Russian Sledges

Emoji will become more racially diverse in 2015. On Monday the Unicode Consortium, the nonprofit in charge of setting and developing internet coding languages, released a proposed draft for the forthcoming Unicode 8.0 update, which would allow users to choose between five possible skin tones when selecting one of the 151 humanoid emoji pictograms. Currently, virtually all of these emoji characters have pale skin.

“People all over the world want to have emoji that reflect more human diversity, especially for skin tone,” Google’s Mark Davis and Apple’s Peter Edberg write in their draft. “Five symbol modifier characters that provide for a range of skin tones for human emoji are planned for Unicode Version 8.0 … These characters are based on the six tones of the Fitzpatrick scale, a recognized standard for dermatology.”

The Fitzpatrick scale, developed by Harvard University dermatologist Thomas B. Fitzpatrick in 1975, classifies all human skin colors according to five types, from pale white to dark brown and black. Accordingly, the five proposed emoji modifiers would allow users to give their character pictorials a variety of skin tones.

This isn’t the first time emoji have been modified to make the icons more inclusive. In 2012, same-sex couple emoji were introduced, and earlier this year Oju Africa, a division of the Mauritius-based cell phone manufacturer Mi-Phone, launched an emoticon app of its own featuring characters with darker skin tones. It was pop star Miley Cyrus, of all people, who brought widespread attention to the lack of diversity among emoji in a December 2012 tweet that marked the debut of the “#emojiethnicityupdate” hashtag.

Even with the new skin tone swatches, there’s still room to further diversify the cast of emoji characters. The proposed Unicode 8.0 update will not allow for the depiction of multiracial couples, as the symbol modifiers can only be applied to emojis one at a time.

“Real multi-person groupings include many in which various members have different skin tones,” Davis and Edberg write. “For representing such groupings, users can employ techniques already found in current emoji practice, in which a sequence of emoji is intended to be read together as a unit, with each emoji in the sequence contributing some piece of information about the unit as a whole. Users can simply enter separate emoji characters for each member of the group, each with their own skin tone.”

We predict that the release of the Unicode 8.0 update will also have an immediate and profound impact on the diversity of emoji art history.

h/t Designboom

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The Voynich Manuscript is one of the most obsessed-over historical enigmas. A medieval book dating from the late 15th or 16th century, its strange, flowing script has never been deciphered, its origins never determined. The 113 plant illustrations it contains seem to depict no flora found on Earth, and throughout its vellum pages are visuals of the cosmos, a small army of naked women cavorting through pools of water, and the arcane alphabet that has so frustrated linguists and cryptographers.

As the Yale Daily News reported last week and aficionados discovered online, new high-resolution scans of the manuscript were recently posted at Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library site. Digital versions were previously available to the curious through the Beinecke, but the new scans are even sharper, and in sequential order you can closely examine each page. As the library explained to Hyperallergic, recent conservation work addressed folds and curls that had previously blocked some pages, and new scanning equipment made the color more accurate and didn’t require so much securing with straps on the delicate pages.

In 1912, the manuscript started to make its way into contemporary conscious when it was acquired by antique book dealer Wilfrid M. Voynich, who for the rest of his life tried and failed to derive meaning from the manuscript apparently about the natural world. Believed to have been created in Central Europe, its path over the centuries is unclear — at one point in the 17th century it was reportedly sent to Athanasius Kircher, scholar of the scientific and the strange. It arrived at Yale in 1969 impressively intact, housed now in the Beinecke as the star obscurity among an incredible trove of rare texts. There its curvy writing in brownish-black ink, flowers sometimes sprouting animal parts like something from a deranged herbal, and zodiac charts beckon code breakers.

Some still speculate it is all a hoax, but carbon dating at least confirms its age, and even this year researchers are attempting to puzzle out the meaning from this book no one can be read. A linguist at the University of Bedfordshire in the UK proposed sounds to match the symbols, declaring he had decoded 14 of them. Meanwhile, researchers at Delaware State University argued the manuscript may have its origins in central Mexico after analyzing the nature of the bizarre plant illustrations.

You can find a full description at Yale’s Voynich catalog record, and perhaps form your own theory of how a book that seems so fluidly written, so packed with intended meaning, can become a complete mystery.

h/t Clive Thompson

The complete scans of the Voynich Manuscript are online at Yale University Library. 

drib-drab:

Sir Thomas More, The Book of Fortune, 221

Sorry I murdered everyone at your party, but as an introvert, I prefer one-on-one interactions to group gatherings.

I'm really sorry that everyone is dead. I prefer animals to people.

Sorry I killed everybody! I just really need my alone time.

Read more Sorry I Murdered Everyone, But I’m An Introvert at The Toast.

There’s a particularly disruptive undercurrent of contemporary progressivism, a performative oneupmanship, in which any expression of powerlessness must instantly be counterweighted on the comparative grievance ledger. We saw this in the fallout of the cat-calling video from last week, with each interested demographic segmenting off increasingly smaller portions of the vexation allotment. Intersectionality tells us that the variety of flavors on the oppression menu can’t be broken down into their ingredients any easier than you can separate the contents of a simmering stew, and yet, again and again, we attempt just that.

The result, particularly when it comes to feminism, often has the opposite effect of the overall intent, further pitting women against one another. And yet, despite knowing better, I can’t help but fall for it myself while considering two widely shared stories from prominent women this week, both of whom enacted the most hallowed of performances from the male point of view: taking their tops off.

The first came when actress Keira Knightley posed topless for Interview magazine. The shoot, she explained in an interview with the British Times, was meant as a statement about the way women’s bodies, particularly of the oft-photographed persuasion like her own, are obsessively picked for unappealing, often invented, nits.

“I’ve had my body manipulated so many different times for so many different reasons, whether it’s paparazzi photographers or for film posters,” she said. For the Interview shoot, she stipulated, “OK, I’m fine doing the topless shot so long as you don’t make [my breasts] any bigger or retouch. Because it does feel important to say it really doesn’t matter what shape you are.”

Knightley is no stranger to having her appearance manipulated in promotional images for her films, most notably for the 2004 film King Arthur.

“I think women’s bodies are a battleground and photography is partly to blame,” she went on. “Our society is so photographic now, it becomes more difficult to see all of those different varieties of shape.”

Knightley’s choice was lauded around the internet for her insistence on taking back some control of the way her body is sold. Unsurprisingly, just as many seized upon the occasion to criticize, saying there’s nothing brave about a conventionally gorgeous woman daring to appear in her merely-spectacular form, albeit a degree or two off from typical digitally-manipulated standards of perfection. Earlier this year a similar round of applause and opprobrium followed Zooey Deschanel’s posting of a makeup free selfie, as happened before that with AnnaLynne McCord and many others.

I fell into the latter camp myself on each occasion, jumping at the easy joke. “I can’t believe gnarled garbage gnome Keira Knightley has the courage to reveal her gruesome visage without the aid of filters,” I tweeted. “Hero? Hero.”

A cottage industry of identity-reclaiming has sprung up around photos like these, with #nomakeupselfie in particular standing out as a tag with millions of photos on Instagram. It’s a positive outlet for young women to express their comfort in their own skin and a hugely worthwhile endeavor. But yet one can’t help but appreciate the reactionary side as well, and note that many of the women who avail themselves of the tag are still conventionally beautiful, makeup or no.

It’s an easy trap to fall into, especially as regards the likes of Knightley; the beautiful, young woman is always an easy target for petty sniping. How can someone like her possibly experience her own form of insecurity, when people like me, average slobs, have our own, certainly more authentic ones? We see a famous, rich, talented person telling us explicitly what bothers her, or even a nonfamous, beautiful one, and we say to her: fuck you. My experience tells me it must be otherwise for you.

Later this week came a seemingly ideal counterweight to the Knightley imbroglio, with the news of a performance by standup comedian Tig Notaro (who was hospitalized over the weekend for an undisclosed medial emergency) on Thursday as part of the New York Comedy Festival at Town Hall. Notaro, who came to fame after a universally lauded stand up story about her experience with breast cancer, doffed her shirt in the middle of her set, and performed the rest of the night topless, exposed.

“The patches of the audience that were stunned into silence alternated with the patches that were seized by deep, hoarse laughter, resulting in weird patterns of wave interference,” The New Yorker wrote. “Notaro is thin. She stood with her shoulders slightly hunched, her ribs visible, her lack of breasts visible, her surgery scars visible.”

Here then, at long last, is bravery, you might think. Notaro is 43 years old, a breast cancer survivor, a queer woman, famous for her wit, not her cheekbones. It would be hard to top that in terms of a feminism cause celebre. It’s tempting to consider Notaro literally baring her scars to the audience, and tell Keira Knightley to go shove her somewhat-smaller-than-she-might-like breasts up her perfect, small ass. Certainly from a reactionary social media stand point, and from a hacky joking stance, that’s what I’m inclined to do myself. At the moment, the balance seems to be tipping in just that direction on Twitter. Here’s what real bravery looks like. “Keira Knightley…Meet Tig Notaro. A real woman. A real woman,” read one.

Bravery, however, isn’t a binary, it’s a spectrum. In fact, in remembering the stories I heard in the days after the cat-calling video from every woman I talked to about it, it occurs to me, as an absurdly privileged white, straight man, that even walking out the door into the world every day is itself an act of bravery for any woman, model-thin or larger, “beautiful” or plain, old or young. To be a woman, famous or no, is to be made to constantly enact a sort of comparative attractiveness calculus, both from external institutional systems and individual social interactions, as well as from within ones own psychological reckoning of the two. Men – fine – sometimes experience this as well, but to a far lesser extent. If nothing else a man’s greatest privilege is in our ability to exist outside of the perpetual fuckability machinery. We’re gifted with proud ugliness as a birth right.

What is bravery? It’s something worth thinking about next time an actress, or a conventionally attractive woman talks about her experience of feeling judged. It may not be similar to the experience of the average person, but it’s of a piece of the same whole. On the chopping block, after all, all cuts of meat, no matter how expensively priced, are still subject to the pulverizing, brutal arc of the butcher’s swing.

@lukeoneil47

Inspired by Victorian Mourning jewelry and traditions, Extollo Jewelry fuses the melancholy with the imagination. Named for the Latin “to adorn”, with clever item names (the Bi Molar Bracelet got a chuckle from me), Extollo’s collections are composed of human teeth and coffin nails, just to name a few materials.

Just a weird girl making jewelry for other weirdos and entranced by the idea of what we leave behind in the world that wasn’t there before.

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Many ancient monsters are female because in a sense women are more ferocious. They have a more wicked side. Also women aren’t too worthy of being things of high role. This reveals that women can’t be anything greater than evil, spell casting, killing monsters.

Welcome back to Restaurant Confessionals, where we talk to the unheard voices of the restaurant industry from both the front-of-house (FOH) and back-of-house (BOH) about what really goes on behind the scenes at your favorite establishments. 

It’s pretty amazing how often this will happen, but you know it’s an online date when someone will come in and pull this thing like, “Oh … I’m … waiting for someone.” Usually, if you’re waiting for a friend or someone you know well, you’ll get a drink and relax. But when it’s obvious that you’re “waiting for someone” in that way, you kind of cryptically give me this eye, and I’m thinking, I don’t know or care what the fuck you’re up to, but sure, you can wait for somebody.

And then the dude—or woman—will walk in the door, and they’ll always walk past who they’re supposed to meet. But when they notice the person at the bar first, before the approach, you can often see their face being like, “Oh shit, am I really going to go through with this?”

Or you’ll see a lot of 24-year-olds or younger people who have never learned how to talk to someone except through a cell phone, and they’re struggling. It’s fucking weird, man. You can really tell. I end up overhearing people as they drink, and they’re like, “I just really didn’t like the second season of that!” On first dates, I also see a lot of the cocktail I call “The White Girl,” which is vodka, soda, and a splash of cran.

I actually refer to Tuesdays as “Tinder Tuesdays” now. It’s me standing there behind the bar, with various awkward couples at the bar talking to each other or both staring into their phones, or a loud guy obviously trying really hard to be cool.

Actually, there’s this one guy who literally goes on a date every single night at one of my bars, and I know his drink progression order. They get stronger if the date’s going well, and weaker if it’s not. He starts with a beer, and tells his date, “Oh this place is great!” He has almost the exact same conversation every night. It’s kind of eerie. Then he’ll get a shot and she’ll be like, “Oh my God, doing shots, you’re so crazy!” and he’ll say, “You should do one too!” If she’s into it, then the drinks will get stronger, and he’ll be like, “You should get a crazy cocktail!” But if she doesn’t want a shot, he’ll go back to beer. Then he’ll have a seltzer with lime. Then she leaves, and he’ll take like four shots in a row and just wallow.

I’ll get people who repeatedly bring new dates in. They have this weird unspoken thing with me, this eye contact thing, where obviously I see what they’re doing and they know I was working the night before, but they’ll never verbally admit it to me, which is fine. You’ll see a guy bringing in four different women a week, or a girl bringing in four different guys. I’ll chuckle, I don’t give a shit, but I won’t blow their cover. There’s client confidentiality, for sure, even though I could write a War and Peace-sized novel about the shit I’ve heard.

Recently, these two people were on a date, and from what I’d overheard, they’d maybe hung out before but it didn’t work out, so they were trying to hang out again. And she was sort of like, “Oh hey, it’s good to see you.” That kind of thing.

I try not to listen too much, because then I get really into it and I feel like a creep. I want to know the whole backstory. I’m like, Wait, what’s his mother like? What does he do for a living? So they’re at the corner of the bar, where there’s a little nook with a couch—an area which is wildly unsanitary, but that’s a whole other story. He goes to the bathroom, and I think she may have picked up and looked at his cell phone or something. They were clearly not a couple, mind you. But I saw it and I was thinking, That’s fucking dark, young lady. God, don’t do that. He comes back and she’s losing it, “You messaged her??? You’ve been messaging her?” And he’s saying, “What are you talking about?” And it’s that voice I do when I’m totally fucking caught in a lie. He’s like, “What? Who? Oh, that message? I can’t just message her? It’s nothing!” And I was like, Oh God dude, you’re digging your hole so deep right now.

At this point, I walked over to their side of the bar and pretended to do something because I wanted to keep listening. They’re sort of screaming, and he’s like, “I just wanted to know if she still cared!” Yelling at the bar at the top of his lungs. Meanwhile, my bar serves pizza, so he’s got pizza all over his shirt, he’s almost crying, it’s so fucking dark. It was loud, too. My door dude was like, “I just can’t do this right now. I can’t handle this right now.” He was about to walk out himself. It was pretty fucking awkward.

He went and got another pizza. Like, now you’re stuffing your face on the verge of crying? This is gonna get awesome. So then, she’s like, “Look, we need to talk about this,” and he’s yelling back at her, “GO AWAY! GO AWAY!” like a deranged eight-year-old at a birthday party. I sort of wanted to tell them to shut up, but it was too hilarious. Cringe-worthy. I don’t even really smoke anymore, but I went outside and had a cigarette after that.

The unsanitary couch corner is the nook where two people will go when the guy is like, “Hey, you wanna go sit over there and talk?” I’ve seen some hookups there where I wonder, Are they fucking? Is that fucking, over there? I just turn around and start closing the bar because I don’t want to get involved. I’m better off that way. I’ve had to intervene on almost-blowjobs before. In my head, I’m like, Guys, come on. You can’t go to your place? I’m sitting here thinking about going home and eating a sandwich in bed. This is my life. I’m at work right now.

I see people get drunk and take their friends with them to just “hang out” while they’re on their dates. Then the friend gets wasted.

This one time, this woman obviously brought her friend on a date to make sure everything was cool. Which I totally get because hey, I don’t blame you, guys are animals, we’re disgusting. But her friend was clearly like, This fucking sucks. So she got completely wasted and kept falling asleep on the bar. I would put a water in front of her and she would just swat and spill it, like three times in a row. I’m talking eyes in the back of her head, Ghostbusters, “Are you the Keymaster?” drunk. I didn’t want to kick her out because her friend was on a date, so I was in a dilemma. The date seemed to be going well. The guy was tall and handsome, and even as a straight man, I was like, you look good. So I didn’t know what to do. Eventually I had to go over to this woman and tell her to take her friend home. And from the look on this dude’s face, he wanted to fucking murder me.

I’m not there seven days a week, but I’m sure there’s an awkward date here every night. I can always pinpoint one. I’m there to run a bar—that’s what I do. If a date looks particularly interesting, hell yeah, I’m fucking into it. But, if it’s their last stop of the evening, it’s 3:20 in the morning, and I’m getting ready to go, then I hate it. It all kind of depends on the circumstances. If I can tell it’s going well and the people are at the bar, sometimes I’ll sneak over some shots. I’ve totally wingmanned people just because I feel like it’s a nice thing to do.

Maybe I am a drunk matchmaker. Who knows?

As told to Hilary Pollack

Industrial Arts is where we talk to some of our favorite Boston bartenders, servers, and other hospitality professionals about their creative endeavors outside of the culinary & mixological arts.

We first met Katrina Jazayeri at an Opus Affair TAG dinner, where we chatted her up about the conspicuously handsome aprons that she and chef Josh Lewin were wearing and that—it turned out—she had designed and sewn herself. We’ve since enjoyed visiting her at Belly Wine Bar in Cambridge.

Lewin and Jazayeri’s hospitality group, Bread & Salt, took over the kitchen at the South End’s newest speakeasy, Wink & Nod, in September. Just before the beginning of their tenure there, she got drinks with us at Backbar and let us pick her brain about designing her Post Oak aprons, as well as bartending, public health, and culinary storytelling.

Christine Fernsebner Eslao: How did you end up making aprons?

Katrina Jazayeri: I guess I started by making Josh [Lewin] an apron for butchering. He was doing a series of classes about how to butcher an animal.

I like the idea of making really useful things. I watch the people around our restaurant folding their aprons or tying their aprons in a weird way. I started asking them, “Why are you doing that? Do you not want a pocket? What are you trying to avoid?” I guess the engineering brain was like, “There’s a problem here. People are adjusting their behavior around, it seems, this tool that they use. What’s wrong with their tool?”

I thought it would be really cool to design aprons based on the craft they’d be used in. I started realizing that wasn’t a thing that exists. Aprons come in one shape. They typically are the same fabric and they’re made for one mannequin size. I’m 5”10’. There are people I work with who are 5”2’ and their aprons touch the floor. That’s not comfortable and that’s not useful to doing your job or your craft better.

So it started from making Josh a leather apron that had a holster, essentially, for his mallet and his boning knife. And then it turned into, other people might have jobs-specific requests for what their apron might look like, the durability of it.

So I started making a couple of prototypes, because I love to sew. If I do any one thing for too long I start looking for side jobs or side projects. So I wanted to get back to my sewing roots. I took [the aprons] around to different boutiques. People would see Josh wearing them and ask, “Where’d you get that apron?” The guys over at Bronwyn [in Union Square, Somerville] asked if I would make them some.

It’s been a word of mouth thing that’s gotten a little bit of traction.

CFE: So, Bread & Salt. What can you tell us about your role in that?

KJ: Bread & Salt is Josh [Lewin] and I, and we argue about who’s the bread and who’s the salt of our group.

I can’t actually eat bread. I bake bread and I teach bread-baking classes in college and all this stuff—but I developed a gluten intolerance. So I kind of joke that I have to be salt because I can’t be the bread.

The name comes from [...] an Arabic saying that Josh used quite a lot on his menus that means, “There’s bread and salt between us.” Which means we’ve shared a meal, there’s a bond between us now that politics or conflict can’t take away. You can’t fight with someone you’ve broken bread with, essentially.

My role in Bread & Salt is the front of house, the beverage program, the design of the event. We collaborate over concept.

We both like history and creating a story for people. So we get together on that. We come up with an idea for either a one-time popup or a series of events. Then Josh takes the food and I take the guest experience route.

CFE: So what’s the story that will be told at Wink & Nod?

KJ: A little bit to-be-determined. A lot of it, I think, has come from Josh’s summer of travel. He spent some time in San Francisco and then in DC working at an Indian restaurant. So a fair amount of the opening menu has connection to either an Indian tradition—there’s usually a bit of Persian influence that I sneak in, but—

CFE: Those are sort of contiguous empires, right…

KJ: Yeah. India, geographically, wasn’t part of Persia, but a lot of the people in India were sort of exiles of the Persian empire. Particularly the Zoroastrians were kind of ousted from Persia.

It’s going to be a mixture of things, seasonal and New England ingredients. Definitely a mediterranean, if not middle eastern slant, on things.

Food experiences are a story. And they should be a peptic history, a little bit.

So when we think about the place we’re gonna open, we can’t, we’ve chosen not to say, “We want to open a tapas bar in Brookline.” We would rather say, “Oh, there’s a convenience store for sale in this little corner of J.P.,” or wherever. “Let’s take that over and keep the history, make it accessible to the people who already come there for their bag of potato chips, and maybe we’ll give them potato chips with Persian dried lime on it instead.”

I think it’s not only much more difficult to decide everything and then wait until you find the perfect blank canvas—we would rather walk into a space, see a story, incorporate that into our own, while paying tribute to what came before us, literally and figuratively.

So, yeah, Wink & Nod will be—I imagine it’ll be changing, from our opening menu through our six months’—maybe longer—stay there. But at Wink & Nod we are only the food. [...]

Kate Holowchik is the sous chef over there. I have to make her an apron.

CFE: Where does Kate need her pockets?

KJ: I don’t know. We’ve just met each other. I haven’t quite figured out where she needs her pockets. I will. I’ll get there.

Brayden C. Burroughs: A cake pocket.

CFE: Historically, you have aprons for specific purposes. Is that just not a thing that people  make anymore?

KJ: There definitely were, and I think, still should be, different aprons for different tasks. But because no one’s asking for them, a market doesn’t exist for someone to make them. In some ways, people have taken the best attributes of the blacksmith apron and combined them with the best attributes of the hostessing apron. Then you get this trendy leather, like, ruffle thing. And that’s cool, but it’s not authentic to either of those.

There’s no judgment in that. That’s just an observation. But I like parsing out that—not to harp on history, but, why do train conductors wear overalls? Because they need things close to them and they don’t want to have pockets, because you’re standing next to a coal-burning whatever. Which is not dissimilar to a cook. Do you really want your pockets at…

BCB: At flame level?

KJ: Exactly. That was one of the things that the bakers at Bronwyn said. They were like, “We stand up against the cutting board. We don’t want pockets here. We want pockets on our sides.”

And that’s not attractive, because that’s an unflattering place to put bulk. So Anthropologie isn’t going to make an apron that has pockets on hip level. They’re gonna make them, like, little tiny pockets that accentuate your waist.

[A sewing teacher] told me: “Cut on the bias, always. If it’s going on a human, cut on the bias.” One thing I’ve learned, in practice, is, I might have to test the bias cut for certain uses. Because the same reason it looks nice on a body is also what makes something stick between your legs, like when you’re walking. Because it’s formed to you, it will shift.

The chef at work the other day was wearing the apron I made him and he was like, what’s this about? Why is this happening?

I may have made that [apron] too sexy for you.

CFE: Are there other professions [besides bartending and cooking] that you’ve targeted your aprons toward?

KJ: I don’t want to design something for what I think the needs of another person are. I can design for a baker, because I’ve been a baker. I can design for a seamstress, because I’m a seamstress. I can design for a chef, because I know enough of them.

I have a friend who’s an industrial designer and he’s a woodworker. We’ve been talking about the needs of a woodworker versus another kind of craftsman. It mostly comes down to durability—so, material choice. Things to avoid, like shrapnel kind of shards being blown into a person.

So it’s mostly been designs for what I know or for people I can interview about their needs. The idea is making something custom, sturdy, and useful. So I haven’t really tried to imagine a set of needs for somebody else.

CFE: Are there any stores where you sell your aprons?

KJ: Right now they’re at Boutique Fabulous in Inman Square [in Cambridge]. They’re opening up a new location on Charles Street and I’m designing a specific line for them. It doesn’t have a name yet. The [apron] company is called Post Oak, so everything will be that, until it gets a more specific identity.

CFE: What kinds of design concerns do you have in mind, for those, if it’s not for a specific person or a specific profession?

KJ: The retail component is definitely more of an advertisement, on a level. For retail you kind of have to pick the median design. It can’t be a floor-length apron, it’s can’t be a half-apron. It has to be somewhere in between.

It could be used for someone barbecuing, it could be used for someone painting their furniture.

CFE: This is Somerville. We butcher goats.

KJ: For your home goat butchering. It will be useful. It may not be exactly what you want.

BCB: We have to ask you the cheesy question, which is: which drink best describes your apron design work?

KJ: Sazerac. Yeah.

It’s traditional, classic. From humble beginnings, but with a little flourish. A little something that makes it not an old-fashioned. But it’s pretty much an old-fashioned. Yeah.

CFE: It’s funny that you mentioned frilly home-sewn aprons, because I literally wrote down, “Your aprons are the opposite of colorful, print-heavy, vintage-kitsch aprons that are often made by home-sewing enthusiasts. How would you describe the aesthetic you’re aiming for?”

KJ: My aesthetic has always been a more masculine one. I tried as much as possible to buy men’s clothing for myself because I loved the textures and the fabrics so much more than what made its way into women’s fashion.

Definitely texture-focused and textile-focused more than printed pattern. Industrial. The vintage craftsman. The locomotive engineer, or a carpenter. I love chambray and I love that that’s come into style because I think it’s so rich and I just see the person with their overalls and a little mud rubbed in somewhere. Kind of like an earthen color palette. But also bringing an element of interesting design. I think you should be able to have function and fashion in the same item.

So, yeah, if I guess if I had to pick a person to… personify my aprons, it would be like a vagabond engineer. On a train somewhere.

[laughter]

Like, corduroy and houndstooth and men’s suiting. But worn.

CFE: How did you start sewing?

KJ: In complete honesty, it was because my older sister had a friend who I thought was like the coolest thing ever. She introduced us to the Magnetic Fields. I started listening to Depeche Mode because I heard her talking about them one day.

She made her own sack bag once. I was like, I need to start sewing. I need to learn how to make my own bag like this. I was probably eleven at that point.

Just started there. I didn’t have a sewing machine for three or four years, so I made skirts and bags and stuff by hand. I got a machine in high school and my world changed.

CFE: You’re bartending at Belly now. How did that come about? This is your first bartending job, right?

KJ: Yes. Belly was my first restaurant job. It was my first serving job. It was my first bartending job. And now it’s my first managing job. I’ve been lucky to work my way up around in one place that’s really supportive of that kind of growth.

[Bartending at Belly] came about out of necessity. Ryan [Connelly] was leaving and I was actually at this fork in the road where I was going to work in the kitchen at Belly but the front of the house made a move quicker and offered me the bartending job.

At that point, I was almost a year into working there, so I had the vocabulary and the interest in wine. People come in [to Belly] looking for conversation. They want to know about a producer, they want to know about a process, and they want that interaction. As a front-of-house-interested person, that’s the rewarding part, when you can learn along with your guests.

CFE: What are the things you’ve most enjoyed learning?

KJ: I guess, as a science brain, I really thought it was cool learning just the process of spirit-making. It’s something that surrounds you but—I found myself asking questions like, “So, what is gin?” “What is Pimm’s?” “What is…”

CFE: You also have a sciencey background?

JZ: I do. When I applied to college, I applied to art school and I applied to bioengineering programs, and I ultimately [...] started a pre-med program in Santa Cruz. And then took a Marxism class and got interested in social activism and community policy. And then started picking up a public health degree.

And that was really what brought me to food, in a kind of circuitous way. Because I was working at a nonprofit in New York that is now in probably the height of hipster Bushwick but, in 2009, was definitely a food desert. Bodega cooking for sure. I ran a farmers’ market for them and started these nutrition classes. We did “forty dollars and a bodega, what can we make?”

I started to view food as an instrument of power or an instrument of oppression for communities. So, from there I looked at how a food business can be a source of careers for people, and through a steady income—well, without a steady income, people can’t make informed or healthy decisions. And so, to say my goal was to impact community health through food, you had to back up and say, well, what stops people from being healthy when it comes to food? And how do you effect change at all in that setting?

Part of it’s biology, part of it’s the quality of the raw ingredient, but more than that it’s decision making, and it’s access, and all of that backstory that takes you to that point where you know “this is better for me than this, and I’m going to put my resources towards the healthier choice, as opposed to a convenient choice.”

So, somehow, pre-med and Marxism created my desire to effect social change through a business. I was looked down upon very severely by my socialist comrades.

CFE: Is there anything about designing aprons for your own use that helped you to think more consciously about how you work?

KJ: Definitely. I’m someone who likes to, in my head or on paper, plan out as many eventualities as I can think of. I think that the framework of “plan every motion, don’t make unnecessary movements” is really specifically useful, but it’s also broadly expanded to general…

Have what you need to do what you love. Don’t waste your time thinking about where your scissors are.

CFE: It’s a way of controlling your space.

KJ: You’re making your space part of you, in a way.

If something’s not on your body, it’s your own fault. It’s not that someone took your strainer.

In heaven, all the interesting people are missing.

Update: new development; see end of post. Elections never run flawlessly, and it’s not unusual — and no, not an indication of wholesale fraud — to hear of voting machine glitches and snags. We’re quite willing to accept that there’s nothing nefarious going on when one or two touch screen machines screw up, though that’s also a good argument for good old optical-scan ballots, too. And then there’s more unfortunate applications of Murphy’s Law on Election Day, like how the Georgia secretary of state’s “find your polling place” website crashed this morning. Again, that seems like a glitch, not frauding, although that one looks a lot hinkier in the context of the state maybe losing tens of thousands of new registration applications.

Now we can add to the list of great election planners the city of Hartford, Connecticut, where several polling places were not ready to go when polls were supposed to open at 6 AM They didn’t yet have the official voter registration books. In testimony at a hearing today to determine whether polls should remain open late to make up for the late start, witnesses said that as many as 10 or 11 polling places opened late by anywhere from a few minutes to an hour and a half at the latest. Depending on the sites, some allowed people to enter provisional ballots, with their names and addresses to be matched against the lists later, while at others, some voters just gave up and left:

The moderator who was a voting site observer testified the moderator at the site was trying to determine what to do without having the lists and then determined that voting would not be allowed without the lists.

He said 20-30 people left without voting. The moderator kept lists of the people who were turned away. Some did however come back and vote later.

John Gale testified that he was at the polling place shortly after 6 a.m. and said there were angry voters at the United Methodist Church on Farmington Avenue in Hartford who were not able to vote. He observed voters leaving without having voted.

Gov. Dannell Malloy filed a complaint to extend voting hours so that those who might have missed voting early in the morning could come back later. Normally, polls close at 8 PM; the complaint asks for them to stay open an additional hour. Bill Bloss, attorney for Gov. Malloy, said that over half of the city’s 24 polling places opened late or were not able to start voting at 6 AM; state law requires registrar books to be at polling places by 8 PM the night before the election.

The hearing was still going on as we wrapped up here; process addicts can catch the action online. Again, no allegations of dirty tricks, just a fine example of the many things that can go wrong in trying to get an election to work.

In a radio interview, President Obama urged Hartford residents to make sure to go back and vote, frustrating though the process might be:

Obviously, the man is trying to steal the election! It’s not known whether any New Black Panthers are available to hold doors open for voters in Hartford.

Update: There’s been a decision on Gov. Malloy’s request for extended voting hours, and it seems pretty darn paltry: Two polling places in Hartford will stay open an extra half hour, to 8:30 p.m., and anyone in line by 8:30 at those locations will be able to vote.

Ballots cast after 8 p.m. must be held on the side in accordance with federal law. The judge is also ordering that the Secretary of the State’s Office investigate why such a well-publicized election had the issues to begin with.

Someone please tell us what “held on the side” amounts to, in terms of whether the votes will actually be counted? The judge appears to be excessively concerned that somebody might try to sneak some Black Panther votes in:

The judge said the reason that voting was only extended for 30 minutes was so that those who could not vote this morning would have enough time to return and vote, but not enough time for additional persons who couldn’t vote earlier to go to the polls.

Sharpest legal mind of the 21st Century, we think. Couldn’t he just request post-8 p.m. voters to pinkie swear that they were really there in the morning?

[WFSB-TV / FoxCT]

Please Share/RT: Found on RT 62 in Bedford MA a few years ago, genealogical notebook full of picture and research.

It doesn’t look good for dELiA*s, news that will likely make you feel old, due to you remembering the brand from when you were young, which now you aren’t, due to the passage of time.

 

As Buzzfeed reports

dELiA*s is trading for pennies on the stock market – it closed at 11 cents a share on Friday — and is set to be delisted from the Nasdaq Global Market on or around Monday, Nov. 3, its deadline for meeting compliancestandards. It’s on the hunt for an acquirer after reporting that with the way its business is going, it won’t be able to meet its cash requirements for the next 12 months. Sales for the last four quarters have all been down by at least 20% over the previous year; executives said on an investor call in September that the chain will no longer provide earnings guidance.

Want to feel old? Go out of business and lose your job. I bet that makes someone feel old.

One of the enduring issues in cyberspace is which laws apply to online activities. We see this most clearly today in the reaction to revelations about government surveillance: on one hand, individuals are increasingly seeking assurances that their content is protected from government overreach, while governments want to ensure they have access to information to enforce their laws, even if that content is stored outside their borders. We see this same tension in debates over privacy protection for data placed on line by consumers. This discussion will explore the role of law in protecting our rights in the physical world online, the complementary roles of law and technology in achieving this protection, and the need for governments to come together so that companies (and customers) don’t face conflicting legal obligations.

ravingsbyrae:

spottieottiefroalicious:

thechanelmuse:

Lmaooo this is the greatest! Check out #DudesGreetingDudes and Elon James White’s twitter. There’s a whole lot more. 

😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂

The greatest thing ever.

saucieshares:

Twin Peaks - Study (x)

Fire walk with me (1992)

- Characters - Agent Phillip Jeffries

"It was a dream! We live inside a dream!"

Hi

otterdidact

. I found this gifset for you.

some of my favorite things~

lvndcity:

olya aleksandrova (2012)

Iceland

"After Apple CEO Tim Cook publicly called for sodomy, the monument was taken down to abide to the Russian federal law protecting children from information promoting denial of traditional family values." Promoting "traditional values", President Vladimir Putin last year signed a law prohibiting the spread of "gay propaganda" among minors.

Japanese researchers created an incredibly detailed illustrated cross-section of Hong Kong’s notoriously overcrowded Kowloon Walled City (previously) shortly before the enclave was torn down in 1993. The map can be viewed in full size in the book, Large Illustrated Kowloon City, by Kowloon City Expedition, Kazumi Terasawa, and H. Kani.

images via Daniel Fernández Pascual

via Raul Gutierrez, Spoon and Tamago

(YouTube link)

News from the Supreme Court is extremely important, but since cameras are not allowed during hearings, the audio-only TV coverage is far from interesting. John Oliver has a wonderful idea to get people to watch SC news stories: use footage of dogs! To that end, his production team made an entire reel of “stock footage” which can be used to illustrate any sound bite from Supreme Court hearings. Each individual Justice is included, as well as lawyers and other court employees. 

(YouTube link)

And in case you like that idea, here is the entire reel, which can be excerpted as necessary. There is no soundtrack, but once you start watching, you won’t want to stop. -via Daily Picks and Flicks

For the adventurous who endure the trek to reach the giant Hang En cave, the rewards are otherworldly.

Today's PhD Comics:

Live ants dig tunnels inside clear acrylic enclosures in a series of living sculptures by artist Brad Troemel. The nine sculptures — each filled with a clear gel that doubles as ant food — are part of Troemel’s ongoing exhibition LIVE / WORK at Tomorrow gallery in New York City through November 9th, 2014.

photos via Tomorrow

via The Two Percent, My Modern Metropolis

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Pride and Prejudice is actually about ethics in games journalism.

(Submission via adirred) TY!