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Archive for the ‘News’ Category

Founder of Taco Bell, Dead at 86

Wednesday, January 20th, 2010

Amidst a million other things going on this week, I thought I’d take a moment to note the passing of the man behind Taco Bell, Glen Bell, Jr.  I grew up waiting with barely contained excitement for taco night, which in my gabacho household meant the ritual spooning of meat, colby-jack cheese and lettuce into a crispy tortilla.  Later, it became the first meal I ever figured out how to make myself (with help from a kit), starting me down the road of culinary self-sufficiency I walk today.

According to the New York Times’ obituary page, I have a man to thank for this glorious innovation of the pre-crisped taco shell:

… Mr. Bell, a fan of Mexican food, had a hunch that ground beef, chopped lettuce, shredded cheese and chili sauce served in the right wrap could give burgers a run for the money. The problem was which wrap. Tacos served in Mexican restaurants at the time were made with soft tortillas.“If you wanted a dozen, you were in for a wait,” Mr. Bell said. “They stuffed them first, quickly fried them and stuck them together with a toothpick.”

The solution: preformed fried shells that would then be stuffed. Mr. Bell asked a man who made chicken coops to fashion a frying contraption made of wire.

Much innovation has come from the creative abuse of chicken wire.  May ever more tasty creations be spawned from the hands of geniuses with pliers.

So Mr. Bell, for cheaply feeding generations of mall employees, for prepping my tender palette to the wonders of churros, and for introducing the joys of beans and tortillas to the North American masses, long before many in those white bread zones had ever met a real live Mexican, I salute you.

Tags: glen bell, obituary, taco bell, tacos, tortillas, tribute
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Scandinavian Ghost Rockets & Lights

Wednesday, December 9th, 2009

Between Obama receiving the Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, Norway and these mysterious lights in northern Norway much is going on in Norway. The Daily Mail has photos and videos of this oddity.

As the Daily Mail reports, the lights were not seen by many. Lenticular Clouds, Northern Lights, and other natural phenomenon could be a cause. Some are propose the mysterious lights are caused by a missle from Russia. The Russian military of course denies this. Others say it might be a UFO of extraterrestrial origin.

This would not be the first time Scandinavia had a flap with ghost rockets and UFO’s. During World War II, Nazi scientists tested V1 and V2 rockets over Sweden and Norway. After the war reports of mysterious lights and objects emerged. At its height in the late 1940’s the Swedish Defence Research Agency (Totalförsvarets forskningsinstitut, FOI) stated “nearly one hundred impacts have been reported and thirty pieces of debris have been received and examined by FOI.” Some hypothesized these UFOs tests by Russia and a few wondered at the possibility of an out of this world phenomenon– including the US Military. A 1948 USAF document states: “we are inclined not to discredit entirely this somewhat spectacular theory [extraterrestrial origins], meantime keeping an open mind on the subject.”

Who knows maybe its a natural phenomenon, missile, or UFO. Or maybe Sarah Palin is pissed at Obama and summoned her buddy Thor.

EDIT: Yeah, it was a rocket. But a rocket spewing out tiny sapphires!  Not Thor, but still cool.

Tags: norway, obama, palin, ufo, world war 2
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If X => Then the Owls Will Surely Rape Our Faces as We Sleep

Wednesday, July 15th, 2009

A lot of useless things get shoveled into the brain of a young inmate of the public education system.  Like factorials or peanut-based inventions numbers 4 – 2,000 of George Washington Carver.  One thing I am grateful to my middle school math classes for is a careful study of logic.  It helps me read the news and see little flashing bursts of color as brain cells seize, choke and blow up like a meth lab. (high school chemistry!)

Exhibit A, from the New York Post:

A Brooklyn grandma got more than she’d bargained for when she rented a copy of “Austin Powers” from her local library and found it spliced with long pornographic scenes.

…

Klein contacted her assemblyman, Dov Hikind — and he’s now demanding that local libraries ban all VHS tapes.

“This is unbelievable,” Hikind fumed. “The bottom line is that the local library can be unsafe for young children. It’s pretty sick stuff.”

Really, Dov?  Ban all VHS tapes?

Exhibit B, via a Wired blog post on pending Congressional legislation to allow prisons to jam cellphones used illegally by prisoners:

But public interest groups, including Public Knowledge, the New America Foundation, and the Main Street Project, told the committee in a letter that cited a Wired magazine story that blocking technology is unproven and that blocking is not possible without causing collateral damage.

“Allowing the legal manufacture, importation and sale of jamming equipment will create a loophole that history shows the FCC will find impossible to close,” the groups wrote.

“Jamming prison cellphones would jeopardize public safety because there is no way to jam only phones used by prisoners,” said Harold Feld, legal director for Public Knowledge. “All wireless communications could be shut down within a prison.”

…

“Once such a jamming device is built, it will inevitably become available on a wider basis. Who knows what chaos that will cause?” Feld said.

So what do these two stories have in common?  A similar psuedo-logical leap that I like to call If X =>Then the Owls Will Surely Rape Our Faces as We Sleep.* This is a favored tactic of those we pay to freak out about things on our behalf (politicians, lawyers, PR, lobbyists) wherein the master logician in question takes scant evidence, an anecdotal isolated incident or something they hope the listener is ignorant about and label it the surest route to a doomsday of owl-on-face-sexual-assault proportions.

This is how Assemblyman Dov “Hey can we get some more racial profiling over here?” Hikind goes from a random porno dub on an Austin Powers tape to populist rage against an entire A/V format to protect the children from sexual relations.  (Of which there is no mention in Austin Powers, mind you)

And he even manages to get in a WTF-worthy dig at the wretched hive of scum and villiany, oh, and child seduction, that is the library.  Dammit, Dov, that’s the Queens Public Library System, get it straight.

Then we’ve got Harold Feld hearing the desperate hooting and mad sex-crazed flapping of some dystopic future where owls rule and cell phones are jammed everywhere, all because we tried to stop a few measly contract killings.  While it should be said that I support a lot of what Public Knowledge says they’re for, Feld is either banking on our ignorance and sitting in a warm puddle of his own.

Anyone with access to another dangerous technology, The Googles, can find plans and providers for exactly the sort of cell phone jammers (DIY here, commercial there) that he fears will lead to some kind of ambiguous large bad thing.

That’s another piece of this tactic: keep the threat ambiguously defined but big.  The human brain automatically fills that void with, you guessed it, feathers everywhere and a taste no amount of mouth wash will cleanse.

*Feel free to replace face rape by owls with the worst case scenario of your choice.  I spent a lot of my upbringing in a sleeping bag in the woods so y’know.

Tags: austin powers, cell phones, Dov Hikind, education, feathers, freak out, Harold Feld, horny flapping, jammers, jamming, logic, owl rape, owls, porno, Public Knowledge, signals, vhs, wireless
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New Sub Species of Monkey: Mura Saddleback Tamarin

Tuesday, July 7th, 2009

The small gray and brown tamarin monkey which weighs 213 grams (0.47 pound) guy was named Mura’s saddleback tamarin in honor of the Mura tribe.

Not an alien life form in a sewer, but much cuter.

Read more on the tamarin:

• New long-tailed monkey discovered in Amazon, MSNBC
• New monkey discovered in Brazilian Amazon, Reuters
• Newly Discovered Monkey Threatened by Amazon Development, National Geographic

Tags: cryptozoology, News, science
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China Needs More Gay

Wednesday, June 10th, 2009

Two China-related stories kept coming up in the blog chum bucket today, one sounding like a clear solution for the other.

First there was this look at China’s surplus of young men in the Wall Street Journal:

Thanks to its 30-year-old population-planning policy and customary preference for boys, China has one of the largest male-to-female ratios in the world. Using data from the 2005 China census — the most recent — a study published in last month’s British Journal of Medicine estimates there was a surplus of 32 million males under the age of 20 at the time the census was taken. That’s roughly the size of Canada’s population.

32 Million males who can’t get laid is a lot of Limp Bizkit concerts.

On this point, Kenneth Anderson notes that with such a gender difference, you’ve ended up in a situation similar to polygamous societies, with their accompanying troubles with social unrest:

The inequality that is baked into a society in which one husband has multiple exclusive wives is perhaps not primarily or necessarily about the wives, if one makes (extremely, fantastically heroic assumptions, in actual social fact) about their freedom to choose, and if it included the right to divorce not only the husband, but other wives (however that might work in some idealized world). The intrinsic inequality is about the mateless men, deprived of the opportunity to even have a chance to marry and have families and children.

Now, the argument can be made that polygamy comes naturally, as that nature made men as canon fodder and equipped the canny survivors with the ability to spread seed on a mass scale without hardly breaking a sweat. (Though you should.  Put your damn back into it!)  However, in this modern era with our crazily low homicide rate as compared to the bulk of human history, we men are much better at surviving long enough to be sexually frustrated, often without a socially-sanctioned outlet for hot sex or, barring that, heinous violence.

And then there’s Shanghai this week:

The visibility of the LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) community in China has been growing fast recently but its profile became more prominent this week as Shanghai hosted the country’s first gay pride festival.

What an elegant solution.  Too many unmatched males?  Why not try gay?  Sure beats all the slaughter, exile and slaving that other folks have tried.

Even the numbers look pretty good, according to China Daily:

China has a homosexual population of 30 million people – 20 million gays and 10 million lesbians, said Zhang Beichuan, China’s leading scholar in the field of homosexuality. The government puts the figure at between 5 and 10 million.

OK, so that breaks down to just a 10 million man gay offset in the ranks of all the young dudes. Using the 32 million figure as a target, that means you’ve got 22 million left to convert, boys.

So how might the Chinese government encourage this?

Well first off, letting Shanghai fully get its queer on would help.  This is a bit of a difficult proposition, seeing as how the Chinese government is basically an East Asian version of the stodgy town elders from Footloose.  If they really want this to work, they need to acknowledge that dancing is the surest slippery slope to gaydom.  (Dancing With the Stars… I’m on to you.)

Other, more People’s Republican options exist.  The Finns seem to be working on some kind of ‘gay gas‘ but the reports are sketchy and juvenile.  The Pentagon might have something to that effect too.

Note on Flag Graphic: Made it myself.  Feel free to swipe it and use it wherever.

Tags: china, equality, gay, gay bomb, politics, polygamy, shanghai, World
Posted in News, World, politics | 1 Comment »