Rexfeng

From Mallory Ortberg at The Toast, an appreciation of Ralph Wiggum.

Ralph is not a rule-follower like Lisa, nor a rule-breaker like Bart; Ralph does not observe the rules because he is almost completely unaware of them. More than any of the other students at Springfield Elementary, Ralph is a child. Bart and Lisa and Milhouse and Nelson and Janey are kids, and therein lies the difference. Ralph sees things that aren't there ("Ralph, remember the time you said Snagglepuss was outside?" "He was going to the bathroom!"), eats paste, picks his nose, volunteers unprompted, nonsensical declarations ("My cat's breath smells like cat food") disguised as Zen koans. His character is sometimes written as dim-but-profound, sometimes borderline-psychotic, and occasionally developmentally disabled, but more than anything else, Ralph like what he is: a child who hasn't yet aged into a kid, which is one of the most embarrassing things a child can be.

Goes nicely with this video of some of Ralph's finest moments:

Tags: Mallory Ortberg   The Simpsons   TV   video

Having a 7-inch tablet slotted into your car's dashboard just makes so much sense. It would be an elegant solution to craptastic GPS systems and clunky entertainment options. Toyota thinks so too. Its latest cars in Taiwan come with a Nexus 7 built right in.

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 Swift Navigation has developed centimeter-accurate GPS technology that can be used for a much wider range of applications. The company has developed a GPS module that comes at a fraction of a cost of competing chips with the same accuracy, which it hopes will be used in all sorts of agriculture, drones, and construction applications. Read More

The hospital said it was “confident that the discharge of these patients poses no public health threat” and said the decision to release the two was linked to the results of urine and blood tests.

When a company called Estimote released its first product last year, it was about the size of of a kiwi fruit that had been cut in half. Its diminutive wireless Bluetooth beacons were (and still are) designed to replace things like signs and information placards by sending that to the screen of your smartphone. At the same time, the beacons would help retail shops, museums, and restaurants keep track of where visitors were going.

But there were a few things holding the initial version back. There's an accelerometer to track motion, but people would just stick the beacons on walls or pillars where they remained stationary. And while aesthetically pleasing with bright colors and a polygonal form, they were still big enough that some...

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Spotify today unveiled Serendipity, an online map that displays a live stream of coordinates whenever two users play the same song at the same time. As each pair of listeners flashes onto the screen, the song they've chosen starts playing for a few fleeting moments before another song comes on. Serendipity is accurate to one tenth of a second, Spotify says. The site isn't particularly useful, but is a fantastic visualization of how music spreads — and of the reach of Spotify's user base. It's also just a fun way to hear what the world is listening to right this second.

Serendipity was built by Kyle McDonald, a Brooklyn-based digital artist who recently became Spotify's first "artist in residence." The company, which is well known for...

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Conceptual artist and illustrator Gediminas Pranckevicius posesses an imagination to covet. While most of his digital painting is centered around character design, his larger landscapes seen here are rich in detail, creating impossible but ingenious juxtapositions of water, land, and haphazard architecture. You can see more of his work over on Facebook, and all of these are available as prints via INPRNT.

Konami's finally giving the world a look at the multplayer component of the next Metal Gear Solid this week.

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Lego maniacs have another pilgrimage destination to add to their list: The brand's new "experience center" broke ground in Billund, Denmark yesterday. As you'd expect, the building itself looks like it's constructed from a pile of Legos. And thanks to a new Lego Architecture kit, you can start building your own version at home today.

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A menagerie of armed state and federal agents have filtered in and out of Ferguson, Missouri for more than a week as unrest has grown there, and now even a private military company is joining the mix. Asymmetric Solutions, a PMC that claims to be "capable of deploying highly qualified former special operations personnel" to "anywhere on the globe in a moments notice" will be providing a security detail to an unnamed individual visiting Ferguson.

Asymmetric Solutions announced the job on Twitter, noting that the assignment is saddening and unexpected.

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SeaWorld has decided not to appeal several citations from OSHA that it received after the 2010 drowning of a trainer who was swimming with a killer whale. The Associated Press reports that, as a result, SeaWorld trainers will not be able to swim with killer whales during shows in the future, which could help to remove some criticism from the park. SeaWorld's initial appeal of the citations was rejected back in April, and it's been keeping trainers out of the water since before then because of OSHA.

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And now, as a Shitshow Week special, Eater features editor Helen Rosner reviews Matt Levine's new Soho restaurant with Joe Isidori, Chalkpoint Kitchen:

[Chalkpoint Kitchen photo via Facebook]

Spend any time living in New York, and you'll quickly realize that there's no such thing as "the city." This place is manifold, it's multifaceted, it's many cities at once sharing the same geographic space. I'm not talking about the old saw of Manhattan being really just a patchwork of small towns; anyone who wanders more than six blocks outside of the mirror-glass vortex of Midtown can pick up on that. What I mean is that the whole of the city, end to end, top to bottom, is actually a living palimpsest, dozens of simultaneous New Yorks written and overwritten atop one another, the inhabitants of each zipping around within their stratum from jobs to homes to bars to restaurants to parks to clubs to parties, maybe intersecting briefly with other simultaneous worlds on the subway or at the airport but, on the whole, rarely bleeding through with any significance.

This isn't a class thing (or at least, it's not entirely one). It's about cliques, it's about social blinders, it's about the way cell phones plus tourists plus real estate prices have stripped the hubs from New York's tribal topography and we're living on a new, bigger map. Mostly, though, it's a long-winded way of making the point that—existing as I do in my own limited version of this city—I tend to live a life that allows me to forget about all the douchebags.

But there are times when I'm reminded that I live in a curated reality, that there are people who are, to paraphrase a friend with a particularly generous spirit, actual human beings whose apparent choices I may not agree with, but whose histories, environments, and inner lives I can't begin to fathom, let alone judge. Among them: The woman who wears a Soul Cycle tank top to places other than Soul Cycle; the man who nonchalantly rests his lacquer-red motorcycle helmet on the dinner table; the stringy-haired, quinquagenarian Russian with a barrel gut and a tight black t-shirt who, when the hostess approaches to ask if he'd like to get up from his seat at the bar and move to the table that's ready for him, puts his hand on her hip, cocks an eyebrow, and says "And why would I do that?"

All of these characters were found at Chalk Point Kitchen on a recent Wednesday night (after much negotiation with the angelically patient hostess, the handsy patron did eventually get up from his barstool, freeing up space so my friend and I could eat our dinner sitting next to each other). They were scattered around homey wooden tables and cutely mismatched chairs, flatteringly lit by repurposed kerosene lanterns mounted to (surely reclaimed) wood-plank walls, dining beneath decorative shelves packed with homey ephemera: flowerpots, jar candles, an antique grocer's scale, a framed drawing of a chicken, a set of a dozen cloth-bound cookbooks. The servers wear miniature-chalkboard name tags affixed to their suspenders with wooden clothespins. There are Edison light bulbs. There are mason jars. There are Edison bulbs inside mason jars. It's a Pinterest restaurant, a sponsored post on a lifestyle blog, a Blake Lively fever dream.

It is, in short, a pretty restaurant. The people eating there are very pretty. The food, served on a charmingly nonsensical mishmosh of painted porcelain plates and Chinese-restaurant melamine, is very pretty. Here's the part I did not expect, considering I was assigned this restaurant to assess as a potential shitshow: The food is also really, really good. A buttery succotash was mostly (happily) sweet corn and peas, perfectly barely cooked, studded with chunks of carrot and mushroom roasted just to the edge of char. The shrimp cocktail came with a sauce that was so sweet and smoky that I considered ordering more shrimp to scoop up what was left. The "Market Avocado"—which is, yes, a single avocado, peeled and cut into pieces and put on a plate, for which privilege one is asked to pay $10—would be a contender for Culinary Punchline of the Year if it hadn't turned out to be actually terrific, dressed in a spicy vinaigrette and topped with a sweet, stemmy tangle of baby herbs.

The back half of the meal was less transportive, but—and I mean this in the best possible way, a way that demands that you remember the fact that this is a restaurant with its social media hashtag printed on the menu, a restaurant with a Red Bull fridge prominently displayed on the back bar, a restaurant that serves a kale martini (basically your standard post-spin class green juice spiked with a shot of apple vodka; let's not lie to one another and pretend I didn't have two), a restaurant whose downstairs speakeasy is, even on a relatively sleepy night, guarded by a bouncer and a velvet rope—it was nevertheless astonishingly competent. A hunk of pan-roasted Maine cod with tender flesh and crisp skin on a bed of stewed tomatoes was like a really good dinner at home. The Romanian-style skirt steak au poivre with blue cheese had way too much going on, but the meat was cooked perfectly, tender and savory. My only complaint about the airy, creamy chicken liver mousse was that its garnish of richly spiced marcona almonds and dried cherries may have been too abundant, overpowering the bittersweet funk of the liver itself.

So the service was a little spacey (an order of Chinatown-style greens showed up twice). So the drinks at the downstairs lounge were a little off (but upstairs they were pretty great). So the whole intricately set-designed gingham-and-whitewash aesthetic was so aggressively, unignorably twee that it felt, by the end, like the third member of our dining party. But that's part of the deal with these simultaneous New Yorks. In my version of the city, I'm persnickety about the sweetness of my Sazerac, I roll my eyes at specialty light bulb filaments, and I balk at paying $800 for a pair of jeans. But in someone else's city, these things don't matter so much. They probably roll their eyes at me, my sensible shoes, my unlimited MetroCard, and my internet addiction. They don't care that they're eating dinner in a facsimile of a Brooklyn restaurant that's a facsimile of a Charleston restaurant that's a facsimile of an old French barn. They just order another round of kale martinis with genuine, unironic enthusiasm for the novel combination of alcohol and nutrient-rich leafy greens.
Verdict: Not a shitshow

— Helen Rosner

· All Coverage of Shitshow Week [~ENY~]

You all remember the TALOS, right? That big cybernetic exosuit designed to boost the physical abilities of its wearer? This is its unpowered cousin and, while it won't turn you into Captain America (regardless of how friggin awesome that would be), it is already revolutionizing how America's Navy builds its battleships.

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Will there be a Pumpkin Spice Latte jingle?

It's been a big news week for Starbucks: The company revised its erratic scheduling policy, continued its push to serve booze, and, today, announced the introduction of coffee trucks on college campuses. Arizona State University, James Madison University, and Coastal Carolina University will all serve as test sites for mobile trucks, operated by food-service company Aramark. It's only a matter of time before Starbucks trucks start tailing you everywhere you go, tempting you with a siren song of a Pumpkin Spice jingle.

The ubiquity of Starbucks is nothing new, but in New York, it seems like the twin-tailed mermaid is now everywhere you look: This summer, the company opened an outpost in the former Bleecker Street Records space, invaded Williamsburg, and announced a second Williamsburg location. Don't be surprised if Union Square Café or wd~50 become Starbucks, too.

Starbucks Coffee Trucks Will Follow Zonked College Students Around Campus [Bloomberg Businessweek]

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: the chain gang, food trucks, new york, starbucks

One more on the police in Ferguson. Matt Yglesias:

The other two men in the photograph, despite presumably being police officers, are not identifiable at this time. Unlike normal police officers, they are not wearing name tags or badges with visible numbers on them. When police arrested the Washington Post’s Wesley Lowery and the Huffington Post’s Ryan Reilly, they weren’t wearing badges or name tags either. Reasonable people can disagree about when, exactly, it’s appropriate for cops to fire tear gas into crowds. But there’s really no room for disagreement about when it’s reasonable for officers of the law to take off their badges and start policing anonymously.

There’s only one reason to do this: to evade accountability for your actions. […]

Policing without a name tag can help you avoid accountability from the press or from citizens, but it can’t possibly help you avoid accountability from the bosses. For that you have to count on an atmosphere of utter impunity. It’s a bet many cops operating in Ferguson are making, and it seems to be a winning bet.

Disgraceful. Every police officer should not only always wear their badge and name tag while on duty, they should be proud to do so. (And in most cases, that’s true.)

Filed under: Supercars, MISC

If you're looking for racecar performance for the street (or at least for non-competitive track days), it doesn't get much more direct than the Caparo T1. With "only" 575 horsepower on tap, the lightweight F1-car-for-the-road will rocket to 60 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds and grip the tarmac like nothing else on road or track, all for $400k. But even at that price, Caparo has only sold a handful of T1s. The upcoming T1 Evolution, however, will cost more. Much more.

According to Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf's automotive publication Autovisie, the upcoming Caparo T1 Evolution will cost a whopping 1.1 million euros - equivalent to nearly $1.5 million at today's rates. That's almost enough to buy four standard T1s, or even more than the latest hybrid hypercars like the Ferrari LaFerrari, McLaren P1 or Porsche 918 Spyder. (Close to two times the latter, in fact.)

So what do you get for all that scratch? Details are still rather limited, but as we reported a couple of weeks ago, the T1 Evolution is slated to pack 700 horsepower along with new electronics like an on-board telemetry system as well as ABS, traction control and stability management. As a result, you can expect the T1 Evo to be even more extreme in its performance than the vehicle on which it is based, but you'll have to pay dearly for the privilege.

Caparo T1 Evolution to carry $1.5M sticker price originally appeared on Autoblog on Tue, 19 Aug 2014 18:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Over the weekend, we caught wind that Twitter was testing some new ways of showing you tweets in your timeline, specifically from folks that you don't actually follow. It turns out this is official policy. Get ready to see a lot of stuff you didn't ask for.

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Musicians typically don't get paid for playing at the NFL's Super Bowl halftime show. Having 115.3 million people watch your performance is payment enough, really. But this year the NFL is using the big game's unrivaled power of exposure to its advantage — or at least trying to, according to The Wall Street Journal. The league has apparently whittled its list of potential acts down to three: Coldplay, Rihanna, and Katy Perry. (Sorry, Weird Al fans.) But when approaching representatives for each artist with the good news, the NFL reportedly made an unprecedented request. It's asked three of pop music's most popular performers whether they'd "willing to contribute a portion of their post-Super Bowl tour income to the league, or if they...

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Coming to 32nd Street.

Coming very soon to 319 Fifth Avenue is Kang Ho Dong Baekjeon, a chain owned by Korean comedian and former wrestler Kang Ho Dong. Stateside, its Jonathan Gold-approved L.A. location and Flushing outpost are connected to the original but are independently operated, and the 150-seat K-Town location will be Baekjeong's American flagship. As such, the owners have brought on chef Deuki Hong, who cooked at Jean Georges and Momofuku, and who is now wrapping on a cookbook co-written with food writer Matt Rodbard, so expect a lot of finesse with that grilled pork jowl. The restaurant will be open until 6 a.m. on weekends, and will eventually tack on lunch hours as well. [Facebook]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: coming soon, k-town, kang ho dong baekjeong, murray hill

Maersk's Triple-E line of supersized cargo ships are already among the largest sea-faring vessels to ever set sail. Now the Danish shipping group can add another feather to its cap with the successful transport of more than 17,600 TEU containers. No other ship has ever carried that much on a single trip.

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 Google has just launched a new photo application for iOS users called Photo Sphere Camera, which allows you to take 360-degree photos, then publish them to Google Maps or other social networks. The app is an expansion of a feature that was previously available via Google’s Android operating system, and shipped on the Nexus-branded smartphones. Read More

The American Life's Ira Glass talks with Lifehacker about how he works. When asked what his best time-saving shortcut or life hack was, he responded:

I've got nothing. Reading other people's answers to this question on your website today made me realize I live my life like an ape. I eat the same breakfast and lunch everyday, both at my desk. I employ no time-saving tricks at all.

Though come to think of it, I guess my biggest life hack -- and this is the very first time I've attempted to use the phrase "life hack" in a sentence -- is that my wife and I decided to live just a few blocks from where I work. We did this because of our dog. Since I spend at least an hour every night walking the dog, I didn't want to spend another 60 or 90 minutes a day commuting. I don't have the time. Like lots of people, I work long hours.

Tags: Ira Glass   working

Minetta Tavern serves Heinz, but Cherche Midi opts for fancy-ass ketchup.

At Cherche Midi, Keith McNally's latest restaurant, the French fries are truly outstanding. They retain all the best attributes of fast-food fries — uniformly golden, very thin, perfectly crispy — while still managing to feel handmade. They nail the sweet spot on the spectrum between elegant, old-school New York dining, and the generic greasy drive-through that you frequented as a teenager. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said about the ketchup that arrives, in a small, nondescript ceramic cup, with the fries. Is it Heinz? No, it's darker than it should be, and not nearly smooth enough. There's too much spice, not enough sweetness. It is fancy-ass ketchup, and all it does is make you wonder why you can't just have Heinz — like at McNally's other restaurants, Minetta Tavern and Balthazar.

Fortunately, Heinz remains the go-to brand at most restaurants, even in establishments like the NoMad Bar, the Dutch, and, surprisingly, Gramercy Tavern, a place otherwise wholly committed to a fully homemade ethos. Even at Daniel, where the seven-course tasting menu costs $220, Heinz is what arrives if a guest requests ketchup. When I called up Minetta Tavern chef William Brasile, he told me, "When customers have strong connections to a product like that, you have to respect it, no matter what your beliefs are," he says. "I don't like it when Heinz is not offered. And I do prefer the taste."

So why, after 138 years, in an era when practically every food gets an artisanal makeover, has no ketchup competitor even come close to replicating Heinz's success? Why is it that Heinz, and only Heinz, is what we not only love, but what we demand with every French fry we eat?

Because as Malcolm Gladwell once explained, Heinz doesn't just taste good, or even great. It tastes objectively perfect:

When Heinz moved to ripe tomatoes and increased the percentage of tomato solids, he made ketchup, first and foremost, a potent source of umami. Then he dramatically increased the concentration of vinegar, so that his ketchup had twice the acidity of most other ketchups; now ketchup was sour, another of the fundamental tastes. The post-benzoate ketchups also doubled the concentration of sugar — so now ketchup was also sweet — and all along ketchup had been salty and bitter. These are not trivial issues.

[...]

Salt and sugar and umami are primal signals about the food we are eating — about how dense it is in calories, for example, or, in the case of umami, about the presence of proteins and amino acids. What Heinz had done was come up with a condiment that pushed all five of these primal buttons. The taste of Heinz's ketchup began at the tip of the tongue, where our receptors for sweet and salty first appear, moved along the sides, where sour notes seem the strongest, then hit the back of the tongue, for umami and bitter, in one long crescendo.

If anyone has the ability to create a next-level ketchup to knock Heinz off its throne, it's wd~50's Wylie Dufresne. But he won't even try. "I'd like to think, that as a professional, if someone said, 'Make me a ketchup that tastes better than Heinz,' I could do that," he says. "But that doesn't mean it would be commercially successful. You're fighting a goliath. You can't give people homemade ketchup. They don't want it."

What's funny is that the Heinz formula actually predates our cultural awareness and obsession with the very flavor receptors it activates. "We've come to understood those fundamental tastes so much more recently, and the role that they play in how and why we like foods," Dufresne explains. "The conundrum is not that Heinz can't be beaten, but that Heinz landed on this formula by accident. Staying there is calculated, but getting there appears to be a confluence of things. When Heinz landed, nobody was talking about umami. They got very lucky, with this wonderful swirl that happened to hit all the right notes."

In other words, Heinz very well might be actual lightning in a bottle, and perhaps the rare confluence of factors that make it not just unmistakably good, but also culturally dominant, just cannot be replicated. This results in competitors like Sir Kensington's, which falls awkwardly in between two schools of ketchup — Heinz and homemade — and manages to strip away the real benefits of both: It's still a processed, pre-bought product, which isn't really what you want in a restaurant setting (like at Cherche Midi), and it's not nearly as good as Heinz.

Brasile reveals that at Minetta Tavern, McNally actually spends more money to ceremoniously present Heinz in glass bottles. "It costs us more to put that bottle on the table, as opposed to using bulk Heinz," he says. "You may have noticed that the other condiments are served in ceramic cups, but there's a glass bottle of Heinz. I think that it allows people to relax into their meals a bit more." He recalls one memorable customer who really let herself go: "We had a woman who wanted to know if she could have black truffles shaved over her Black Label burger. We did it, and charged her a reasonable amount." And then, he says, "She dumped ketchup all over the thing." Even the most refined foods — the most sought-after delicacies and the funkiest dry-aged beef — are no match for the pull of Heinz.

Read more posts by Sierra Tishgart

Filed Under: summer eating, cherche midi, heinz, keith mcnally, ketchup, minetta tavern, william brasille, wylie dufresne

Earlier this year when the Facebook purchase of Oculus VR went down, there were more than a few detractors but none as prominent as the man behind Minecraft. At the time, Markus "Notch" Persson said that his company Mojang was in talks to bring the...

Students at a Compton school will be facing some changes as the new school year starts next Monday: the campus' police officers will now be allowed to keep semi-automatic AR-15 rifles in the trunks of their patrol cars while they're working. [ more › ]

Rob Griffiths, writing at Macworld:

Thanks to (I’m guessing) some time in the rice and a healthy dose of compressed air, I now have a fully functional iPhone 5, as seen in the image at right. I find this simply amazing, given the amount of time it spent 10 feet deep in a lake. So what did I learn during this incident?

(Via Shawn King.)

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Game on, jamon.

Spanish chain 100 Montaditos specializes in thumb-size sandwiches laden with things like sausages, sliced cheese, jamon, hardboiled eggs, almond cream, and all manner of condiments. Its New York City expansion push continues tomorrow, August 19, with the opening of its second shop at 177 Ludlow Street. Show up between the hours of noon and 3 p.m. and you'll get two montaditos for free. If you miss it, chances are you'll have another opportunity soon in a different neighborhood: Franchisee Mini Hospitality plans to open 26 more 100 Montaditos within the next three years. [Related]

Read more posts by Hugh Merwin

Filed Under: freebies, 100 montaditos, free, openings

 One of the most recent applications from Westfield Labs is Dine On Time, an app that lets busy shoppers skip the line at restaurants in its food court and pay for their meal via mobile app. Since many of the diners in its San Francisco location are actually workers who have offices nearby, time is of the essence, and being able to place an order without having to wait in line is huge. Read More