It’s amazing what the Internet has unleashed. Today I stumbled across a mention of the Vosges Bacon Chocolate Bar. It was an amusing typo, I thought: it almost sounds like a chocolate bar with bacon in it. My roommates have long joked about my love for bacon. (A local pizza place offers a dish known as the “heart attack,” which is a calzone stuffed with mozzarella sticks and bacon–its name is well-deserved. But ohhhh is it good.)
But it turns out that I hadn’t misunderstood anything. It is a chocolate bar with bacon in it. Sitting on a hot tip like this, though, I knew I had to act fast, so I sent the link to the Snack Maniac. Barring the Maniac’s ghostwritten entry, the Internet had gone a whole month without any snack updates, so I’m proud to take credit for leading to the first update in a month. So proud, in fact, that I may have to take todays “Hero of the Day” designation away from [deep breath] the man suing to keep his amputated leg that he stored in a barbecue smoker in a storage shed but was inadvertently sold when he missed his rent payments and is now used by the guy who bought the smoker at an auction as some sort of bizarre exhibit in his backyard[deep breath], and instead give it to myself… (The Hero of the Day designation, not the amputated leg stored in a barbecue smoker in a self-rental shed.)
Having recently resolved that I need to focus on eating healthy, I was thrilled to learn that the Snack Maniac was sending me a bacon-chocolate bar of my own. And while I confess that I don’t have the experienced palate of the Snack Maniac, I’ll be sure to post an update on how it tastes.
If the piques your interest… It’s not the strangest part of the story. You see, the man lost his leg years ago in a plane crash, and stored his leg in a barbecue smoker in a storage shed, but failed to make his rental payments, so they sold the smoker with the leg inside. The new owner charges people to see the leg inside the smoker, and refuses to give it back to the man from whence it came.
Today’s Hero of the Day secures a solid spot in my list of daily heroes.
I’m eating some nuts right now. They’re unsalted, unroasted, so they’re really not even that good.
Which got me wondering… How did people discover nuts? Were they accustomed to ripping things off trees and eating them? Did they try acorns? All the trees with inedible berries?
But here are some other things I’ve always wondered about the discoveries of:
Smoking. I think I posted about this before, actually. I think that, even if I lived all by myself in the woods with nothing to do and nothing to eat and no basis for what was normal, I’d never think, “Let’s rip this leaf up, dry it, set it on fire, and inhale the smoke.” And why tobacco leaves? Did they try oak leaves? Grass? Cabbage? Corn? Poison Ivy?
Sex. No, really. What else did they try before their breakthrough discovery? I think a fair amount of what we hold as “intuitive” is really societal. Was it clear initially that it should be a male and a female, and what went where, or were there lots of other variations?
Beer. Who thought, “Let’s take these unappetizing ingredients, let them rot for months, and then drink it!”? Intuitively, wouldn’t you think, “This has been rotting for months, I don’t dare drink it?” What else did they let ferment before ingesting?
Cheese. Kind of the same concept. Spoiled milk is disgusting. But getting it to cheese? I don’t think I could ever even eat cheese if I really thought about its manufacture. And for the first, say, century after cheese was discovered, I’m fairly certain that there weren’t supermarkets that sold pre-packaged cheese.
Milk. Really thinking about where it comes from, what led us to drink that? Did we try drinking bodily fluids from other animals? Do I even want to know?
Meat. Seriously, who thought, “Let’s kill that cow, cut it up, and eat it?” Was cooking devised right away? I love my burgers, but I’d rather starve to death than go up and start gnawing on a cow. And cutting up a cow and then gnawing away sounds even more disgusting.
Contact lenses. I’m glad I got them long after the technology was perfected. I’m fairly certain that if someone came up to me and said, “I’m working on a revolutionary new technology that lets you stick ‘glasses’ directly to your eyeball,” I just would have laughed… Or run screaming. Depending on whether or not they wanted to try them on me.
John Kerry gave a speech at Faneuil Hall today, focusing on economics. Between being interested, having been a Kerry ’04 supporter, wanting to try my hand at photographing the event, and having no classes during the day, I decided to attend. What follows is a write-up of the event, a combination of photography stuff and politics.
I was worried when I found out it was inside. I have a fairly “slow” lens (f/5.6 when zoomed in, which I knew is where I’d be shooting), so I wasn’t sure how they’d come out. It ended up being fairly bright inside, but shooting zoomed to 200mm still requires a fairly fast exposure. I left the lens wide open (which has the added benefit of helping to throw the background out of focus) the whole time, and bumped the camera up to ISO800. (I spent a little time at ISO1600 to try to get some “safety shots,” figuring a little grain was better than motion blur, but I can’t even tell without looking at the metadata which was which.)
This is not John Kerry, but I’ve still got a few photos uploading so I’ll start with those that are already online. This guy was marching around Harvard Square ranting about his dislike for Jews. I kind of wanted to get into his head: momentarily pretending that hating Jews isn’t crazy in and of itself, I have to wonder what possesses someone to dress up in a ridiculous costume and try to convince a ton of other people that they should hate Jews, too. Does this guy have a job? Is he sane in other settings, or is he always like this? Does he go to the grocery store to buy eggs and ham and rant to the cashier about Jews? Does he have a wife? What’s going on with the couple beyond him to the left?
Upon seeing this guy, someone near me wondered aloud, “Can you say that in public?!” This guy must not have gone to our school, because just a few weeks ago, we handed out about 1,000 copies of the Constitution. He wouldn’t have had to read far, even: we put that part right up front for him.
I had lunch in Quincy Market. Since I was by myself and didn’t feel like looking for a seat, I ate at one of those bizarre troffs tables. I took this shot with my 18-50mm lens, at 18mm. Even with the camera’s crop, 18mm (effectively 29mm) is really wide! This picture should also go in textbooks that talk about barrel distortion.
What are the odds that everyone here would be in orange? (It was pure coincidence.) I really like seeing that it’s not just young college students calling for Bush’s ouster.
The room was really impressive, and was a great place to hold something like this. Of course, there was no shortage of flags. The inscription on the bottom of the pictures behind Senator Kerry reads, “Liberty and Union Now and Forever.”
This breaks one of the cardinal rules of photography. You want the subject looking “in.” It’d have been great had he been facing the right (his left), but he wasn’t. Also, at least for me, the object that my eye jumps to is the woman in green, who was just some random audience member.
The enormous picture behind him wasn’t level. Another “cardinal rule” I’m big on is keeping straight lines. I’m more prone to noticing than most people, but when the horizon is slanting, it really detracts from the picture. I realized early on that my pictures were coming out pretty crooked, so I started being careful to try to keep the bottom of the frame nice and level. But on more zoomed-out shots like this, the stage was pretty slanted. I’d love to fix the alignment of the painting, but when I try aligning pictures on walls, they tend to fall off. I think I’d be in pretty deep trouble if I knocked that painting down.
Here’s the room. It’s on the upper floor of Faneuil Hall, and is incredibly nice. (This was a little before we started; the guy on the right is an usher.)
Any idea who this lady is? She was right near the front and a lot of people were coming up saying hello. I’m assuming she’s either a former politician or wife of a politician, but I didn’t recognize her.
See what I mean? Here I aligned the image so the stage was perfectly level. Look at that sloping painting! Isn’t it distracting?
Kerry talked a lot about health care, and the utter disaster that is our status quo. He actually slipped in what I thought was a hilarious joke… Discussing Romney’s move for universal health care in Massachusetts, he mentioned how he’s now downplaying it. “It’s almost as if he’s saying he was for universal health care before he voted against it.”
He also discussed tax cuts and the preposterous situation of giving the richest Americans huge tax rebates. “Teresa and I didn’t ask for a tax break. We didn’t need one, especially not when 43 million [?] Americans can’t afford basic health care.”
I’m not sure I did such a great job going over what happened, but it was great. My one critique is that he seemed a little too quick to bash Republicans: it’s something most all Democrats are quick to do, but unless we start working together, the schism is going to get wider. We need to work with the Republicans, not against them.
