In celebration of my freedom and the resultant lift in anxiety, here's something totally frivolous. Thanks to the folk at Slashfood, I have come across the Omnivore's Hundred, which purports to be a list of 100 things everyone should try at least once before they die. I wonder: should I be depressed that I've already made my way through quite a lot of these, or should I be putting together the advanced version?
Anyway, here's the list, complete with instructions (and a few comments):
1) Copy this list into your blog or journal, including these instructions.
2) Bold all the items you’ve eaten.
3) Cross out any items that you would never consider eating.
4) Optional extra: Post a comment here at www.verygoodtaste.co.uk linking to your results.
The VGT Omnivore’s Hundred:
1. Venison
2. Nettle tea
3. Huevos rancheros
4. Steak tartare
5. Crocodile
6. Black pudding
7. Cheese fondue
8. Carp
9. Borscht
10. Baba ghanoush
11. Calamari
12. Pho
13. PB&J sandwich
14. Aloo gobi
15. Hot dog from a street cart
16. Epoisses
17. Black truffle
18. Fruit wine made from something other than grapes
19. Steamed pork buns
20. Pistachio ice cream
21. Heirloom tomatoes
22. Fresh wild berries
23. Foie gras
24. Rice and beans
25. Brawn, or head cheese
26. Raw Scotch Bonnet pepper
27. Dulce de leche
28. Oysters
29. Baklava
30. Bagna cauda
31. Wasabi peas
32. Clam chowder in a sourdough bowl
33. Salted lassi
34. Sauerkraut
35. Root beer float
36. Cognac with a fat cigar
37. Clotted cream tea
38. Vodka jelly/Jell-O
39. Gumbo
40. Oxtail
41. Curried goat
42. Whole insects [once was enough, thanks]
43. Phaal
44. Goat’s milk
45. Malt whisky from a bottle worth £60/$120 or more
46. Fugu
47. Chicken tikka masala
48. Eel
49. Krispy Kreme original glazed doughnut
50. Sea urchin
51. Prickly pear
52. Umeboshi
53. Abalone
54. Paneer
55. McDonald’s Big Mac Meal
56. Spaetzle
57. Dirty gin martini
58. Beer above 8% ABV
59. Poutine
60. Carob chips
61. S’mores
62. Sweetbreads
63. Kaolin [Erm. As far as I can tell, this is soil. Why?]
64. Currywurst
65. Durian
66. Frogs’ legs
67. Beignets, churros, elephant ears or funnel cake
68. Haggis
69. Fried plantain
70. Chitterlings, or andouillette
71. Gazpacho
72. Caviar and blini
73. Louche absinthe
74. Gjetost, or brunost
75. Roadkill
76. Baijiu
77. Hostess Fruit Pie
78. Snail
79. Lapsang souchong
80. Bellini
81. Tom yum
82. Eggs Benedict
83. Pocky
84. Tasting menu at a three-Michelin-star restaurant.
85. Kobe beef
86. Hare
87. Goulash
88. Flowers
89. Horse
90. Criollo chocolate
91. Spam
92. Soft shell crab
93. Rose harissa
94. Catfish
95. Mole poblano
96. Bagel and lox
97. Lobster Thermidor
98. Polenta
99. Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee
100. Snake
So. How about you?
It's been a long time since I liked a blog post enough to actually email the link to a big list of people, but I just did: Ben Terrett's talk, "I'm a designer. Use me better."
Of course, sending the link felt pretty wasteful to me - if only in terms of inbox space and pixels - which made me think again about the whole online social media thing. I clearly need a ground-up reorg of my online communications: after a long period of feeling like I had not much of anything to (publicly) say, my interest seems to have renewed. I'm re-engaging, but in the roughly 3 years since I disengaged, so much has changed about the online world that I feel like it's not going to be right (or enough?) to just start posting again here and there, chucking up links when I feel like it, and starring the odd list item in Google Reader. So what do I do? I'm used to designing solutions for other people, but what's going to work for me?
If anybody's looking at this, I'm open to suggestions.
Mr. PotatoHead meets Indiana Jones. Best. Toy. Ever.
I've been mildly obsessed of late with the conflict between the human tendency to simplify and linearise processes, and the human nature to be messy and complex. This bears itself out in all kinds of interesting ways, but I just caught myself writing a stupidly long comment on someone else's blog, so I thought what the hell, let's put it here instead.
So Richard was saying that it would be great to have a unified online identity (for convenience, bien sûr), but that at the same time he wants to preserve the ability to present himself differently in different contexts. Good point, I've said it before myself. But there's more to this. I was talking to a friend of mine in the States about her idea for a new social-network-ish online service and we stumbled into the problem that's plagued me ever since the earliest days of Friendster: all friends are not equal. Nor are all colleagues. Yet every social network based site more or less requires me to pretend they are. I suspect that this normalisation contributes to people's need to represent themselves differently on different networks - but doing so doesn't solve the problem. Take, for instance, my LinkedIn network. Do I know everyone on there personally? Yes, of course. Do I rate everyone on there equally? No, of course not. Do you? Some of those people I would work with again anyday, anytime. Some I keep in touch with fairly regularly, and some I hear from maybe once a year. Yet they're all equal to the outside observer. Is that a problem? Maybe, maybe not. It's not an accurate reflection of my professional relationships, but with recommendations and so forth it probably comes close.
When we get into the world of personal interaction online, this same challenge gets stickier. For instance, on Facebook there are only two ways that I can post something: either everyone who's connected to me sees it, or I send a private message to a select group of people. This means I have to think carefully about what I say and where. Let's say I'm having a party and I only want to invite 15 people because I don't have enough chairs to go round. I create an invitation that I only send to the people I want to invite, right? But then woe betide me if I twitter about the preparations. And what about those conversations you'd have with your closest friends but not necessarily your broader circle? For all the collaboration tools and technologies out there, you're often still better off using email.
No matter how egalitarian we pretend to be, all friends - all contacts - are not created equal. That's not because we're bad people; it's the nature of human relationships. There are Facebook apps that acknowledge this, but they're clumsy at best and mean at worst. Go check them out - it's a lengthy list of teenage girl torture methods.
The thing is, humans are, by nature, complicated and erratic. As such, it's difficult to come up with technology that truly supports our lifestyles, varied and changeable as they are. Technology (like legislation, but we'll talk about that some other time) operates on rules, and when the rules get too complex, the machinery grinds to a halt. So we are forced to keep things as simple as possible, but in so doing we create (or exacerbate) all manner of fuzziness.
So what do I want? I want to do whatever it is that I want to do at the moment that I want to do it, of course. And I want it to be easy. Is that too much to ask?
Maybe it is.
(but that's no reason to stop trying...)
The list is based on an exercise developed by Will Barratt, Meagan Cahill, Angie Carlen, Minnette Huck, Drew Lurker, Stacy Ploskonka at Illinois State University. The exercise developers ask that if you participate in this blog game, you acknowledge their copyright.
Father went to college
Father finished college
Mother went to college (for 1 year at a business college. I helped her with her homework. I was 14.)
Mother finished college
Have any relative who is an attorney, physician, or professor
Were the same or higher class than your high school teachers
Had more than 50 books in your childhood home
Had more than 500 books in your childhood home
Were read children's books by a parent
Had lessons of any kind before you turned 18
Had more than two kinds of lessons before you turned 18
The people in the media who dress and talk like me are portrayed positively (Talk like me? yes but only since my mother refused to let me adopt the rural Ohio accent that I was surrounded by. Dress like me? Nope, hence the italics.)
Had a credit card with your name on it before you turned 18
Your parents (or a trust) paid for the majority of your college costs
Your parents (or a trust) paid for all of your college costs
Went to a private high school
Went to summer camp
Had a private tutor before you turned 18
Family vacations involved staying at hotels
Your clothing was all bought new before you turned 18
Your parents bought you a car that was not a hand-me-down from them (I didn't get my driver's license until I was 21.)
There was original art in your house when you were a child
Had a phone in your room before you turned 18
You and your family lived in a single family house (sometimes, yes)
Your parent(s) owned their own house or apartment before you left home
You had your own room as a child (most of the time, yes)
Participated in an SAT/ACT prep course
Had your own TV in your room in High School
Owned a mutual fund or IRA in High School or College
Flew anywhere on a commercial airline before you turned 16 (but only because our dog saved my father's life and was Dog of the Year for 1976 so we got to fly from California to Atlanta.)
Went on a cruise with your family
Went on more than one cruise with your family
Your parents took you to museums and art galleries as you grew up (ha! I was happy to go to Murphy's Mart, which was a Kmart knockoff)
You were unaware of how much heating bills were for your family
I tell people I was poor growing up, but they don't believe me very often. I guess I didn't realize how unpriviliged I was compared to everyone else I've know who has done this meme. But I will say that a number of things are very urban-centered as points of privilege. Which is less privileged? Living in a condo? or living in a trailer? And I think having a car at all before you were 18 should be seen as a point of privilege and not just having a new one given to you. I mean if your parents can afford to give you a car at all that is privilege. Few of the kids I went to high school had access to a car, let alone a car of their own. But it is interesting to have some random list of things used to describe your economic class. And since many of the items that aren't bolded for my childhood are able to be bolded now, does that mean I still am unprivileged? Or does it just mean that I understand what it is like to lack privilege? And this only describes class, not sex or race which can affect your privilege as well.
As a member of a craft mafia, I get asked by other crafters how to create or join one in their area. I've been asked about this by a woman in Houston, a woman in Dallas, a woman in Clevland, and 3-4 women in LA every year for the last three years. II respond to each of them with a moderate amount of information and encouragement to start their own group, or their own craft show. I get grateful responses from everyone, except for the women in LA. I hate to generalize about people in cities that are so stereotyped, but I find it very interesting. And confusing. Why do I get such dramatic differences between people living in LA and people living in several other cities?
Last week I was chosen as one of three finalists in the Apartments.com Possession Obsession video contest, for my video about my extensive and alluring pin-up collection! Which means I have a chance of winning $20,000!!!
Here's where you come in:
- Go to the contest site, register with your email address. It's quick, painless and they won't do anything untoward with your address, I promise. Then... VOTE! You can watch my video too, but that's not a requirement for voting. But really, you should, it's cute.
- Today and every day from now through October 19th, go to my video page, log in, and VOTE VOTE VOTE! Yes, you can actually vote multiple times (this is Chicago, after all), limited to once a day.
- Subscribe to the RSS feed for my personal site for a daily reminder to vote. As a special thanks, I'll post a different pinup from my collection every day, one that didn't appear in the video!
- Forward my personal site's URL or my video page URL to your friends and ask them to vote for me. Everybody loves sexy babes, your friends will thank you. Ask them to forward it to their friends, and so on, and so on...
- If you have a blog, I would be ever so grateful if you would write a post about my video. I'm counting on my blogerati friends to help get me to first place. So go to it! (Did I mention I could win $20,000????!!!!)
- Dust off your party hat, because when I win the $20,000 grand prize, there will be merriment! And you're invited.
Thanks for your help! I couldn't spell pin-up without "U"!
I entered a video contest run by apartments.com called "Possession Obession". Right now the videos are on display, but next week the judges pick 3 finalists, and for about a month after that people vote for the winner. You can vote once a day then -- can you tell this company is in Chicago???
Go look at my video and leave me a juicy rating and flattering comment. It doesn't have any bearing on the final results, but it sure will make me feel good :) (the login is painless, I promise)
this is what happens when Richard Branson is allowed to design a "spaceport":
