Magic Spot Flowing

New favorite word: argh-inspiring.

And the blog it’s noted in (Wordlustitude), is also my new favorite blog.

Courtesy of the wonderful Sars.

…I don’t twitter. But apparently several of you do. I’m curious why. It doesn’t really resonate with me — too much announcement, too little interaction, maybe? It seems like Facebook status on crack, with what is entered becoming a kind of social performance piece to up the entertainment value. It reminds me of the way AIM messages were used in college when everyone was logged on all the time, often either vaguely mysterious or highly uninformative. I got uncomfortable with that during my extended AIM hiatus in Scotland, and now the idea of updating people on my status even as often as I do on Facebook (which isn’t very) seems odd to me.

Thoughts?

I think most people who would write a blog post “Stumped by the NYT” would mean the crossword, but I’m thinking of their online home. I find the layout baffling beyond belief. The very top isn’t so bad — it’s obviously the top news & other-section stories, plus links to sections. But getting below that, we get the tabbed ad box, which doesn’t quite line up at the bottom with the bottom of the “main section”. Then there’s some videos and pictures, which look very cluttered in their arrangement. Following this is a horizontal block of featured articles from other sections, with pictures, then a vertical arrangement of non-featured articles from other sections that doesn’t line up with the previous segment. Finally, this far down the page, we get the most popular stories. Ads now line the left, but are stuck in one wide box on the right, and the lower right is filled with replications of links from earlier.

Does this layout actcually work for anyone? What am I missing that the web design professionals at the NYT clearly see?

I found something interesting on BoingBoing today. I don’t usually repost stuff that I see elsewhere, but this one intrigued me. A German site bought 100 different packaged food products, photographed the image of the food on the packaging, and compared it to the actual food (the linked site isn’t the original, but it’s easier to see what they were doing in the setup at the link).

I think we all know that what we see on the package isn’t that likely to be what we get — after all, the photos of food in fast-food restaurants always set you up for disappointment with the real thing. But what surprised me was how consistent the differences are.

1) The color is enhanced so that things look brighter and warmer.
2) If there’s an especially yummy part of something (it has raisins, or a caramel or cream or mint filling, or meat inside of a pastry) the yummy part is shown in high detail and larger than in reality.
3) The form is always portrayed as symmetrical and unvarying, where the real food might have varying amounts of dark and light pastry, or an uneven swirl of chocolate on top. If there are layers, the layers are shown thicker and more even than they actually are.
4) The texture is enhanced. Rice is separated instead of gluey, noodles curl pleasingly, rice pudding is thick and lumpy instead of a smooth gunky cream.
5) If the food comes with sauce, there’s much more sauce in the real food than in the picture, where the sauce is usually used decoratively and sparingly.
6) If the food comes with vegetables or meat along with noodles, rice, bread, broth, or sauce, the pieces of vegetables or meat on the packaging are larger, brighter, and more plentiful than in the real item. (Where are the fleischballen in the real Kartoffelsnack? Look at that tiny meatball on the right!)
7) If the food is presented nicely on a plate, it’s usually either in separate compartments or all mushed together. Any decorations on the package (parsely, onion curls) are definitely not in the real food.

Candy and simple snacks are usually more accurately presented than soups and entrees. For example, the Wasa cracker sandwiches, pistachio nuts, and the Corny Milsch bar, among others, look a lot like the real things, plus the standard color balance and texture enhancement.

Some of them look just terrible. The green beans look awful on the package and even more awful in reality, and the dull white block of noodles in the very first picture, accompanied by meat swimming in sauce, just looks dull and nasty. Several that look like they have texture and substance on the package (Currybrustensalat, Eiersalat, Herringsalat, Fleischsalat, and Krabbensalat, along with the “spaghetti carbonara” and “pizzeria salami” — whatever that is!) are just textureless junk in tons of sauce. The Herringsalat, being pink in reality, is especially nasty. Maybe Germans just don’t understand that salad should not be drowning in sauce…

I read a lot of food blogs, and my choices of what to read sometimes seem eclectic even to me. I like blogs with pictures and recipes. All pics and no recipes means you get a sure drop from my list, and no pictures is a bit boring and makes it hard to visualize the food. (This is why I don’t food blog — my pictures of food are terrible. I haven’t picked up on presentation for the most part yet, despite my bentos.) But lots of chattiness and posts on technique or food-related items (and even the occasional personal life tidbit) is fine too. It doesn’t matter whether I can eat all the recipes (that is, not all the blogs I read are vegetarian), as long as they’re presented in an interesting way.

But one thing I don’t like is food blogs that preach to you. There are two blogs I’ve rejected on that basis — one is Fatfree Vegan Kitchen and another, which I found through Vegan Dad, is Happy Herbivore. They both have lots of good recipes, but I find the fat-freeness weird because it often results in them remaking what to me are perfectly good recipes, and in some cases not in ways that make sense to me. And then there’s the attitude (more from the latter than the former, but it comes through in FFVK too).

THIS IS A FOOD JOURNAL of what two health conscious athletic vegans eat each day. Our diet is high in fiber, full of protein and low in fat. We rarely use oils, we avoid processed foods and we try to eat raw foods when possible. Refined carbs, nutritionally dense food or anything “hydrogenated” is out of the question!

I don’t know what’s so wrong with nutritionally dense foods — I mean, nutritionally dense sounds good to me, because it means lots of nutrients in the food, right?

And overall I just find the “my/our diet is better than YOUR diet” overtones really irritating. If they want to eat that way, that’s awesome for them, but I can do without the preachiness. Is it so bad to put shortening in pie crust, if otherwise you replace it with a half cup of sugar? Who’s to say fat is better or worse than sugar? Oh right — they are! And that’s why I don’t read preachy food blogs. Getting constantly assaulted by descriptions of fat as “unnecessary bad” stuff that we are “spared” from just doesn’t make reading fun.

While re-reading The Right Attitude to Rain, I came across several quotations I thought about memorializing in my Facebook profile, including this one:

How many people in the United States believed that they had been abducted by aliens? It was a depressingly large number. And the aliens always gave them back! Perhaps they were abducting the wrong sort.

This is so emblematic of what I love about Alexander McCall Smith. He’s full of these funny little observations that are expressed in the compact, deadpan way that British people have of saying things. Perhaps they were abducting the wrong sort. It’s lovely.

In the end I decided that pickled onions were probably enough Alexander McCall Smith for one Facebook profile, but I did want to add a lovely little poem about Scotland that’s quoted closely following the above gem. When I searched for the poem, though, one of the results that came up was from an SNP (Scottish National Party) news release, about SNP MSPs wearing the white rose of Scotland to the opening of Parliament. I was concerned that maybe the poem has nationalist associations that I wasn’t aware of, but I couldn’t find anything else that suggested that it’s more than a longstanding image association made famous by nationalist poet.

To make sure I was spelling the poet’s (pen) name correctly, I looked him up in Wikipedia, and found this gem:

He was instrumental in creating a truly Scottish version of modernism and was a leading light in the Scottish Renaissance of the 20th century. Unusually for a first generation modernist, he was a communist. Unusually for a communist, he was a committed Scottish nationalist.

The parallel there sent me into gales of laughter, closely followed by coughing. There can’t have been that many Scottish communists, anyhow, I would think.

I also found this bit amusing:

MacDiarmid listed Anglophobia amongst his hobbies in his Who’s Who entry.

Not that Anglophobia is funny, per se, but having Anglophobia as a hobby in your Who’s Who entry strikes me as strangely hilarious.

For what it’s worth, I’m neither a Scottish nationalist nor an Anglophobe, but I do think it’s a beautiful little verse, expressive of the love I feel for Scotland.

The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet — and breaks the heart.

This is super cool.

Type in “{City} Caltrain” in Google Maps where X is a city name with a Caltrain station and you get a map with a pic of the station, indications of the time of next 6 trains, their type (Bullet, Limited, Local), and their final destination (SF, SJ, Tamien, or Gilroy). Pretty goshdarn awesome in a world that needs more awesomeness.

Some of the non-city names work too, like 22nd St or San Antonio, but others don’t, like California Ave and Tamien, which do bring up the station location and snapshot but only bring up bus and light rail info, respectively. Still awesome!