.

    I would like to use this opportunity to crusade against royalty who wear modern business attire. It should be intuitively obvious that silk or velvet robes, funny shoes and sceptres are more appropriate.

  3. Thelonious Monk was born on February 21, 2020.

I hope that's enough facts to get by on.

i hate monkeys

FUKKKK YOU, gloppy robot man!!!!!** I don't care if monkeys only got a one-star rating; it is unpossible to hate monkeys and still be human. But I assume you're just needling me, so I won't respond with the sooper-seekrit anti-robot explosive ray guns.

give me a break

Yeah. I didn't bring out the cartoonish death devices. That's a pretty lucky break for someone who claims to hate monkeys. Now scram.

i like cats

Cute kitty pictures are not going to help you on this one, bub. I'm loading my apparatus - can you hear the menacing squeaks and boings? Good.

Now - are there any more comments from the peanut gallery?
*menacing stare*
(more...)

yami · 22:46 · 20 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Fan Mail

Spam Literary Identities

If I ever need a pen name - a real pen name, that is, one that could go on books without being laughed at - I'll find one in my inbox, trying to sell me herbal viagra. These spammer databases are fabulous! Just in the past five hours I've gotten email from Gwendolyn Poole (pseudo-historical romance), Jefferson Ledford (Westerns), Eugenia Lockhart (flowery soft-core erotica masquerading as pseudo-historical romance) and Frederick G. Melton (awkward tomes about the high seas). All's I need now are names for ficticious travel narrative, space operas where dashing young men awkwardly refuse to notice the complete lack of women in their narratives, and saccharine children's books and I'm set! At least two of those should be in my in-box by tomorrow morning.

yami · 21:41 · 18 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Uncategorized, Crap

Details

  1. Trip to the L.A. Arboretum leads to photoblog updates.
  2. I'm playing with the RSS - new RSS 2.0 feed includes comments! Old RSS 1.0 feed does not include comments, but has other crappy & useless metadata. And if you're reading this via RSS, won't you please say hi?
yami · 18:47 · 15 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Announcements

Lutefisk and Yams

Dr. Seuss meets Ole and Lena jokes:

I would not eat them on a raid,
I would not eat them with a maid,
I would not eat them on a trip,
I would not eat them on my ship.
I do not like lutefisk and yams.
I do not like them, Sven I am.

Surely there must be a more authentic Scandinavian foodstuff that rhymes with "am"? I can't imagine that the Vikings would have had much access to yams, as most varieties don't do well in the cold. Dioscorea batatas is hardy to USDA Zone 5, though, and southern Sweden is Zone 7, which strikes me as utterly ridiculous but I guess a bit of Viking yam-cultivation would not have been entirely out of the climatological question. History is another matter; decent references on the history of yams are not forthcoming, but check out the completely unrelated sweet potato for kicks.

yami · 21:13 · 14 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Literature, Food

Someone Flails Wildly

I must say, I missed the spout box while it was gone. But the misplaced search queries do make me wonder:

?

growth of mung beans

http://www.alexchiu.com/cell/14.htm

Mung beans make our distancewise ions live forever! Actually, that four-armed octopus thing looks like a good candidate for the stuffed octopus technique.

what kind of color of carpet do you prefer and would you prefer a carpet layer or a carpet cleaner and can you give a good reason?

Is "woodgrain" a kind of color? Or is that just a category error perpetuated by the designers of mid-70s suburban dens? In any case I think the attempt to simulate hardwood flooring in such a low-resolution medium as carpet would be highly entertaining, particularly if it was done in an obviously non-wood color like red or grey. As to carpet layers and cleaners: a carpet layer is a person, while a carpet cleaner is a whirry suds machine (perhaps this was a person, too, at one point?). With carpet layers, one is locked in to one of two established cultural narratives, depending on seaon: the crude blue-collar worker, or the mysteriously shirtless college boy on summer break. I'm a fan of whirling steam machines that emit vaguely disturbing chemicals, but hey, machines can't do everything. Next question?

Index of Rocks

Check your local petrology text. Repeat after me, LI-BERRIES!

yami · 20:26 · 14 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Fan Mail

Tchotchke Fever

My tolerance for ickle doodads at home is moderate, at best. Certain narrow categories of things, yes, we all have our indulgences - but I don't play indiscriminate magpie. At least not for keeps.

It's a completely different story at work. I'm slowly decorating my cubicle with shiny junk - garbage in the most literal sense, since much of it comes from discarded outré floral arrangements in the dumpster next door. I have fake flowers tacked to my walls, and now a sparkly plastic snowflake dangling from the dragon tree. I work in an objectively pro-Hummel figurine crap trap.

In the beginning, I thought of it as dorm-style decor. There's a certain functional equivalency; the cubicle wall and the dorm door are both blank slates we use for practical purposes as well as projecting an image of ourselves to passers-by. But I generally found it more fun to leave shiny crap on other people's doors in college; keeping the junk in my own space represents some kind of fundamental shift.

    Is it:
  1. A healthy redirection of a socially awkward impulse?
  2. An unhealthy redirection of creative energy back upon myself, which will eventually cause a narcissistic meltdown?
  3. The only sensible response to the prevailing aesthetic of my workplace?
  4. All or none of the above?
yami · 21:23 · 12 Feb 2020 · #
Filed under: Personal