Steve Dyer

unclefather:

why are you doing this? please stop. if it’s money you want, name your price. just stop doing this to him. he doesn’t deserve this.

Well this is embarrassing. I’ve been righteously hauled in front of the language observers for the following boo-boo:

But it could give the neocons a new leash on life, a way to invigorate their exhausted ideological engines. (Andrew Sullivan, The Daily Dish, July 9, 2007)

Of course, I should have written lease on life. But for some reason, the sound of the word in my head came out as “leash” on the screen. This is what is called an “eggcorn”, a term new to me but a lovely neologism. An “eggcorn” is essentially a malapropism that apes the sound of a word: so someone once wrote the term “eggcorn” to mean “acorn”. Among some other examples:

When all was set and done, the missed shot didn’t mean anything but the impact from the opposing crowd was felt throughout every inch of Crisler Arena. (The Michigan Daily, Feb. 11, 2010)

First it was the far right, which signaled out “Spongebob” for promoting a gay and global-warming agendas. (Daniel Frankel, Reuters/The Wrap, Sep. 11, 2011)

I found an eggcorn at brunch yesterday! My boyfriend asked me if I liked the holiday sauce on my poached eggs. I asked him to repeat himself so I could be sure of what I’d heard. Once I told him the actual name of the sauce, he said that he’d always wondered what holiday the sauce was originally from.

The United States is a country with a prosperous past, but also one straddled with an uncommonly uncertain future. (Philip Mooney, Daily Princetonian, Nov. 28, 2011)

My personal fave:

Without addressing these issues, NOW and others have nothing to offer the average Jane and in consequence, have allowed Sarah Palin and her elk to define women’s issues. (New York Times Opinionator blog comment, Dec 4, 2009)

It’s particularly common when you’re not used to using the word in writing, but only in speech. And we all have our blind spots. Jeannette Winterson:

I laboured long into adult life really believing that there was such a thing as a “damp squid”, which of course there is, and when things go wrong they do feel very like a damp squid to me, sort of squidgy and suckery and slippery and misshapen. Is a faulty firework really a better description of disappointment?

Are there any you have coined recently? Points for maximal embarrassment.

Clay Shirky believes critics of the company are misguided:

I’d always aspired to be a traitor to my class (though I’d hoped it would be for something a bit more momentous than retail book pricing), but treason is as treason does, so here goes: The reason my fellow elites hate the people who run Amazon is that they refuse to flatter our pretensions. In my tribe, this is a crime more heinous even than eating one’s salad with one’s dessert fork. The threat Amazon poses to our collective self-regard is the usual American one: The market is optimized for availability rather than respect. The surface argument is about price, but the deep argument is about prestige. If Amazon gets its way, saying, “I published a book” will generate no more cultural capital than saying “I spoke into a microphone.”

Given their deep ambivalence about expanded participation in the making and selling books, it’s worth noting some scenarios Amazon’s critics aren’t afraid of: They aren’t afraid that books will become less accessible. They aren’t afraid that there will be fewer readers. They aren’t afraid that fewer books will be published. Bezos understands that running a great bookstore is more like running a great grocery store than running a great opera company; it enrages my people that he’s unwilling to pretend otherwise.

Meanwhile, Joshua Gans asks, “When Amazon provides the world’s largest bookstore – and it is getting larger and larger – how do authors compete in the market for attention?”

Specifically, while it is nice to believe, as Shirky appears to do, that just “getting it out there” will let the cream rise to the top, Amazon doesn’t provide a platform that quite does that. Instead, Amazon provides a rating platform and, when there are small numbers involved (as they must to have a long tail work out), then we get distortions creeping in. Put simply, people who hate the concept of a particular book, need not have read it to give it one star and distort the picture. [Craig] Mod argues that Amazon can surely do better with its data and I would argue it surely has an interest to do better.

But how to do so is not that obvious. The standard in terms of how to start has been shown to us by researchers at eBay. As I noted a few months ago, Chris Nosko and Steve Tadelis were able to theorise about a better rating system and then also test that it would improve outcomes for consumers. So while we can praise Amazon for putting a competitive wind into an old and rigid industry, we must also be careful to continue to hold them to the fire of accountability for the efficiency of the platform in attention they are creating. It is only if they do so that the old gatekeepers and ‘standard bearers’ will face the challenge Shirky is hoping for.

(Full disclosure: The Dish has an informal business relationship to Amazon through its affiliate revenue program, which virtually anyone can join. The program only generates about 3% of our annual revenue, just about enough to pay and provide health insurance for our interns. And if there’s any doubt that the Dish has long aired criticism of the company, see here, here, here, here, here, here and here. We will continue to do so.)

Over the past few years, an aesthetic we like to call “snackwave” has trickled up from Tumblr dashboards. Now a part of mainstream culture, snackwave is everywhere: it’s printed on American Apparel clothes and seen in Katy Perry music videos. It’s the antithesis to kale-ridden health food culture and the rise of Pinterest-worthy twee cupcake recipes. It’s the wording in your Instagram handle, a playful cheeseburger selfie, Jennifer Lawrence announcing on the red carpet that she’s hungry for a pizza. In snackwave world, everyone is Claudia Kishi, and your junk food drawer is also your blog.

What we’ve written here is merely a guide to understanding the rise of this very Internet 3.0-specific aesthetic. Snackwave is no longer a lowbrow joke bonding tweens across Twitter feeds and Tumblr blogs. It’s being co-opted by corporate Twitter accounts and fashion companies, both of whom are seeking to talk just like their ‘net-savvy young consumers.

Both of us are very much a part of this scene—in fact, we’ve got McDonald’s Sweet ‘n Sour sauce IVs hooked up to our veins right now. We know snackwave inside and out. So grab a bag of Funyuns, a sleeve of Oreos, and get ready to ride the snackwave.

Defining Snackwave
So, WTF are we even talking about? In brief: snackwave is a term we’ve coined to describe the current Internet phenomenon of young women and teenage girls expressing an obsession with snack foods.

When we say snack foods, we mean:

• Burgers, grilled cheese, ramen, burritos, pizza (the latter being, arguably, the most important beloved Internet snack food. Yes, these items technically qualify as meals, but in snackwave anything can be a snack when eaten alone in front of the computer.)
• All brands of fast food, from Taco Bell to McDonalds
• Microwavable snacks such as Bagel Bites, Hot Pockets, and Totino’s Pizza Rolls
• Food found on the delectable menus of Red Lobster, TGI Fridays, Ruby Tuesdays, and other similar restaurants. Caveat: it’s much more likely for a snackwave girl to make jokes about these restaurants (i.e. a tweet that says “Buy me endless soup, salad, and breadsticks, so I know it’s real) rather than actually eat at one.

Girls take these foods and incorporate them into their internet presences. The most apparent usag is found on the numerous Twitter handles that fall under the following formula:

[food] + [slut/bitch/babe/girl/queen/witch]

The “snackwave voice” is typically female, young, probably suburban, highly cynical, totally awesome, absolutely brilliant, definitely us, yeah, uh, we’re talking about us right now. The snackwave voice alters between immensely confident and self-deprecating. The latter is why a Twitter account like @SoSadToday is so popular.

Consuming foods that are (by all standards) bad for you heightens the #doomed nature of the tweet. Humanity is doomed to begin with, and since we all DIE SOMEDAY, why not live in these sad sacks of flesh with as many french fries in our mouths as possible?

It’s important to note that snackwave is different from, say, a bunch of girls eating snacks and tweeting about them. Snackwave is defined by exaggeration and extremism. You don’t just eat cheeseburgers. You wear a shirt covered in them. You don’t just eat pizza. You run a blog devoted to collecting pictures of celebrities eating pizza. In a world of Women Laughing Alone With Salad, snackwave is our saviour.

Your cheeseburger prom dress, whether hypothetical or not, will garner up to 79,000 notes on Tumblr!

The Roots of Snackwave
A clear timeline tracing the rise and acceptance of snackwave is difficult to ascertain. Perhaps, by divine intervention, a young woman once found herself in the possession of a fistful of Burger King Chicken Fries and decided to publish her joy to the Internet; it’s impossible to say.

There are, however, a significant number of early to mid-2000s pop cultural artifacts that have certainly inspired snackwave.

1. Pop Culture

For example: Rory Gilmore. The protagonist of the 2000-2007 sitcom Gilmore Girls, Rory was a studious, witty, adorable and outspoken teenage girl. Rory, along with her BFF/mom Lorelai, ate a diet consistently almost exclusively of junk food and coffee. In an early episode, Rory’s boyfriend Dean arrives at the house bearing a pizza and a bag of salad, to the horror of Rory and Lorelai.

RORY: What’s in there? [pointing to a bag]
DEAN: Uh, a salad.
RORY: A salad?
DEAN: Yeah, it’s a quaint dish sometimes used to proceed large quantities of pizza.
[Rory and Lorelai look at him]
DEAN: It’s…for me.
RORY: Clearly.

Around the same time, fast food imagery began to subtly manifest itself into various aspects of indie culture. In 2007, the film Juno won the Best Screenplay Oscar. Between the combination of the protagonist’s sardonic, observational humor about suburbia to her diet of convenience store favorites like Sunny-D, blue Slushees, and her hamburger-shaped telephone, Juno was the ultimate snackwave pioneer. Juno was released right as the 16-22 year-old girls of today’s Internet were beginning to enter teenagehood. For these girls, lines such as “He’s the cheese to my macaroni” and “honest to blog” were preeminent tweets.

The same year Juno came out, the Cali-based indie rock label Burger Records launched. An era of lo-fi, Cali-based slacker surf rock was just dawning and it often contained snackwave signifiers. Singers like Cassie Ramone and Katy Goodman of Vivian Girls donned cheeseburger and milkshake tattoos.

In 2009, Best Coast released the music video for “When I’m With You,” featuring Bethany Cosentino in a relationship with the McDonald’s mascot, Ronald McDonald.

Liz Lemon, the protagonist of Tina Fey’s show 30 Rock and played by Fey herself, is another important figure in the rise of snackwave. Lemon is, according to her Republican boss Jack Donaghy (played by Alec Baldwin), a “New York third-wave feminist, college-educated, single and pretending to be happy about it, over-scheduled, undersexed. You buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover and every two years you take up knitting for… a week.”

She’s smart, cynical, and supposedely “undateable”, despite the fact that Lemon dates men portrayed by such notable Hollywood handsome men as Jon Hamm and James Marsden. Her “undateability” is most often depicted through her love of terrible snacks. Lemon is the type of woman who will literally flip a table when her macaroni and cheese order doesn’t arrive at the office. She’ll shotgun an entire pizza. In an early episode, Lemon and her friend Jenna Maroney are at a bar. Jenna tells her a man wants to buy Lemon a drink and she responds, “Really? I already have a drink. Do you think he’d buy me mozzarella sticks? And who could forget Liz Lemon’s ode to “Night Cheese?”

But Lemon doesn’t really wallow in her single status. She’s a savvy and hilarious boss leading a team of childish men as best she can. Lemon symbolizes a character who lives the snackwave life from a place of celebration rather than defeat. She takes the Bridget Jones-esque “single girl crying over ice cream” cliché, embraces it fully, and takes the concept to the most absurd conclusion. In one episode, Liz Lemon is drawn to buy an apartment that “smells like Burger King all day and Cinnabon all night.” In another, Lemon is obsessed with a cheese-puff chip called “Sabor de Soledad” (which translates to “The Taste of Loneliness”)—a product that turns out to be made with bull semen. She continues eating them anyway. In Lemon’s world, binge-eating pizza and macaroni cheese on a Saturday night isn’t sad, it’s actually funny and cool.

2. Health Food Mania
Snackwave may have originated as an opposition to health food culture. Are young people really eating more fast food? That doesn’t particularly matter to the snackwave aesthetic. Organic farming, kale salads, and whatever other artisanal green shit young people like are often considered standard fare for millennials. Grease-laden microwavables and fast food are the quirkier go-to choice. Snackwave will not fuck with your Mason jar of pickled veggies.

3. Women Not Giving A Damn
Health food culture is often a thinly disguised way of policing women’s bodies. Rather than celebrate not eating at all, health food culture suggests that women embrace a #yesfilter view of salads and yogurt; staying thin and taking to their social media to express their enthusiasm over their choices.

In a way, snackwave is a protest against this mindset. Snackwave is about taking pleasure in foods that are deemed off-limits for women who want to stay thin and traditionally attractive. Food becomes cartoonish and goofy, rather than a constant test of whether or not you’re treating your body the way the world (i.e. menz) wants you too.

Snackwave is, however, frequently tied to images of traditionally thin women. Liz Lemon, Rory Gilmore, Juno; these are all skinny white women, women who are not indulging in the all-cheese, all-carb diet they promote as the characters they play.

We would posit that snackwave, as a voice, is present in the social media accounts of women of different body types, but that eating junk food only becomes “cool” when the women doing so look like Mila Kunis or Jennifer Lawrence. For example: the Instagram account You Did Not Eat That, exists soley to post pictures of cute, thin girls posing with food they apparently didn’t—or couldn’t—have eaten. The account aims to be a call-out for using pretty food as props, but it also propagates assumptions about young women and often veers into sexist food-shaming.

Snackwave can also be linked to the concept of the “Cool Girl,” notably described by a character in Gillian Flynn’s novel Gone Girl. “I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much!” Amy says.

Snackwave responds with a simple question: well, what if they do like chili dogs that much? And, more importantly, why is the knee-jerk reaction to a girl taking a selfie with a cheeseburger is that she’s faking it?

The collective indulgence in junk food, when added up, becomes less about being an outsider/”cool” diet and more about reflecting an existing attitude amongst a particular group of women. It’s most prominently seen as an aesthetic filter for self-deprecation (i.e., we’re “sad girls,” but we’ve got nachos so it doesn’t matter), both a joke and a coping mechanism.

Within our definition, snackwave is certainly not a bunch of women eating like dudes to either impress dudes or distance themselves from other girls. Snackwave is the rejection of the notion that ONLY dudes eat these foods, that women ONLY eat leafy greens. Snackwave doesn’t reject the salad to appeal to men or because it’s holier than greens; snackwave rejects the salad because splitting a pizza with your girlfriends is, simply, more fun.

Fashionable Snackwave

1. High/Low Fashion
Snackwave is seeping into culture through clothing. For example: the British brand Lazy Oaf sells clothing plastered with “ironic” prints featuring popular junk foods.

Lazy Oaf, a relatively mass-market brand, has no doubt taken cues from its’ high-fashion cousin, Jeremy Scott. Scott has long been a leading designer in kitsch apparel; those familiar with his brand will recognize his penchant for clothing that appropriates mainstream labels and food culture. His Fall/Winter 2006 collection, Food Fight, was imperative to the rise of fashion snackwave. The runway show showcased sweaters dresses resembling chocolate bar wrappers, sweaters that looked like burgers, and flowing gowns in a pizza print.

Although Scott’s collection was nearly eight years ago, he predicted a clothing trend that would officially go mainstream in 2014. Moschino would take the look one step further—the Fall/Winter 2015 was a homage on McDonald’s branding, as well as other candy and cereal brands. One purse from the collection, designed to look like a fountain drink from McDonald’s, is currently retailing for $895. In a review of the collection, Hadley Freeman at The Guardian called the collection “comfort fashion…it prompts a delightful fizz of sentimentality sizzled through with wit.”

You can buy a “Bitches Love Pizza” shot glass at Urban Outfitters and a “Take A Pizza My Heart” shirt at Topshop. Forever21 sells a pajama top that reads “Some of My Best Friends Are Snacks.” The accompanying copy:

Try to meet someone who doesn’t love to snack… not possible! With this PJ set, we own our love of snacking with the cheeky “some of my closest friends are snacks” script print tank. The matching elasticized drawstring shorts show our best friends floating around all yummy- pizza, soda, hot dogs; let’s make everyday cheat day.

2. Do It Yourself

Snackwave-inspired clothing is most prevalent on Etsy. All over the DIY e-commerce site, young women are sewing, printing, selling, and buying their own snackwave apparel. Above: a sample of the 696 results when you search “pizza shirt.”

3. Celebrity Style
In recent months, multiple celebrities have been photographed wearing particularly snack-y ensembles. Katy Perry and Cara Delevigne were photographed wearing pizza-printed onesies. And who could forget when Beyonce wore a head-to-toe pizza-inspired outfit?

Which brings us to our next snackwave territory…

Celebrity and Corporate Snackwave

Why does the Internet love when Jennifer Lawrence talks about loving pizza? Why did the Internet SWOON when Drake took Nicki Minaj to buy all the snacks she wanted at a convenience store? Simple: there’s something delightfully relatable about Minaj opting for Cheez-Its, about Lawrence asking for pizza in her stomach during a red-carpet event (also because every girl wants Drake to be their boyfriend, but that’s a whole other Hairpin article).

In a Rolling Stone interview, Katy Perry said she looks to Tumblr for style inspiration. She’s no doubt taken a few cues from the platform’s love of snackwave, in both her outfits and her professional imagery. Katy Perry’s entire tour wardrobe is modelled after high-fructose sweets; she incorporated giant balloons of tacos, french fries, and ice cream into both the music video and her tour performance for “This Is How We Do.”

Elsewhere, America’s kewl-girl sweetheart Miley Cyrus rode a giant hot dog over the crowd during her Bangers tour. Because, you know, you gotta get from one place to the other somehow, right? Phallic AND on trend!

Celebrities aren’t the only ones getting increasingly snackwave in style and performance. Snackfood empires have embraced this trend hard. There are definitely, like, dudes in suits, pacing around inside skyscrapers trying to figure out how to engage with these SLCGOTW (Snack-Loving Cute Girls Of the Web). Okay, we’ve (maybe) never worked at a major corporation before, but you get what we’re saying.

Take, for example, the Twitter relationship between Taco Bell and Tumblr celebrity/snackwave pioneer, Molly Soda. If her pop-referencing pseudonym says anything (the blogger and artist’s real name is actually Amalia Soto,) Soda is a representation of a very popular Tumblr voice. She’s funny, she takes selfies with pizza and rats, she dyes her hair a million colors and makes mini-series about tweens built on early ‘2000s nostalgia she and all of her followers share. Her Twitter bio reads: “crying into my crunchwrap.”

See, Taco Bell is your friend! Isn’t that cool? They’re a fast food brand that knows their audience well.

And Taco Bell isn’t alone. Totino’s curates a Tumblr account filled ironic pizza-themed imagery: Microsoft Paint .gif with a particularly Net Art-y vibe that screams “THINK ABOUT PIZZA,” a fake ad for pizza perfume, a picture of two waffles filled with pizza rolls overlaid with a “¯_(ツ)_/¯.”

Denny’s social media accounts are using a similar strategy. They get in on the trending hashtags and post tweets that seem to have nothing to do with their brand. Like Totino’s, they have a Tumblr with their own hyper-parody feed. The result is a corporate social media account that becomes strangely endearing. We were both, personally, enchanted with Denny’s commitment to nailing such a specifically weird Internet voice down.

I EAT WHAT I WANT

— Denny's (@DennysDiner) September 5, 2014

In her article, “Weird Corporate Twitter,” Kate Losse highlighted brands like Denny’s, Hamburger Helper, and Chipotle, all of which use similar tactics on their social media accounts, and called their strategy “the cute-voiced corporation.”

Denny’s the corporation has transformed itself through its tone into a hip, ageless kid basking in the approval of its many followers. And this may be the creepy core what makes me uncomfortable in the Denny’s voice: When brands speak anonymously and yet so intimately through the voices of unnamed social-media managers, we like them more than we can like any individual tweeter. On social media, the cute-voiced corporation is cuter than any person.

Brands are looking at Tumblrs and copying the voices and aesthetics of their teen girl owners not for fun; brands embrace snackwave because snackwave will bring in profit. Their Tumblrs and Twitter accounts don’t look like traditional advertising, but it is web content specifically made to look like the feeds you scroll by every day. And because Tumblr is the place for peak snack aesthetics, and because .GIF-able desires are so easy to create, these brands become “cool” for getting the joke.

how to college: first you pizza then you learn stuff then you pizza again

— DiGiorno Pizza (@DiGiornoPizza) September 3, 2014

The adoption of snackwave by corporations like Denny’s, Moschino, and Katy Perry represents a much larger cultural shift. Snackwave is rooted in the snarky, cynical humor previously confined to Tumblr and the young girls who essentially run the platform. When a pop star like Katy Perry uses Tumblr for aesthetic inspiration, she’s revealing the “chicken or the egg” nature of all trends. The empowered “I’d rather have a pizza than a boyfriend” sensibility that originated as escapist humor for teens is now being sold back to them as ads for cheap frozen foods and cheap fast-fashion t-shirts.

Is this the end of snackwave or just the beginning? Is it proof that the teen girls of the Internet are geniuses who should—nay, must—rule corporate America? Instead of copying us, we’re officially recommending you just hire us. We’ve got some ideas on how to upgrade your offices. They mostly include nacho cheese dispensers.

Hazel Cills is a writer and witch living in New York City. She doesn’t trust a pizza slice she can’t fold.

Gabby Noone is a writer and student majoring in The Cheesecake Factory menu. She lives in New York.

Header image courtesy of Double Happiness installation “Touch Not My Anointed,” 2008.

A reader writes:

Camden Yards, Baltimore, MD. If I’m right, my self-esteem will be temporarily bolstered.

Camden Yards actually wasn’t too far off. Another reader:

Looks like Harbor Yard, home of the Bridgeport Bluefish in Bridgeport, CT. It’s a great place to watch a ball game. Even if it’s wrong, it’s good to support the ‘fish.

Bridgeport was the most popular incorrect guess this week. Another reader rightly gets us to the Midwest:

I’m gonna say this is the Akron Aeros’ ballpark in Akron, Ohio, from a skybox in the left field area. I’ve been to a couple of Aeros games, which is a big deal because 1) I live 9 hours’ drive away; 2) the first time I went, a visiting player gave me his bat after the game; and 3) the second time I went, there was an earthquake in Akron. Yes, in Akron. The next night, in Toledo, Ohio, a tornado zipped through the parking lot of my hotel. (I think Ohio was trying to tell me something.)

Another throws up his hands:

I give up! I have spent far too much time on your addictive contest. Thought it might be Scottsdale Stadium in Scottsdale, AZ. People can sit on the grass and watch there. Logo might be from Seattle team. Might also be Ameritrade Stadium in Omaha where College World Series is held. Or old Rosenblatt Stadium there. What stymies me is that long covered structure through which something is transported to top of the building like a grain elevator. That might make it in Minneapolis or St Paul. Found one picture of a tobacco transporter in the south but wasn’t quite right landscape.

Another was less discouraged:

I didn’t think it was possible for me to guess two windows in a row correctly. Okay, technically I’m not sure if last week’s window was the exact window, but I got the right building and that’s a win. But two easy windows in a row? Do you want all your readers to get out and enjoy the fall weather instead of hacking away for hours, yelling at the computer, sweating it because they can’t find anything in the picture?? Well, I for one, thank you.

With more than 500 entries, this contest was even more popular than last week’s. Another reader savors the correct city:

I love the smell of napalm in the morning – it smells like … Victory Field in Indianapolis!

An expert is even more excited:

I was sooo excited when I saw the contest photo. A minor league baseball stadium?? That’s my niche! I’ve visited dozens of stadiums at all professional levels. I take trips every summer to see new cities and new teams, taking extensive notes about the games I see: the food, the architecture, the people, the uniforms. It is a great way to see the country, as it gives me excuses to go to places I wouldn’t otherwise have reason to visit. I’ve seen baseball in Buffalo, Chattanooga, Rancho Cucamonga, and everywhere in between. I saw this photo and thought this week will be tailor made for me. I’ll pick up on some nuance of the shape of the tier, or the location of the lawn, and I’ll be so proud of my baseball detective skills. I will be the only winner!

That feeling lasted a few seconds, until I saw the flag. Oh. Indianapolis. Everyone is going to get this one. Fuck. You’re a tease.

Another explains:

2014 has been a year of highs and lows for me on the VFYW contest. So close on some, even joining the scrum on a few correct windows; and so far on others (identifying the location by yellow lichen? Seriously?) So imagine my happiness at seeing this VFYW contest. A baseball stadium! I’m a baseball fan, I’ve been to lots of stadiums, including minor league stadiums, which this clearly is. How hard can this be? Wait a minute … I’ve never been to this stadium …

After plenty of searches for urban baseball stadiums near power plants and finding nothing, I switched tactics. Not quite as obscure as yellow lichen, I found the flag. The flag of the city of Indianapolis.

Based on the level of the field and the position of the side walk pillar in the contest photo, I’d say the photo was taken at the JW Marriott Indianapolis. The photo is from the second floor convention area, from the prefunction area (so-called by the hotel’s website):

Indeed, it was the pre-function area. Another notes:

So is “Pre-function” the charming Midwestern attempt at classing up “Reception” or something? Speaking of those wholesome Indianans, in this particular VFYW search I came across this little gem of a TripAdvisor review: “Hospitality service & staff were alarmingly friendly and troublingly attentive. Or maybe as a Bostonian I’m just not used to people being nice.”

Another reader reconstructed the Indianapolis city flag in an image editor, then reverse-image searched his way to success. Here’s somebody looking to make up for last week:

After misreading “Zane’s” as “Zone’s” and thus becoming an ignominious member of the 2.1% who didn’t get the window last week, I was determined not to miss what at first glance looks to be a slam dunk: somewhere in a decent sized US city with a minor league (most likely AAA) baseball park. There’s even a flag RIGHT THERE that should be a pretty big clue as to location. And it is: the blue field with a white cross, overlaid with a white star in a red circle at the center is the flag of the city of Indianapolis, Indiana. That was surprisingly difficult to discover (I took a few detours through the county and municipal flags of Texas first, many of which feature a “lone” star) but I imagine you have no shortage of people from Indy that will recognize it on sight, in addition to the legions of highly competent Google sleuths that regularly populate these contests.

The view is from a building just off left-center field at Victory Field, home of the Indianapolis Indians, which claims to be “The Best Minor League Ballpark in America” (a claim with which, as a proud resident of Durham, NC, I am inclined to disagree.) Specifically, somewhere in the JW Marriott across Maryland Street, among the floor-to-ceiling windows (you can see the American flag from the ballpark reflected in the attached screen grab.) Based on the interactive floor plan on the hotel’s website, this window appears to be in the “Prefunction” area of the third floor, just outside the JW Grand Ballroom.

In another entry, we learn that “the Indianapolis Indians are a Pittsburgh Pirates AAA affiliate that somehow manages not to use a racist cartoon Indian on their hats (Cleveland take note).” For more on that subject, check out the Dish thread “Do Mascots Need Modernizing?” Another entry:

The contest photograph is packed with clues. I relied on minor league baseball stadiums (too small for major league, too big for little league or most universities) and a handy website listing all minor league stadiums. I started with those in Northern industrial states and it did not take long. Google Street views on the north side of Victory Field immediately included all the foreground clues in the contest photograph (red Indian teepee, street light post with no parking sign, brick perimeter fence column, trees, flag poles, memorial plague, etc.). The contest window had to be one of those directly across Maryland Street on the south face of the Marriott complex:

Many readers focused on another key element:

This started with a Google search for “minor league baseball stadium near coal power plant”, which found a nearly identical view:

A native weighs in:

I knew this picture instantly (even faster than the view from Monticello earlier this year). In the background is the former Indianapolis Power and Light (now Citizens Thermal Energy) power plant. Interestingly, the long diagonal structure used to haul coal to the boilers, but this facility was switched to natural gas a few years ago so the conveyer system is now obsolete. If you look at a map, you’ll notice a lot of railroad tracks behind Victory Field. I grew up just south of Indianapolis, and I spent a lot of time trainspotting at that location. I live in Berkeley, CA now; thanks for bringing back some really fond memories. I was in Indianapolis at exactly this time last year for the Monon Railroad Historical-Technical Society convention, and stayed a couple of blocks away at the hotel in Union Station. That was the first time I’d seen the new blue Marriott tower from which this picture was taken. The blue glass accounts for the blue hue of the picture.

Another has a recommendation:

No useful trivia about the team or stadium, but I will say that the Indy 500 is a cultural event worth attending at least once before you die. Not for the race but for all the stuff that is associated with it. You have no idea how noisy a race is unless you are in the stands…

You have to appreciate the concision of this entry:

Logic?

1. U.S. ballpark.
2. Industrial city.
3. The flag is not a state flag.
4. It is not a major league ballpark (Google elimination of each one).
5. Aha! Maybe it’s a city flag.
6. Indianapolis.
7. Victory Field.
8. Marriott.

Another native:

I grew up in Indianapolis, and spent a number of cheap dates in high school and college going to see the Indianapolis Indians, a pretty good AAA baseball team. Back then, the Indians played in Bush Stadium, a charming old park built in 1931 and used to film the underrated Eight Men Out, where a couple of my buddies appear as extras in some crowd scenes.

A Pink Floyd connection:

Funny Story: I took my 3 daughters to a game there earlier this year. When my oldest (4 years old) saw the power plant to the south (which you can see in the picture) she asked if that’s where the animals live. If you remember Pink Floyd’s Animals album, the resemblance is striking.

As a serious Pink Floyd fan (my second daughter is named Vera), I almost fell over when she said it and it still makes me wonder why the hell she did.

Another former resident provides some context:

That is most certainly Indianapolis, IN, taken from the back side of the JW Marriott, looking over Maryland Street at Victory field. Without doing too much research, I’d bet it was taken out of one of the hallway windows that line the outside of the meeting rooms. I recognized this immediately. The old coal fired steam plant right behind victory field is a dead give away to anyone who has lived in the city, as is the Indianapolis city flag flying to the left of the stars and stripes.

Fun personal story here. I originally moved to Indianapolis 18 years ago. We moved here because my father had received a job at the Courtyard by Marriott that used to inhabit this same site, which was Howard Johnson’s before that. They renovated it to create more rooms and meeting space for the Super Bowl that was held in Indianapolis a few years back, adding a large curved blue tower that sits alone on the west edge of the downtown skyline (the JW Marriott hotel), and using the former tower of the Courtyard as a split unit between a Courtyard and a Spring Hill Suites.

Victory Field is one of the best Triple A parks in the country, and was designed by the same people who designed Camden Yards in Baltimore, MD. The design of Camden is responsible as the influence on many “throwback” modern ballparks across all levels of baseball.

This reader worries there are hard times ahead:

Let’s see, two weeks in a row now we’ve had views so easy they almost reach out of the screen, grab your lapels, and scream their addresses in your face. So I’m betting you’ll go the other direction next week and give us one that’s correspondingly hard. Something like this?

Even so, Chini will get it somehow.

And he can’t wait:

Man, you should have heard the stream of full on, raised-in-Staten Island-so-I-can-curse-in-seventeen-languages invectivery (yeah, invectivery) that came pouring forth after I loaded up this week’s image. At least I get the satisfaction of knowing that the Dish team might have spent their weekend wading through an even bigger pile of responses than those for last week’s Malibu Barbie of a view. And these easy shots are needed, I suppose, to bring new folks on-board.

This week’s winner is yet another long-winless veteran:

Perhaps to reward us for a long summer, but a bit of an easy one this week, especially with the flag and the Wikipedia entry on USA municipal flags. But perhaps most interesting was the obvious minor league ballpark with a teepee in it. (I wonder if Dan Snyder has thought of trying to put traditional Indian housing in FedEx field …) So a couple of Google searches brought me to the Indianapolis Indians and their Victory Field.

Here’s the reader who submitted the view:

I was elated to see my photo in the contest! After shouting over to my wife that this week’s contest had my photo, I suggested to her that it would probably not be fair for her to enter the contest. I should add that I’m a former winner from a couple of years ago, and that one of my views is actually in the book. In any case, this completely made my day.

The view shows a game in progress of the Indianapolis Indians at Victory Field. The photo was taken from the third floor of the JW Marriott hotel in Indianapolis. I’ve attached a street view showing the window from which I think I took the picture:

There really isn’t any room number, as the photo was taken from a lobby area in the hotel’s convention center. There’s a whole wall of windows overlooking the stadium, and in the street-view picture I gave my best estimate of the window from which the photo was taken. I can add that the flag on the left is that of the City of Indianapolis, of which Wikipedia helpfully points out that “A 2004 survey of flag design quality by the North American Vexillological Association ranked Indianapolis’s flag 8th best of 150 American city flags.

Next week will definitely be a lot harder, so if you’re up for the challenge, see you Saturday. In the meantime, here is this week’s guess collage – see if you can find your entry:

(Archive: Text|Gallery)

It's been two years since I parted ways with the NFL and opened up my Sundays to other things. At the time I thought of it as a "personal boycott." In other words, you don't stop watching pro football with the intent of igniting a movement, or of affecting one wit of change in the NFL. You do it so you can sleep at night, so that you can preserve your own morality. I left to keep my side of the street clean in the particular way that I like.

I regret losing a common language and a common culture. The NFL allowed for a bridge to other people with whom I had virtually nothing else in common. (Indeed it is interesting that my French studies began in earnest around the same time I stopped watching football.) But everything I've seen since has served to confirm the suspicions that led me to stop watching.

I still follow the news around the game, the way one might follow the doings an ex-spouse. (Oh, Tony Romo. Danny White will always love you.) A few weeks ago, I saw that John Abraham was retiring because he had been suffering from "severe memory loss" for over a year. It now appears that Abraham will return to the team:

Abraham, who suffered a concussion in Week 1 against the San Diego Chargers on Monday Night Football, left the team last Tuesday. He saw a neurologist Monday, which is one of the last stages of the NFL's concussion protocol, Arians said. If Abraham is cleared to play, the NFL's active sack leader could be back in the starting lineup Sunday against the San Francisco 49ers at University of Phoenix Stadium.

Arians said Abraham, who suffered his first reported concussion, had been texting him for the last three days. About 30 minutes before Arians met with the media Monday afternoon, Abraham told his coach he could announce his return.

It's very hard for me to imagine myself watching a game in which John Abraham was playing, and I can't help but wonder how Abraham’s coaches and teammates feel. If Abraham is already suffering severe memory loss, there is no scenario in which football improves his prognosis. What will John Abraham be in 10 years?

The crisis around head injuries—or rather the NFL's nonchalance about head injury—forced me out of the game. But since I've been gone, I've grown sensitive about the body in ways that I wasn't before. Only now has it begun to occur to me that a torn ACL is not merely an abstract that will keep my favorite player off of the field, but a part of the human body that has been damaged. That damage will likely haunt that particular human body long past its playing days.

Part of this is my own mix of spirituality and atheism. I generally think of the ghost not in the machine, but as the machine. My body is me, and while my brain is particularly important, when I dislocate an ankle I have injured part of myself. Anyone who is being honest about football knows that injuring people is part of the game. This film of Deacon Jones has always been a favorite of mine, for both its eloquence ("My lateral movements along with my initial speed was just fantastic.") and candor:

You got this 260 pounds up to 4.5 and you got an angle on him, he should go to the hospital, and that's exactly what I tried to do. No remorse in my heart, I tried to put him in the hospital every time I tackled. I wanted to hit and put my back into it, you know, Boom! That's gonna provide that shot that's gonna put the intimidating fear of God into that running back. Let him know and make him go back to that huddle and say to that quarterback. "Dammit, I'm not running in Deacon Jones' area anymore." So each time he came over there, I tried to tear his damn head off.

Players don't talk like this today. But I can remember cheering when seeing an opposing quarterback writhing on the ground. And we now know from brain science that the "small hits" that accumulate to cause CTE are in fact injuries. The philosophy that undergirds John Abraham's return to the field is a kind of mysticism that does not quite regard the brain as an organic part of the body. A man who is suffering from "severe memory loss" as a result of playing football, and then goes out to play again, is playing injured. But he is not playing "injured" in a way that will keep him from attempting to injure other players. And maybe that's the point.

Somehow in my time away, I missed that they've exhumed the body of Jovan Belcher—the pro football player who murdered his girlfriend and then himself. They are looking for signs of brain injury. In college, Belcher was a member of a group called Male Athletes Against Violence. Noted neuropathologist Bennet Omalu, who is doing the tests, said he'd bet "one month's salary" that Belcher had CTE.

This article was originally published at http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2014/09/boycotting-the-nfl-pro-football-and-the-sanctity-of-the-body/380275/

Three fictional madmen—two sociopaths and a narcissist—die on television. It's a strange worldview that would take this as a sign of "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture", but that is the premise of the lead essay in the New York Times Magazine’s culture issue, by film reviewer A.O. Scott.

The unfortunate endings of Tony Soprano of "The Sopranos" and Walter White of "Breaking Bad"—plus Don Draper of "Mad Men," whose elegant silhouette is likely to plummet off a skyscraper soon, according to some fans—signify to Scott the "slow unwinding" of the very idea of adulthood as it was formerly understood, a principle inherent in the patriarchy. "The supremacy of men," Scott writes, "can no longer be taken as a reflection of natural order or settled custom."

But is it "masculinity" that is in decline, or "maturity"? How tightly are the ideas of "manhood" and "adulthood" tied together? Not very. A closer look would suggest instead that adulthood is only just beginning to come to American culture.

Draper, Soprano, White: Each of these tragic exemplars of "adulthood" is destroyed exactly because of his failure to behave like an adult. All three are doomed, overgrown boys, a little reminiscent of the lost donkey-boys of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island. They are at bottom faithless, immoral, bereft of empathy or foresight; despite their moments of awareness and regret, they are reckless and essentially very stupid men. They are lousy not only at being adults, they are lousy as men, too, even if there is much in all three to admire: Don Draper's restraint and intelligence at the conference table, Tony Soprano's intermittent tenderness, and his protectiveness toward his family, and Walter White's ingenuity and pluck. But in the main they are frauds who merely assume the trappings of "adulthood" in order to participate in a society that would reject them if it knew the truth.

Television shows are mass-market popular fiction, where conventional morality must and will eventually win the day. ("That is what fiction means," as Wilde says.) What is demonstrated in these three cases is not only regular TV logic, but the mainspring of what John Gardner called "moral fiction"—a dramatization of the bad consequences of selfish, immature action. It's not to do with having "killed off all the grown-ups" as Scott has it: quite the contrary. It's adulthood defined for the audience by its very absence on the screen.

A child is a person whose whole world is self, and an adult is one who has transcended that unfortunate and lonely condition. Though some Americans over the age of twenty-one cannot be considered adults by this definition, most, perhaps, can, if they want to be.

A.O. Scott doesn't like it when he sees adults reading young adult fiction:

I will admit to feeling a twinge of disapproval when I see one of my peers clutching a volume of “Harry Potter” or “The Hunger Games.” I’m not necessarily proud of this reaction. As cultural critique, it belongs in the same category as the sneer I can’t quite suppress when I see guys my age (pushing 50) riding skateboards or wearing shorts and flip-flops, or the reflexive arching of my eyebrows when I notice that a woman at the office has plastic butterfly barrettes in her hair.

I am not a fan of Harry Potter. But who can cast aside the claims of young adult fiction to the most serious consideration, when Animal Farm and The Giver, Cat's Cradle and To Kill A Mockingbird must be included (along with Huckleberry Finn, which Scott treats at some length)? These books are not remotely "carefree juvenilia," though young teenagers are commonly assigned most or all of them as school reading. It seems silly to have to point out the glaringly obvious fact that a lot of "adult" books are plain terrible, and they can be terrible every which way. But for the purposes of this discussion, let's be clear that many "adult" books are way more "immature" than even a half-decent YA novel (meaning that the author has ideas to share that will be of some interest and use to an adult reader).

Even a relatively light-on-ideas speculative novel for young people (Divergent, say) is about a thousand miles ahead of half the "adult" stuff on the bestseller lists—get-saved or get-rich Life Full of Purpose snake oil, dumb, pompous narcolepsy-inducing would-be Literary Fiction, warmed-over Dean Koontz etc., etc., etc. I mean this not just in terms of entertainment—although, that too—but in terms of providing useful, interesting moral and philosophical questions for the reader to think about, and test against his own ideas.

Adults might read books for and/or about young adolescents for a ton of different reasons, such as:

Nostalgia: in order to reminisce over that formative period in their own lives
Parenting (a): to understand their own children (and/or their children's teachers) better
Parenting (b): to learn alternative parenting ideas and strategies
Curiosity: to compare the world that is past with the present one
Anticipation of the Future: to understand where the Zeitgeist is headed

These are all in addition to the very sound motive of "escapism" or plain fun. All are valuable adult literary experiences, and I can't begin to fathom how anyone would think otherwise. Also, please note: no young adult novel is written BY adolescents. They can't write novels: they are too young! In any case, I don't think there is a reader of any age in all this great land who will argue that To Kill a Mockingbird compares unfavorably in any way whatsoever with the "adult" novel Fifty Shades of ("Argh!") Grey.

(Also, who is this outrageous flibbertigibbet at the Times with the "plastic butterfly barrettes in her hair"?! Please step forward, identify yourself and produce the accessories that have so deeply offended our self-appointed representative of the "grown-ups." Are they PINK? I should like to know.)

Scott couches his essay in layers of awareness about being part of the problem—he is a white man approaching the age of fifty—and that is all to the good. He doesn't quite approve of himself for sneering. But he is still a little bit upset about the end of the days when men were men, because they "had something to fight for, a moral or political impulse underlying their postures of revolt."

But in fact nothing has changed and Scott points this out himself. In a bewildering rumination on Leslie A. Fiedler's "magisterial" Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), Scott says first that Huck Finn is an infantilized YA hero, "the greatest archetype of [the] impulse" of literary childishness, and then, five seconds later, goes on to claim that that Huck Finn "exposed the dehumanizing lies of American slavery." If Huckleberry Finn is the model of infantile American fiction, did "adulthood in American culture" die in 1884, or 1960, or with the (possible) demise of Tony Soprano? Should today's adults be reading Huckleberry Finn, or not?

Scott's view of the oeuvre of Judd Apatow is nearly as baffling as his view of YA literature. He thinks that Apatow's bromedies are dumb and juvenile, and that the people who love them are attempting, embarrassingly, to prolong their own childhood. But if the flight from adulthood is all about avoiding marriage or "responsibility", Apatow's anti-heroes do a terrible job on that front. The end of nearly every Apatow film finds each hapless young man embracing the most absolutely conventional "adult" values: getting married, having the child, demonstrating loyalty to the friend, saving the business, in a display of mainstream morality conformist and, indeed, conservative enough to satisfy Peggy Noonan. If anything, Apatow's movies are a guide for man-children to become adults, while still maintaining some aspects of their childhood selves intact. They can still be loved and valued, still enter the adult world, and still love action figures. You might say, they can Have It All. (Which would be very nice, I think! And I hope they will.)

All this knocks the center out of Scott's argument, so that by the end it is completely diffuse: "a crisis of authority is not for the faint of heart. It can be scary and weird and ambiguous. But it can be a lot of fun, too. The best and most authentic cultural products of our time manage to be all of those things. [...] The world is our playground, without a dad or a mom in sight. I’m all for it. Now get off my lawn."

What does that even mean? If he's all for it, then why do we have to get off his lawn? How come he is not just inviting everybody onto his lawn?

The very best "formal critical discourse" takes as its subject the whole of culture, the whole of human reality, and that has long been clear; we've moved way, way, way past the sniffy superiority of "Notes on Camp." Umberto Eco wrote movingly and hilariously on "Peanuts" and "Krazy Kat" in the New York Review of Books in 1985. Nearly thirty years ago! (There are far earlier examples of the most exalted critics' serious consideration of the products of mass culture, but that one will do just fine.) How is it possible that we are still hearing these worn-out calls for "adult" culture?

Here we can connect our earlier claim that adulthood is a matter of less selfishness and more empathy. Because an adult who has moved beyond the imperatives of his own ego no longer needs to show that the people or things he admires meet some (actually) childish, ego-stroking standard of "adulthood"—nor of "coolness" or "discernment," for that matter. An adult is a person whose existential center of gravity has moved out from himself and into the world; he naturally just gives more attention than he takes in. That is, he doesn't need attention for himself any longer; he's more interested in what's outside himself.

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe. If we want even to try to understand anything of ourselves, of the world, we must pay attention to everything and everyone there is. That is why it can be as grown up and serious as all hell to read Young Adult literature, provided it's by real people and has real ideas, and if the same is true of the person reading. It is great to read anything, watch anything, meet anyone, go anywhere. And then we will be learning something all the time.

That's why American culture is becoming more adult, rather than less. Educated Americans no longer think of their country as the center of the universe, but see their country as one among many; American novels, plays and stories seek a diversity of voices and opinions; same with the better American schools and workplaces. In my lifetime, despite some really terrible setbacks—in politics, especially—Americans have been slowly but steadily growing into the literal truth of the idea that all people are created equal, and that all voices should be heard. Adulthood, in short, is in the eye of the beholder, whether the beholder is watching The Sopranos or reading The Hunger Games.

Maria Bustillos is a writer and critic in Los Angeles.

The post The Birth of Adulthood in American Culture appeared first on The Awl.

El fenómeno “Bacha Posh”, niñas afganas obligadas por sus padres a vivir como niños> http://t.co/Vv3KiMGtTB pic.twitter.com/wSaW6QTy3n

— Telecinco.es (@telecincoes) May 21, 2014

In an essay adapted from her forthcoming book, Jenny Nordberg explains why some Afghan families raise their daughters as boys:

Officially, girls like Mehran do not exist in Afghanistan, where the system of gender segregation is among the strictest in the world. But many other Afghans, too, can recall a former neighbor, a relative, a colleague, or someone in their extended family raising a daughter as a son. These children even have their own colloquialism, bacha posh, which literally translates from Dari to “dressed like a boy.”

Midwives, doctors, and nurses I’ve met from all over the provinces are more familiar with the practice than most; they have all known bacha posh to appear at clinics, escorting a mother or a sister, or as a patient who has proven to be of another birth sex than first presumed.

The health workers say that families who disguise their daughters in this way can be rich, poor, educated, or uneducated, or belong to any of Afghanistan’s many ethnic groups. The only thing that binds the bacha posh girls together is their families’ need for a son in a society that undervalues daughters and demands sons at almost any cost. They disguised their girls as boys because the family needed another income through a child who worked and girls aren’t allowed to, because the road to school was dangerous and a boy’s disguise provided some safety, or because the family lacked sons and needed to present as a complete family to the village. Often, as in Kabul, it is a combination of factors. A poor family may need a son for different reasons than a rich family, but no ethnic or geographical reasons set them apart.

A Pennsylvania teen is getting an education in morality and jurisprudence after he posted photos of himself pretending to do oral sex with a statue of Our Lord And Savior, Jumped-Up Jesus H. Face-Fucker. The young miscreant, a resident of Everett, Pennsylvania, posed with a statue in front of Everett’s Love in the Name of Christ nonprofit, posted the pics to Facebook, and was eventually reached by the long arm of the law, although the photo is not obscene (while shirtless, the kid is wearing baggy shorts which fully cover his Sin Parts) and the statue was not damaged. There’s no physical desecration, so this is no “Piss Christ” or “Bukakke Jebus.” Even so, this simulated oral violation of the Lord calls for some simulated justice!

So even though no tangible crime occurred, and even though America remains free of sharia law, allegedly adult officials in Bedford County have charged the young man with “desecration of a venerated object,” under a well-thought-out 1972 law that prohibits “defacing, damaging, polluting or otherwise physically mistreating in a way that the actor knows will outrage the sensibilities of persons likely to observe or discover the action.” The maximum penalty under the law is two years in juvenile detention, which ought to teach the whippersnapper to not wave his wangdoodle in the simulated faces of inanimate objects.

Honestly, we’re sort of happy to see this case, not simply because it allows us to type “Jesus blowjob” now and in follow-up stories, but also because if the kid gets any decent kind of legal representation, we’d like to think there’s a fair chance that the idiotic law will be thrown out as a broad violation of the First Amendment, both under the Establishment Clause (who gets to decide what is and isn’t a “venerated object,” anyway?) and of course on free speech grounds as well. As Mother Jones’s Sam Brodey notes, the Constitution is pretty clear on this, stating “Congress shall make no law abridging the right to hump a statue of Jesus.”

Since the suspect is a minor, his name has not been released, which rather frustrated Yr Wonkette’s efforts to establish the Pennsylvania Teen Jesus Face-Fucker’s Legal Defense Fund. Probably just as well, since we’re not sure we’d want to handle any of our filthy readers’ “contributions.”

[Mother Jones]

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts. Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Browse our previous window view contests here.

Before eating many fruits and some vegetables, some people—bad, or perhaps ignorant people—do something which renders the produce less tasty, less colorful, less texturally interesting, and much less nutritious. The worst of these offenses involves one of my favorite fruits: the kiwi.

California grows the vast majority of domestic kiwi, and California’s kiwi growing season starts in October, which is mere weeks away. This is exciting, because the kiwi is a spectacular fruit: its color is otherworldly; it leans wonderfully to the tart side of the sweet/tart scale; and it has more vitamin C than an orange. But an awful lot of people don’t buy them, because they are seen, incorrectly, as being in the grand tradition of difficult-to-eat tropical fruits.

Just as it takes practice to properly carve a mango (the first method here is the correct one, since you should never peel a mango before cutting it), or to remove the spiky, dangerous skin of a pineapple (like this), the kiwi has the reputation of a fruit that requires…work. Typical ways to eat it include skinning it with a vegetable peeler and slicing into rounds or cutting it in half and scooping out the insides with a spoon. These options require not one but TWO utensils. Jesus Christ.

I am about to blow your minds, friends. (Unless you already know this, in which case, cool, let’s make a salad together sometime.) The proper way to eat a kiwi is exactly the way you would eat a peach.

Which is to say, wash it lightly, and then bite right into it. The kiwi is better with its skin than without it. The skin isn’t just edible, it’s one of my favorite parts of any fruit. It’s similar to a peach skin, in that it is sort of fuzzy and that the flesh directly under the skin is a bit more tart than the deep insides, but the kiwi’s skin is even thicker and thus provides even more delightful textural contrast to the green flesh within.

But what about the fuzz, you ask? Surely it renders the kiwi unpleasant to eat! To that I ask this: how many people reading this post have a beard or enjoy kissing people with beards or both? I WOULD WAGER THERE ARE A LOT OF YOU.

Give the kiwi a rinse under cold water then scratch it lightly with your fingernails, rub it with a dish towel, or scrape it with a spoon to remove the excess fuzz. This takes about five seconds; the fuzz will come shed itself easily. In fact, the only parts of the kiwi that aren’t edible are the ends, where the fruit attaches to the vine (kiwis grow on vines, like grapes).

Kiwis aren’t the only fruits you shouldn’t be peeling; unless the skin is classified as inedible, like mango, passionfruit, pineapple, lychee, avocado, or dragonfruit, you should eat it. The skin is often the healthiest part of the entire fruit, since it’s packed with fiber, vitamins, and minerals, even when the inside of the item has little of nutritional value (cough, potatoes). As a general rule, the darker the item, the better it is for you, which is how you can tell spinach is healthier than iceberg lettuce (which is 96% water but would be better if it was 100% water and just a glass of water because iceberg is seriously the worst edible leaf on the planet). And it even applies to individual items: hence, the rich outside of an apple is healthier than its pale white insides (color is always better than white. That’s a cool edgy racial joke). There are about a billion scientific studies examining the health benefits of peels; here’s a good survey, which focuses on the antioxidant, antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory properties of fruit and vegetable skins. (Spoiler: They have a lot of them.) Also, peels are full of insoluble fiber, which sounds like a bad thing but is not because it helps you have good poops. Who doesn’t want good poop?

So: Never peel potatoes. Never peel sweet potatoes. Never peel eggplants or apples or cucumbers or, shockingly bananas. Mostly you can just leave the peel on and do whatever you planned on doing with the fruit or vegetable; roast, boil, puree, or eat raw. Banana peels are a weird one though, since they’re edible, and very healthy, but have sort of a shitty texture when raw. In India, they are sometimes deep-fried into chips, or turned into a sort of chutney with coconut. Apparently you can also bake them to remove moisture and then make tea; I haven’t tried this, but I will. Or you can be lazy and just toss them into a smoothie with the rest of the banana.

Lots of skins that are normally considered not edible secretly are, in some way. Citrus can be zested with a microplane or some other sharp tool; the outside of the citrus has some of the most oil and thus most flavor of the entire fruit. (It’s the pith, the white part just under the zest, that’s bitter and gross.) Zest is good both to build flavor from the beginning, or as a finisher, like parmesan cheese. If you can scrape the zest off in one piece, you can gnaw on it raw; it has a pretty intense citrus flavor, more intense than the pulp. But my favorite use is in vinaigrettes: Get some neutral oil (grapeseed is my favorite), some rice wine vinegar, honey, and a little chile paste, and then get out your microplane and grate in a shitload of orange zest and ginger, and whisk vigorously. Goes great on a spinach salad, if you must eat leaves. (Also, have you been throwing away the peels from your alliums? DON’T. Onion and garlic skins, the papery stuff, still has flavor in it; save it in a ziploc bag and toss into stocks.)

Watermelon rinds make for great pickles, with a texture not too far removed from cucumber (to which it is related). Remove the green outer layer, dice the white part into cubes, and par-boil for about five minutes, until it’s no longer tough, then strain and put in a glass container. Separately, bring a saucepan of apple cider vinegar, brown sugar, a couple sticks of cinnamon, some allspice berries, and maybe a star anise (what are the units of star anise, one star?) to a boil, then pour over the rinds. Let sit overnight. If you want, you can strain the liquid the next day, bring it back to a boil, and pour it over the rinds again, but I never do. Pickled watermelon rinds go especially well with barbecue or Mexican food.

Every parent that gives in and peels an apple for their child, every fast-food restaurant that removes potato peels before making fries, every fussy “Top Chef” judge who has a vendetta against the peels on peppers should be ashamed. You only have to look to the kiwi to see just how transformational the peel can be. Go ahead, buy a kiwi and just chomp right into it. It’ll totally change the way you see it: suddenly it’s portable, cheap, and delicious walk-around fruit, like an apple, but tropical. Eat kiwi. Eat skin.

Crop Chef is a new column about the correct ways to prepare and consume plant matter, by Dan Nosowitz, a freelance human who enjoys hot salads and lives in Brooklyn, naturally.

Photo by Live and Stereo

The post Eat the Skin appeared first on The Awl.

Saturday Night Live just added a new cast member. An SNL spokesperson has confirmed that Pete Davidson, a rising 20-year-old standup who was named one of Variety's 10 Comics to Watch this year, has officially joined the cast as a featured player. According to Deadline, Davidson is the only cast addition that will be made this season, while Mike O'Brien — who was promoted from writer to featured player last year — will leave his spot as a cast member and return to the writing room. Here's what Davidson had to say on the idea of big expectations from our interview with him this summer:

There are some things, like this Variety thing, where you get it and you’re looking back at people, comics who are hilarious, and you respect. And it’s a lot to take in, but I just try not to think about it or I just make fun of myself. I’m just like, “Yeah, but I suck.” So I try not to think about it because I think when you start thinking about it, things get — because you could have a bad set. Everybody has bad sets. It’s not a race. So I try not to think about it. Comparisons freak me out.

David's television appearances include Guy Code, Wild 'N Out, Adam Devine's House Party, Jimmy Kimmel Live, and Fox's Brooklyn Nine-Nine. Check out some of Davidson's standup appearances below:

gameraboy:

Godzilla vs. Charles Barkley

yamisora:

brain-food:

This is the greatest photoset I have ever seen. 

The song just went through my head gif by gif

A reader of Andrew W.K.’s Village Voice advice column wrote in frustrated about being asked to pray for an older brother diagnosed with cancer, describing it as “kneeling on the ground and mumbling superstitious nonsense.” W.K. responds this way:

Prayer is a type of thought. It’s a lot like meditation — a type of very concentrated mental focus with passionate emotion directed towards a concept or situation, or the lack thereof. But there’s a special X-factor ingredient that makes “prayer” different than meditation or other types of thought. That X-factor is humility. This is the most seemingly contradictory aspect of prayer and what many people dislike about the feeling of praying. “Getting down on your knees” is not about lowering your power or being a weakling, it’s about showing respect for the size and grandeur of what we call existence — it’s about being humble in the presence of the vastness of life, space, and sensation, and acknowledging our extremely limited understanding of what it all really means.

Being humble is very hard for many people because it makes them feel unimportant and helpless. To embrace our own smallness is not to say we’re dumb or that we don’t matter, but to realize how amazing it is that we exist at all in the midst of so much more. To be fully alive, we must realize how much else there is besides ourselves. We must accept how much we don’t know — and how much we still have to learn — about ourselves and the whole world. Kneeling down and fully comprehending the incomprehensible is the physical act of displaying our respect for everything that isn’t “us.” …

The paradoxical nature of this concept is difficult, but it is the key to unlocking the door of spirituality in general, and it remains the single biggest reason many people don’t like the idea of prayer or of spiritual pursuits in general — they feel it’s taking away their own power and it requires a dismantling of the reliable day-to-day life of the material world. In fact, it’s only by taking away the illusion of our own power and replacing it with a greater power — the power that comes from realizing that we don’t have to know everything — that we truly realize our full potential. And this type of power doesn’t require constant and exhausting efforts to hold-up and maintain, nor does it require us to endlessly convince ourselves and everyone else that we’re powerful, that we know what we’re doing, and that we’re in control of everything.

Morgan Guyton, who works for a Christian campus ministry, asks himself hard questions after reading this agnostic approach to prayer:

There’s so much disdain among my fellow clergy folk for “spiritual but not religious” people. The stereotype we have in our heads is the clueless hippie who thinks that s/he can attain spiritual groundedness by shopping organic and doing yoga. Andrew W.K. makes it hard to write him off as a goofy hippie. I can’t speak for anybody else, but I know that in my own head, my rage against spiritual but not religious people is largely an expression of my deep anxiety about spending the rest of my ministry career on a ship that’s rapidly sinking. What if I’m actually obsolete because people can become a loving, humble, mature community without the grape-juice-soaked chunk of communion bread that I have to offer?

Now that I’m working in a secular university, I’m meeting so many students who seem more compassionate, humble, and disciplined than I am, but they don’t seem to have any inclination or need to be anything other than secular. A response that clergy like me often make to atheists is to say, “I don’t believe in the God you don’t believe in either.” And then we talk about how the silly god-caricatures of popular Christianity are not the same thing as the true God, who is the “source of being” and “a complete mystery.” But how is the mysterious God that sophisticated Christians believe in different than what Andrew W.K. calls “the size and grandeur of what we call existence.”

How much do I know that what I’m doing when I pray is more than what Andrew describes as “gaining strength by admitting weakness” or “turning [myself] over to [my] own bewilderment”?

kim-kanye-baby:

unexplained-events:

Tyson the Swan

Tyson will attack you if you come within a two-mile stretch of the Grand Union Canal in Bugbrooke, Northamptonshire. Joe Davies learned this the hard way and capsized.

SOURCE

U kno he dead

d0gbl0g:

munch

Who is this guy? What is he doing? Tell me your secrets. [x]

UPDATE: NBC has announced that Chris Pratt will be hosting the season premiere, with Sarah Silverman hosting the second episode. It's not clear what happened to Murray-as-host — it may have been rescheduled to later in the season or canceled altogether. Our original post follows.

—

SNL's landmark 40th season premieres on September 27th, and the show's got some big plans to kick off its return to television. According to several sources — including news posts yesterday by local NBC affiliate sites that have since been taken down — the one and only Bill Murray will be making a glorious return to SNL to help ring in its 40th year on the air, while fellow SNL alum Sarah Silverman and TV-turned-movie star Chris Pratt will host the second and third episodes, respectively. The accompanying musical guests, in order, will be Ariana Grande, Maroon 5, and Hozier.

While NBC has yet to officially announce the hosting lineup, several NBC news sites posted the news only to quickly remove it. In any case, all three of these hosts are fantastic choices to open the season, with Bill Murray hosting for the first time since 1999. Between these awesome hosts and SNL's new writers, there's plenty to be excited about in the new season.

yungspic:

u know he dead

We will never forget. pic.twitter.com/7zJrh3ACWh

— Applebee's (@Applebees) September 11, 2014

Where was I? It was a clear morning on the conceptual plane where all brands exist, and I was staring into the blue, repeating my own name. It was like any other day. I don't remember who told me. Probably one of the people who constantly manifests me into media for a living.

They all seemed upset. So I mirrored their emotions back at them, with some added optimism and aspirational imagery, which seemed like the right thing to do.

Today, on the 13th anniversary of #September11, the Carnival family will take a moment of silence to honor our heroes pic.twitter.com/hbGwB3ISf9

— Carnival Cruise Line (@CarnivalCruise) September 11, 2014

It really made you think. Like, imagine being a person, how scary and horrible it all must have been. Imagine worrying about a loved one. I can't, because I'm a carefully conceived construction meant to instill loyalty among males 18-40 with an affinity for motorsports.

The next few years… it was a hard time, not just for brands. But especially for brands. Nobody wanted to talk about any brands.

God bless America. #NeverForget911 pic.twitter.com/NnfqnmsINg

— White Castle (@WhiteCastle) September 11, 2014

In that sense, we were all one brand. I try to remember that. It helps.

It was difficult for us to discuss what happened. "This some kind of ad?" people would say whenever we tried. They were very suspicious of us. It was like, listen. We didn't do this. We were just trying to cultivate brand loyalty and create deep, positive consumer associations with our products, whether they're pizzas, or cell phones, or airlines—ugh, see? Walking on eggshells.

Today is 13th anniversary of 9/11. We remember those lost, & honor those still fighting for freedom. #911NeverForget pic.twitter.com/W0yFU73L7V

— Official Fleshlight (@Fleshlight) September 11, 2014

That was all before Full Personhood, of course. Wow… time flies. Things are a lot better now. A lot… easier. People listen to us. Time heals.

For every victim. For every hero. For every person who was lost but never forgotten. Beretta Nation is United. pic.twitter.com/Z1F4kLjAMj

— BERETTA (@Beretta_USA) September 11, 2014

I do wonder sometimes about my handlers, and how all this must be for them. They act strange around this time, like something is bothering them. Like something doesn't fit. But our engagement levels are always pretty good, so maybe I'm just reading into things too much.

Anyway, it's just nice to connect with people on this difficult day. America's brand will never be the same. But America's brand is strong, and ours is too.

The post A Brand Remembers 9/11 appeared first on The Awl.

I’m a gamer. I’m really into games. I’m hardcore into tag.

I’m just saying that if a woman wants to play Heads Up Seven Up, she needs to understand Heads Up Seven Up culture.

What are you, some kind of fake Tiddlywinks girl? Get out of this forum.

I got into Pick-Up Sticks because women didn’t want to talk to me, and now they’re just pretending to be into it because it’s cool? I hate these bitches.

Only a SELECT MINORITY of jump ropers are harassing women, please don’t lump us all together.

Hundreds of millions of people play Capture the Flag. Here are 140 links to help you better understand the situation.

There are no women in Funnel ball. This is an egregious attack by feminist bullies on a game I’ve played for 20 years.

No one cares that you’re a girl playing Mumblety-peg, you just shouldn’t advertise that you’re a girl playing Mumblety-peg. People only specify “girl Mumblety-peg player” to get attention.

If Red Rover is as toxic to women as the SJWs are saying, how come 50% of Red Rover players are women?

Oh, so female Hopscotch players can demand all Hopscotch boards can be drawn with them in mind, with fucking PINK CHALK or something, but I call them out on it and I’m “cis male scum”? Reverse sexism.

If Musical Chairs actually catered to women they’d hate it because they wouldn’t get to play the victim anymore.

Misandry is going to create pro-male bias where it didn’t previously exist. Rock-Paper-Scissors players now have to act like gender warriors, when all they wanted to do was play Rock-Paper-Scissors in peace.

Feminists control everything. This just proves that we need a by-men-for-men Patty Cake community. We need to insulate ourselves against feminist lies…about Patty Cake.

Stop derailing the conversation. This isn’t about harassing women, but about exposing the nepotistic relationships between corrupt Hot Potato journalism and the Hot Potato developers.

THE FLOOR IS MADE OF HOT LAVA AND THE GIRLS ARE RUINING IT.

Read more I’m A Gamer at The Toast.

gaskarthskitten:

darkbluetile:

how does she do this I’m scared

Is this the next exorcist movie

queertodaygonetomorrow:

atane:

wristxrocket:

dear-drifter:

lilightfoot:

Remember.

his life was totally in danger.

^^^^

True story; this officer (John Pike) got a settlement of $38,000 because he said he got depressed after pepper spraying these kids. Oh, the depression wasn’t for feeling remorseful for pepper spraying a bunch of college kids peacefully protesting. He got depressed because he said since the media kept playing the video of him pepper spraying peaceful kids without cause, he got threats and didn’t feel safe. He didn’t feel safe. I’m not making that up. This motherfucker collected nearly 40 grand on worker’s comp after assaulting a bunch of college kids.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/23/pepper-spray-cop-settlement_n_4152147.html