food

When a sandwich is the most exciting thing that happens to you all day…

Today wasn’t particularly eventful. Sure, some people on Twitter wanted to make a lot of the fact that I had a miso mustard glazed tempeh Reuben with avocado, ginger sauerkraut, spicy Russian dressing, on 7-grain vegan bread for lunch. But, honestly, who hasn’t done that from time to time?

In all seriousness, though, I bought the sandwich here in Midtown, and it was surprisingly good — especially for vegan food, which in my limited experience is often not very good. Certainly vegan and vegetarians get the short end of it at most restaurants, especially at lunch hour take-away. The place I got this sandwich was a little too far from the office, and certainly much too expensive, to be a regular lunchtime spot for me, but I was pleasantly surprised. I’d never even heard of tempeh before this. I have mixed feelings about soy in general. I like edamame, for instance, and don’t particularly dislike soy milk. But I pretty much hate tofu. So, again, it was a pleasant surprise, even if the sandwich wasn’t even remotely like a regular Reuben.

And that’s about it for Tuesday.

Tuesday various

  • Will singing “My Way” in the Philippines get you killed?

    Still, the odds of getting killed during karaoke may be higher in the Philippines, if only because of the ubiquity of the pastime. Social get-togethers invariably involve karaoke. Stand-alone karaoke machines can be found in the unlikeliest settings, including outdoors in rural areas where men can sometimes be seen singing early in the morning. And Filipinos, who pride themselves on their singing, may have a lower tolerance for bad singers. [via]

  • Salon.com on Kevin Smith: The face of flying while fat:

    And then I read Southwest’s apology to Smith, which includes such gems as “If a Customer cannot comfortably lower the armrest and infringes on a portion of another seat, a Customer seated adjacent would be very uncomfortable and a timely exit from the aircraft in the event of an emergency might be compromised if we allow a cramped, restricted seating arrangement.” And I think, first, “If we allowed a cramped, restricted seating arrangement? Because ‘The Greyhound of the Skies’ is positively roomy when there are no fat people on board?” And second, I think, “Translation: Fat paying customers’ fully expected discomfort only becomes a problem for us if it also makes the paying customers we care about uncomfortable.” [via]

  • Speaking of apologies, does Tiger Woods owe you one? Probably not. [via]
  • A neat, albeit a little disturbing, H.R. Giger cake [via]
  • And finally, the truth behind elephant brain power:

    “We are a bit limited by how little we know about elephants, but the odd glimmers we get seem to be rather remarkable.”

    Incidentally, today is your last day to listen to Inside the Elephant Mind on the BBC player. [via]

Monday various

  • I think the most interesting thing about this new Dante’s Inferno video game — which itself sounds pretty silly, a mashup that misses the point of both sides — is this quote:

    “We look at companies like Walt Disney, where they’ve got intellectual properties that feel like their own, but are based on literature from a time gone by,” said John Riccitiello, Electronic Arts’s chief executive. “A great intellectual property can live a second or third time in new media, because it gives you a head start.”

    Because it underlines that Disney made it big by adapting well known tales it didn’t originate (from the very beginning, actually) but nowadays runs for its lawyers anytime someone tries to do the same to it. This is nothing new, but shouldn’t Mickey Mouse be, you know, out of copyright by now?

  • The headline reads, After Taliban hit supplies, Army chef serves up 42 days of Spam. [via]
  • You can keep your fart noise generators, this is the only iPhone app I’d really love to have. If they make it available for the iPad, I may just have to break down and buy one.
  • “A third of all children aged five to 16 are convinced that the body of one of their teachers has been taken over by an extra-terrestrial being.” Tell me, can you prove that they haven’t? (Then again: “The survey was commissioned by 20th Century Fox to coincide with the release of Aliens In the Attic on DVD.” So, you know, grain of salt and everything.) [via]
  • And finally, I’m basically just copying this from Making Light, but I agree that Cat Valente makes maybe one of the best arguments for why we still need publishers in the world of e-publishing:

    Funny thing is, if this future came to pass and the market were nothing but self-published autonomous authors either writing without editorial or paying out of pocket for it, if we were flooded with good product mixed with bad like gold in a stream, it would be about five seconds before someone came along and said: hey, what if I started a company where we took on all the risk, hired an editorial staff and a marketing staff to make the product better and get it noticed, and paid the author some money up front and a percentage of the profits in exchange for taking on the risk and the initial cost? So writers could, you know, just write?

    And writers would line up at their door.

    I’m obviously biased, since I work as an editor (for a smaller textbook and professional publisher). But sometimes, there’s a middleman for a reason.

Thursday various

Wednesday various

  • Movie popcorn is really bad for you. [via]

  • Then again, so too, in another way, is buying a computer at Best Buy. [via]

  • I can’t decide if this —

    An upcoming film called The Raven posits a story about what would happen if Poe were faced with the very murders he wrote about. In the movie, at the end of Poe’s life, a serial killer challenges him to solve a series of killings inspired by Poe’s fiction.

    — is a really cool or really dumb idea. I’m leaning towards dumb, to be honest.

  • I was surprised at how much I enjoyed this Random Roles interview with Alan Thicke. He’s a man who can speak intelligently and honestly about his (surprisingly interesting and varied) career.

  • And finally, who even knew there was a “murky world of Canadian ‘exploitation’ cinema“? [via]

    “Now in the U.S. when a mommy and daddy love each other, they perform bipolar sexual intercourse and make a baby. Canadians, however, are a breed of hermaphrodites who reproduce by means of auto-insemination, thus eliminating the need for sex. This also explains why we don’t really have a film industry.” – Dave Foley