Mike McClenathan

Are you tired of being in the slow lane with your current internet provider? Switch over today and we promise speeds so fast, you will lose your faith in God.

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waiter do you have frog legs.

no Ive always had ketchup legs with poo on them.

heyyyybrother:

exceptdissent:

kipicon:

flannelandsatin:

Dog Receive 210 Bottles for Christmas

I QUIT THIS IS THE BEST VIDEO ON THE INTERNET MACHINE BYE

oh my GODDDDDDDDD.

I will not stop until every single one of my followers has seen this video.

lauraolin:

DOG GOLDBERG MACHINE

[SUSTAINED SCREAM.WAV]

Black Terra, A Long Black Hot Dog Served in Tokyo

their was a red and white ant!
the red ant sucks blood and the white ant sends the girlfriends butt to their boy friends.

wilwheaton:

laughterkey:

talkingbreakfast:

larhunter:

halphillips:

lalondes:

HOMESTAR RUNNER: A BEGINNER’S GUIDE

The year is 2003. It is a kinder time, a simpler time.

Every single one of your classmates knows how to draw Trogdor the Burninator - first, you draw an S, then you draw a more different S.

"Everybody to the Limit" is a staple at middle school dances.

Your best friend’s little brother owns a plush The Cheat, and you can kick it, and it makes noise.

The year is 2003, the golden age of Homestar Runner.

Basically, every online content creator, every webcomic artist, every YouTube entertainer, owes Homestar Runner a shitload.

Once upon a time, Homestar Runner was the definitive Flash site, an online destination for kids and immature grown-ups alike, fielding millions of hits and thousands of e-mails a day.

Homestar Runner, the earnest athlete with a pure heart and a love for mankind, and his arch-nemesis, Strong Bad, a wrestler with a penchant for issuing snarky responses to fanmail, defined a generation through weird, surrealist Flash cartoons tinged with outdated pop cultural references.

Ten years later, there’s a new generation of Internetters who have never experienced the pure, unadulterated joy of H-Star-R, and that breaks my heart. 

So, here, I’ve compiled this beginner’s guide to Homestar Runner. Every cartoon on this list is shorter than five minutes. Get into it. Do yourself a favour.

STEP ONE: STRONG BAD E-MAILS

1. dragon
2. techno
3. comic
4. japanese cartoon
5. caper
6. stunt double
7. kids’ book
8. caffeine
9. army
10. different town
11. crying
12. for kids
13. montage
14. bedtime story
15. hygiene

STEP TWO: TEEN GIRL SQUAD

Episodes #1-15 are available here. Watch them all.

STEP THREE: SHORTS

1. An Important Rap Song
2. Where My Hat Is At?
3. Best Caper Ever
4. Play Date
5. The Homestar Runner Gets Something Stuck In His Craw
6. One Two, One Two
7. Fluffy Puff Commercial

STEP FOUR: TOONS

1. A Jorb Well Done
2. Cool Things
3. Date Nite
4. DNA Evidence
5. A Folky Tale

props

Just the claps.

Good jorb!

Matt Chapman, the brother who did most of the voices, went to FSU. At one point I went over there for a party and met him and got him to record the outgoing message on my voicemail. I felt like a god.

Ima go pour out a 40 of melonade in memory of the H star R.

Yo, fellow old people, let’s do this.

Edit: wait, I just noticed this thing doesn’t have Drive-Thru Whale on it, which is a personal favorite. Carry on.

Harry Potter and the Secret of NIMH

Harry Potter and the Giant Peach

Harry Potter and the Will to Power

Physicist: Reversing time seems to reverse how things work.  Instead of growing, plants shrink.  Instead of going forward, airplanes fly backward.  And, “intuitively”, instead of falling down, things fall up.  If you have a video of someone jumping into water, then they’ll always fall downward if the video is played normally, and they’ll always fly out of the water and upward if you play the video backward.

If you “rewind time” a couple of seconds you’ll find everything as it was a few seconds ago. So the problem here is that several seconds ago you were not falling from the sky.  If you’ve been walking around here on the surface of the Earth recently, then in reverse-time you’ll still be walking around on Earth.  Just backwards.

So, if you reverse time, things will not fall up.

Turns out that, in general, physical laws can’t tell the difference between time running forward or backward.  The one very big exception is entropy.

As long as things aren’t slamming into each other gravity is time-reversal-invariant.

The second (and most awesome) law of thermodynamics says that entropy increases in time (technically, it just doesn’t decrease).  Gravitation is a beautiful example of time-symmetry.  So long as the gravitational interaction doesn’t increase entropy, you’d never be able to tell whether or not time is running forward or backward.  A good way for gravity to increase entropy is to make things hit each other.  In that case you’ve got heat being generated, stuff breaking, things flying around, that sort of thing.

So, orbits (which don’t increase entropy) are the same forwards and backwards, but cannonballing into a pool (which increases entropy a lot) only makes sense forwards.

Reversing time does flip the direction that things are moving, but the universe couldn’t possibly care less about how what direction things are moving (this is a less elegant way of describing relativity).  But weirdly, reversing time does not change the direction of acceleration, which the universe does care about.  So an orbiting planet switches direction, but the force of gravity (the acceleration) still points inward.  Isn’t that cool?

tastefullyoffensive:

Command’r Crunch* [via]

The nature of Rusanov’s work had been for many years, by now almost twenty, that of personnel records administration. It was a job that went by different names in different institutions, but the substance of it was always the same. Only ignoramuses and uninformed outsiders were unaware what subtle, meticulous work it was, what talent it required. It was a form of poetry not yet mastered by the poets themselves. As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions. A man’s answer to one question on one form becomes a little thread, permanently connecting him to the local center of personnel records administration. There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider’s web, and if they materialized as elastic bands, buses, trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence. The point is that a so-called completely clean record was almost unattainable, an ideal, like absolute truth. Something negative or suspicious can always be noted down against any man alive. Everyone is guilty of something or has something to conceal. All one has to do is look hard enough to find out what it is.

Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads, who manage personnel records administration, that most complicated science, and for these people’s authority.

— From Cancer Ward by Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn, published in 1967.

Physicist: This is a difficult question to even ask, because the word “exist” carries with it some “time-based assumptions”.  For example, if you ask “does the Colossus of Rhodes exist?” the correct answer should be “it did, but it doesn’t now.

The problem with the way the word “exists” is used is that it implies “now”.  So, in that sense: no, the past and future don’t exist (by definition).  But big issues start coming into play when you consider that in relativity (which has given us a much more solid and nuanced understanding of time and space) what “now” is depends on how you’re physically moving.  There’s a post here that goes into exactly why.

“Here and now” is the center of this picture.  Everything in the bottom blue triangle is definitely in the past, and everything in the top red triangle is definitely in the future.  But things in the purple triangles can be either in the past or future or present, depending on how fast you’re moving.  The dashed lines are examples of different “nows”.  In this diagram time points up and space points left/right.

Here’s what’s interesting with that: if we can say that the present and all those things that are happening now exist (regardless of who’s “now” we’re using), then we can show that the past and future exist in the exact same sense.

By moving fast, and in different directions, Alice and Bob have different “nows”.  In this diagram Bob’s now includes Alice at some particular moment, but for Alice that moment happens at the same time (same “now”) as a time in Bob’s future.  Like in the last diagram, time is up and space is left/right.

Again, if we define things that are can be found “right now” as existing, and we don’t care whose notion of “right now”we use, then the future and past exist in exactly the same way that the present exists.

It seems as though what’s going on in the present is somehow important and “more real” than what happened in the past.  But consider this; we never interact with other things in the present.  Because no effect can travel faster than light the best we can hope for is to interact with the recent past of other things.  For example, since light travels about 1 foot per nanosecond, the screen you’re seeing now is really the screen as it was a nanosecond or two ago.  Hard to notice.  In relativity everything (all the laws, cause and effect, that sort of thing) is “local”, which means that the only thing that matters to what’s happening here and now is everything in the “past light cone” of here and now.  That’s the blue bottom triangle of the top picture.

What’s happening now in other places is totally disconnected.  For example, Alpha Centauri is about 4 light years away, and while things are certainly happening there “right now”, it won’t matter to us at all for another four years.  Even though those events are happening now, they’re exactly as indeterminate and hard to guess as the things that will happen in the future.  The point is that “now” does extend throughout the universe, but that doesn’t physically mean anything, or have an actual effect on anything.

So if things in the past and future exist in the exact same way that things in the present exist, then doesn’t that mean that they’re fixed?  If my future is the past for someone else who’s around right now (and necessarily moving very fast like in the last diagram), then does that somehow determine the future?  The answer to that question is: it doesn’t matter, but for two interesting reasons.

First, if you consider someone else who’s around “now”, then they’re not in your past light cone and they’re not in your’s (in the top diagram the “nows” are always in the purple regions).  That means that, for example, some of Bob’s future will be in Alice’s past, but neither of them can know what that future holds until they wait a while.  Bob has to wait until he’s “in the future”, and Alice has to wait for the signal delay before she can know anything.  Either way, the events of Bob’s future are unknowable regardless of who (in Bob’s present) is asking.  The future is a lock and the only key is patience.

Answer gravy: The second reason it doesn’t matter if the future exists involves a quick jump into quantum mechanics (and arguably should have involved a jump into a new, separate post).  There could be an issue with the future existing (and thus being predetermined) because that flies in the face of quantum randomness which basically says (and this is glossing over a lot) that the result of an experiment doesn’t exist until after that experiment is done.  This is embodied by Bell’s theorem, which is a little difficult to grasp.  So Schrödinger’s Cat is both alive and dead until its box is opened.  But if, in the future, the box has already been opened and the Cat is found to be alive, then the Cat was always alive.  Things like superposition and all of the usual awesomeness of quantum mechanics go away.

But, before you stress out and start researching to try to really understand the problem in that last paragraph: don’t.  Turns out there isn’t an issue.  Even if the future does exist, it doesn’t mean that events are set in stone in any useful or important way.  In the (poorly named) Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, every thing that can happen does, and those many ways for things to happen are described by a (fantastically complicated) quantum wave function.  That wave function is set in stone by an extant future, but that doesn’t tell you exactly what will happen.  In the case of Schrödinger’s Cat, the Cat is in a super-position of both alive and dead before the box is opened, and afterward it’s still alive and dead but the observer is “caught up” in the super-position.

The super-position of states after the box is opened: Schrödinger sad about his dead cat and Schrödinger happy about his still living cat.

Before the box is opened we can say that, in the future, we will definitely be in a particular super-position of both happy (because of the cute living cat) and horrified (because of the gross dead cat).  However, that doesn’t actually predict which result you’ll experience.  Technically you’ll experience both.

Anyone who likes you so much that they physically choke themselves a little because they literally cannot wait until they see your face again is kind of impossible to hate or even dislike a tiny bit.

(dog 650)

In Geneva today, United Nations special rapporteur Christof Heyns presented his report on lethal autonomous robots, or LARs, to the Human Rights Council. You can download the full report, which is methodical, dispassionate, and chilling, here.

LARs, which Heyns defines as “weapon systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further human intervention,” have not yet been deployed in wars or other conflicts, but the technology to produce them is very much in reach. It’s just a matter of taking the human decision-maker out of the hurly-burly of the immediate “kill loop” and leaving the firing decision to algorithms (ie, abstract protocols scripted by humans in calmer circumstances). Governments with the capability to field such weapons “indicate that their use during armed conflict or elsewhere is not currently envisioned,” but history, as Heyns points out, suggests that such assurances are subject to revision without warning:

It should be recalled that aeroplanes and drones were first used in armed conflict for surveillance purposes only, and offensive use was ruled out because of the anticipated adverse consequences. Subsequent experience shows that when technology that provides a perceived advantage over an adversary is available, initial intentions are often cast aside. Likewise, military technology is easily transferred into the civilian sphere. If the international legal framework has to be reinforced against the pressures of the future, this must be done while it is still possible.

Another complicating factor, and one that makes the issue of LARs even more pressing, is that “the nature of robotic development generally makes it a difficult subject of regulation”:

The UN report makes it clear that there are practical advantages as well as drawbacks to using LARs in place of soldiers and airmen:

Beyond the obvious moral and technical questions, one of the greatest and most insidious risks of autonomous killer robots, Heyns writes, is that they can erode the “built-in constraints that humans have against going to war,” notably “our aversion to getting killed, losing loved ones, or having to kill other people”:

Due to the low or lowered human costs of armed conflict to States with LARs in their arsenals, the national public may over time become increasingly disengaged and leave the decision to use force as a largely financial or diplomatic question for the State, leading to the “normalization” of armed conflict. LARs may thus lower the threshold for States for going to war or otherwise using lethal force, resulting in armed conflict no longer being a measure of last resort.

It seems clear that the time to think about lethal autonomous robots is now. Writes Heyns: “This report is a call for pause, to allow serious and meaningful international engagement with this issue.” Once LARs are deployed, he implies, almost certainly correctly, it will probably be too late to restrict their use. So here we find ourselves in the midst of a case study, with extraordinarily high stakes, about whether or not society is capable of weighing the costs and benefits of a particular technology before it goes into use and of choosing a course rather than having a course imposed on it.

youarelivingalie:

I CANT BREATHE.

THIS IS MY FAVORITE GIF EVER

BECAUSE IT REPRESENTS MY LIFE

birdlord:

good:

How to Dance Properly to Daft Punk’s ‘Get Lucky’

OK who wants to learn all these moves with me before wedding season? (also check out the dude at 0:30, so sinister and then so awesome)

Stop. Hold everything. Hold all the things.

pleatedjeans:

had to do a return today.

what do you call peach that has a line on it?
butt fruit

raycharless:

I AM HUGGING YOU BECAUSE I LOVE YOU

ALSO SOMEONE ATE ONE OF YOUR SHOES BUT THIS IS NOT ABOUT THAT

real tears

4gifs:

Scent of a sharpie marker traps ants by disrupting their pheromone trails [video]

Determined Pit Bull Wearing a Striped Sweater Swings From Tree Branch In an Attempt to Pull It Down

Johnny Marr Sings The Smiths’ “How Soon Is Now?” on Jimmy Fallon

tastefullyoffensive:

Some things never change.

1. On this earth

Last fall, Facebook released its first television advertisement. The ad was titled “The Things That Connect Us.” It was intended, Mark Zuckerberg announced, with characteristic humility, “to express what our place is on this earth.” It opened with a shot of a red chair levitating in a forest. Some music welled up. Then came the voiceover:

Chairs. Chairs are made so that people can sit down and take a break. Anyone can sit on a chair and, if the chair is large enough, they can sit down together.

Doorbells. Airplanes. Bridges. These are things people use to get together, so they can open up and connect about ideas and music and other things that people share.

The Universe. It is vast and dark. And it makes us wonder if we are alone. So maybe the reason we make all of these things is to remind us that we are not.

If Terrence Malick were given a lobotomy, forced to smoke seven joints in rapid succession, and ordered to make the worst TV advertisement the world has ever seen, this is the ad he would have produced. It even ended with a soaring shot of The Tree of Life:

Despite its all-encompassing silliness, the ad was revealing. Its emphasis was entirely on the physical, on the real. Other than a brief image of a couple sharing a set of earbuds, a viewer would hardly have known that we are in a Digital Age. The ad showed people eating and talking and sitting on chairs and walking across bridges and pushing doorbells and sitting on chairs and watching lectures and lying entwined on lawns and waving flags and sitting on chairs and climbing trees and reading paperbacks on porches and having difficult conversations in kitchens and sitting on chairs and dancing and drinking and watching basketball games and climbing trees and gazing at tiny insects drifting through beams of muted sunlight and sitting on chairs, but there was hardly a computer or a smartphone in sight. Everyone was deeply engaged, deeply in the moment. All the objects of the world were luminous. Everything was shining.

In retreating into a gauzy, pre-digital myth of civic and social bliss, “The Things That Connect Us” sought to position Facebook squarely in the mainstream, to portray the social network as a slice of homemade apple pie. Facebook, the ad told us, with considerable defensiveness, wasn’t revolutionary or disruptive or even particularly new. It was just the latest link in a long chain of human-fashioned objects that have allowed us to “open up and connect.” If the point weren’t hammered home hard enough, the ad even included an image of an old dial phone sitting placidly on a desk in the magic hour:

You see: Facebook is just the new Ma Bell. Nestle yourself in her ample lap, rest your weary head on her matronly bosom, and be wrapped in the comforting embrace of friends and family. Have a Coke and a smile.

2. Home invasion

Earlier this month, Facebook unveiled Facebook Home. The announcement came with all the trappings of a Silicon Valley Big Deal: the enigmatic invitation, the fervid PandoInsiderCrunch rumor-mongering, the haltingly portentous Zuckerberg presentation, the synchronized Steven Levy puff piece. But the product itself was a pretty paltry piece of work: essentially, a Facebook-themed Android skin. Big whoop.

Far more interesting than the product was the series of three ads released to promote it, and the most interesting of those ads was the one entitled “Dinner.” “Dinner” is set in an ugly, underlit suburban dining room. An extended family sits around the table, picking at ugly suburban food. The spinster aunt — the one with, you know, the ugly glasses and the ugly ill-fitting sweater and the ugly haircut and the ugly flat voice — launches into an interminable tale about going to a supermarket to buy cat food for her two cats. Everybody starts squirming. The young, attractive woman sitting next to the spinster aunt gives the spinster aunt a quick disgusted look, and then turns her attention to her smartphone and the other, better home that is Facebook Home. She swipes through a series of photos, and the pictures come to life around her: there’s her friend bashing joyfully on a drum kit in an ugly corner of the ugly room; there’s a troupe of ballerinas dancing across the ugly table and the ugly sideboard; there’s a happy snowball fight and a plow that drives by and flings pretty snow onto the ugly family. The attractive young woman smiles and double-taps a Like as the spinster aunt drones on.

“Dinner” has already spawned much commentary. “Ugh,” wrote Robert Hof at Forbes. “Facebook Home makes it a whole lot easier to be rude to your family and in-the-flesh friends, who are often, yeah, so boring to a cool person like you.” Evan Selinger, at Wired, saw a deeper corruption of social ethics being celebrated in the ad’s “propaganda.” “Dinner,” he wrote, tells us “that to be cool, worthy of admiration and emulation, we need to be egocentric. We need to care more about our own happiness than our responsibilities towards others.” He brought in Kant, who challenged us to ask ourselves “what right we have to be self-absorbed while expecting others to rise above indifference.” Whitney Erin Boesel, at Cyborgology, offered a different view. On the one hand, she wrote, the ad combines “the best of Silicon Valley ‘play ethic’ with good old technoutopian neoliberalism: traditional social bonds constrain us, but technology liberates us, makes us more independent and self-sufficient, and enables us to express ourselves more fully and freely.” But, on the other hand, the attractive young woman can also be seen as enacting a rebellion against the “well-recognized social obligations” symbolized by the family gathered around the table: ”It may look like thumbs on a screen, but in truth it’s a middle finger raised straight in the face of power.” I have trouble seeing the ridiculed spinster aunt as a face of power — and the rest of the family members come off as utterly powerless, the underemployed, futureless denizens of the class formerly known as middle  — but Boesel is right to point out that the ad is not just about being a thoughtless creep but is also about escaping from an oppressive situation. “Sometimes rudeness is also resistance.” The asshole is the hero.

What’s really remarkable about “Dinner,” though, is that, in tone and meaning, it’s set in a universe not parallel to that depicted in “The Things That Connect Us” but altogether opposite to it — fiercely opposed to it, in fact. The new ad comes off, disconcertingly, as a sarcastic and dismissive rejoinder to the earlier one: Facebook calling bullshit on itself. “Our place on this earth”? Doorbells? Bridges? What a load of crap! The earth sucks! Things are boring! People are ugly! Go online and stay online! Chairs, mawkishly celebrated in “The Things That Connect Us” as bulwarks against the meaninglessness of the universe, as concrete means of connection and hence liberation, become in “Dinner” instruments of torture. They trap us in the distasteful world of the flesh, the hell of other people.

Has another company ever come out with a high-concept, big-production “brand ad” and then, just a few months later, turned around and utterly trashed it? I don’t think so. What we learn from this is not just that Zuckerberg is a bullshit artist who’s most insincere when he’s sounding most sincere — we already knew that — but that for Zuckerberg, and for Facebook, “sincere” and “insincere” are equally meaningless terms. Everything is bullshit. A chair levitating in a forest and a ballerina dancing on a dinner table are equally fake. They’re fabrications, as are the emotions that they conjure up in us. It’s all advertising. Despite their glaring differences, “The Things That Connect Us” and “Dinner” actually draw from the same source: the well of nihilism. I’m sure Zuckerberg never gave a thought to the fact that the two ads are contradictory. He knew it was all bullshit, and he knew everyone else knew it was all bullshit.

“Have it your way,” wrote Wallace Stevens:

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

One wants to see the levitating red chair as a Stevensesque symbol of the redemptive imagination. But it’s not. It’s the same chair that the ugly spinster aunt is sitting on. It’s the same chair that the attractive young woman with the smartphone is sitting on. Facebook gives us image without imagination. Everything is beyond redemption, which is what makes everything so cool. Have it your way.

3. Two poles

“Home is so sad,” wrote Philip Larkin:

Look at the pictures and the cutlery.
The music in the piano stool. That vase.

Every object, at least in our perception of it, carries its antithesis. Behind the plenitude symbolized by the vase we sense an emptiness: the wilted bouquet rotting in a landfill. And so it is with the tools of communication. When we look at them we sense not only the possibility of connection but also, as a shadow, the inevitability of loneliness. An empty mailbox. A sheet of postage stamps. A telephone in its cradle. The dial of a radio. The dark screen of a television in the corner of a room. A cell phone plugged into an outlet and recharging, like a patient in a hospital receiving a transfusion. The melancholy of communication devices is rarely mentioned, but it has always haunted our homes.

Home and Away are the poles of our being, each exerting a magnetic pull on the psyche. We vibrate between them. Home is comforting but constraining. Away is liberating but lonely. When we’re Home, we dream of Away, and when we’re Away, we dream of Home. Communication tools have always entailed a blurring of Home and Away. Newspaper, phonograph, radio, and TV pulled a little of Away into Home, while the telephone, and before it the mail, granted us a little Home when we were Away. Some blurring is fine, but we don’t want too much of it. We don’t want the two poles to become one pole, the magnetic forces to cancel each other out. The vibration is what matters, what gives beauty to both Home and Away. Facebook Home, in pretending to give us connection without the shadow of loneliness, gives us nothing. It’s Nowheresville.

Welcome to the Feedbag, where all the dumb questions about food, drink, cooking, eating, and accidental finger removal you've been embarrassed to ask can finally receive the berating they goddamn deserve. Also: answers. Send all your even-vaguely-food-related questions to albertburneko@gmail.com. All of them.

Christopher:

I'm trying to improve my cooking - basically just get a recipe from somewhere and give it a go.

What I don't know how to figure out is when I think to myself "This needs something" - how do I learn to figure out what that something is?

I realize people train for years cooking and building a refined palate and all that crap.

Or they watch the Cooking Channel for three hours and decide to become internet food columnists!

I'm sorry. You were saying?

But where does a novice begin other than just throwing spices into whatever is being cooked?

For example, I made the foodspin chili a few weeks ago. It was tasty, but I felt like it needed something - that might have just been salt, but I don't want to just throw salt at everything all the time.

Basically is there a method, thought process to determine - this needs acid, or salt, or fat etc?

I don't think there's any foolproof method for this. That is to say, nothing is going to magically perfect your ability to add exactly the right touch to each dish, short of years and years and years of cooking many different dishes using a wide assortment of ingredients and techniques. If you watch Chopped a couple of times like I did that one night when I received literally all the cooking training I will ever have, you'll know that even experienced, professional, highly accomplished chefs still get hit, from time to time, with the dread criticism that their dish lacks flavor. And then Scott Conant is all I hate red onions! and then he jumps in a Ferrari with Tubbs and they screech off to arrest some drug lords or whatever.

And, really, that's what you're saying when you say that a dish "needs something," isn't it? It's that you've trimmed and chopped and seasoned and cooked and combined all this different good-tasting shit, and then you taste the combination of all this different good-tasting shit, and somehow it doesn't taste like anything, even though all its constituent parts taste like things, which doesn't make any sense and is kind of infuriating.

There are a couple of things you can do to help yourself. The first, ridiculous as it may seem, is to taste your food and, as you're gnashing it between your jagged snaggleteeth, go through a mental checklist of all the different taste qualities you're detecting. So, like, take a spoonful of the chili, put it in your mouth, and as you're chewing it and tasting it, literally scream out loud, at the top of your lungs and to the tune of "Ride Like the Wind" by Christopher Cross, "Hmm, OK, so it's salty, it's hot, it's fatty, it's meaty, it's burning the roof of my mouth, oh God that hurts..." and so on. If you're thinking in terms of the basic adjectives you'd use to describe food—salty, tart, bitter, sweet, and so on—you might occasionally find that the process of elimination helps you hit on what your dish is lacking. Which will almost always be acid.

Which brings us to the second thing you can do to help yourself figure out what your dish needs, which is just to add some acid to it, because that is what it needs, unless it is a beaker of sulfuric acid, in which case it probably needs some salt. Home cooks tend to go light on acid, and you're likely no exception. Yeah, sure, there are probably recipes where the missing something is salt, or heat, or some fatty richness, or some bitterness or crunch or some sliced hot dogs or whatever, but the likeliest thing your food is lacking if, when you taste it, it just isn't exciting your palate, is acid. You can get this from tomatoes, citrus fruits, or even a splash or two of vinegar. Play around with it. I bet I'm right.

Alex:

I’m currently living in a condo building with a small-ish patio on the 32nd floor in Chicago. Looking for the best grill I can safely use in this situation. Can’t use charcoal for sure nor can we use propane (I think), are there any outdoor electric grills out there that standout from the rest?

Thanks!

The 32nd floor? Christ, Alex, you don't need a grill, you need a goddamn spacesuit. Put a plate on the sidewalk out front, drop a steak from your patio, and it'll cook as it re-enters the atmosphere. Or, if that sounds like too much work, just stand on your patio, hold your meat up above your head, and sear it against the surface of the Sun.

But seriously (use the Sun). The merits of grilling are:

• 1) That grilling enables you to cook things at temperatures which would tend to produce too much smoke indoors;
• 2) That, if you are grilling over charcoal or wood fire, these will impart a pleasant taste to the food cooked above them; and
• 3) That cooking outdoors is a fun thing to do.

That last one doesn't apply to you, since going out on your patio puts you at risk for fatal hypoxia, cerebral and pulmonary edema, and just kind of floating off into outer space. And, the middle one doesn't apply either, since you're disallowed from using charcoal or wood fire (presumably because the smoke could damage passing telecommunications satellites). So, really, you're thinking you need a grill so that you can put sexy grill-lines on your food and make it all caramelized on the outside without smoking up and possibly igniting the artificial pure-oxygen environment inside your Space Station.

That's a fair concern, but I think my recommendation here is that, rather than looking for an electric grill which, even in the best-case scenario, will still not replicate the flavor benefits of cooking over charcoal, you invest in a sturdy cast iron skillet (and/or a stovetop griddle) and some high-smoke-point fat (canola oil, for example, or ghee), turn on your ventilation fan, open a couple of windows, and get comfortable sear-roasting (and just regular old roasting) things in your kitchen instead.

Your stovetop can produce high enough temperatures to pretty well nuke damn near anything you're likely to cook on it, and a cast iron skillet can handle that heat without turning anything cooked on it into a giant ball of cancer, as nonstick pans do. Likewise, at its highest settings your oven can put a serious hurting on, for example, bell peppers, which you might typically slap on a hot grill to burn their skins off. Yeah, this might occasionally entail some (lots of) (all of the) smoke, but not as often as you might expect, if you get the ventilation fan started beforehand and make generous use of that sturdy fat.

Or, hell, if you absolutely must purchase a grill, I've read and been told that infrared electric grills get hot enough to sear beef, which is really as hot as you'd ever need them to be. Thankfully (or, well, it sucks for you, I guess) I've never had to use one, but I figure even in the worst-case scenario, an infrared electric grill is a better outdoor cooking option than, say, rubbing your chicken breasts along the patio floor to heat them with friction. Give it a shot.

Shit, man, this hasn't been helpful at all. The important thing is, I got to make fun of your home.

Blue Raja:

I do the majority of the cooking for my girlfriend and me, and find myself cooking for larger groups of people fairly often as well. I also love meat because, you know, meat. So I am constantly paranoid about bacteria and disease and killing my friends. I have a fairly decent grasp of cooking times and temp so no issue there, but I always end up washing everything constantly and going through a million utensils every time I make a meal. Any quick food handling advice as far as various proteins are concerned? Any suggestions for places to find that kind information? Thanks for the help.

Raja, I sympathize. I also handle a lot of raw meat in my kitchen, and the cleanup afterward can be a big pain in the ass. The best food-handling advice I can give you is to think of the absolute best meal you ever ate in a restaurant in your life, and then wrack your brain to see if you can remember whether that meal caused you to die of dysentery. Probably not, right? OK. Now consider that that restaurant's kitchen was considerably filthier than your average hospital cleanroom. You're worrying too much.

Wash your hands whenever you're going to transition from handling raw meat to handling anything else; be smart about organizing your tasks so that you do as much of your raw-meat-handling as possible in one go; if you're doing any butchering or carving, do it on a dedicated cutting board, and sock that fucker in the dishwasher as soon as you're done using it. Buy a spray bottle of a kitchen cleaner with bleach in it and spritz the countertop after you've finished working with the raw stuff. And, above all else, try to relax a little bit. You're not going to kill your friends and family just because you don't have an autoclave in your kitchen. No, you're going to kill them for entirely different, as-yet-unrevealed reasons.

Ned:

What are your tips for eating well in a college setting? I love Ramen noodles as much as the next guy butttttt I'd like to see if there's anyway for me to step my college food game up.

Ned, I'm never going to have anything better to say about this than Tom Ley's guide to enjoyable ramen, not only because it's ingenious, but because I don't know anything at all about eating well in a college setting. There's, like, a cafeteria or some shit, right? And, like, do you eat Funyuns with your binge drinking or something? In my imagination, the diet of a collegian consists entirely of Funyuns, ramen, Pop-Tarts, and, like, beer mixed with vodka mixed with melted popsicles. Which, I dunno, does that really need to be improved upon? Buy a bottle of sriracha, and see what kind of trouble you can get into with it. It goes great* in melted popsicle juice.

*Probably.

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Subtly Animated GIFs of London Street Scenes Focus on One Person

Jon: WELCOME BACK TO GRUDEN TALK, THE TALK SHOW WHERE WE DISCUSS THE MOST IMPORTANT ISSUES OF THE DAY.  BANDLEADER HERM EDWARDS, DID YOU WATCH THE IRON LADY?

Herm: I EAT LOTS OF RED MEAT SO I DON’T NEED IRON.

Jon: WELL LEMME TELL YA, THAT MERYL STREEP IS A TRUE CHAMPION.  HER LEADERSHIP SKILLS DRAGGED A SUBPAR SCRIPT OVER THE TOP.  AND IT WAS ABOUT MARGARET THATCHER, WHO DIED YESTERDAY.  HERE TO TALK ABOUT HER LEGACY IS LORD FREDERICK PONSONBY, BARON OF SHULBREDE AND MEMBER OF THE HOUSE OF LORDS.

Frederick: Pleasure to be here, Jon.

Jon: THAT’S ONE HELL OF A HANDLE YOU GOT THERE LORD PONSONBY, IN AMERICA WE HAVE NAMES LIKE BOOGER MCFARLAND.

Frederick: You can call me Frederick if you prefer.

Jon: SO FREDERICK, YOU GOT A LOT OF DIFFERENT REACTIONS TO MARGARET THATCHER DYING.  SHE SEEMS TO BE A DIVISIVE FIGURE LIKE RICHARD NIXON OR BUDDY RYAN.

Frederick: Well, you have to understand that Britain was a mess when she took over.  Someone had to remake society, but she did it at great cost to the poorest Britons.

Jon: WELL YOU GOTTA MAKE SOME ROSTER CUTS IF YOU WANT TO WIN THE SUPER BOWL.  DID SHE CONSIDER SIGNING THEM TO THE PRACTICE SQUAD?

Frederick: In the United Kingdom there was a post-war consensus that was forged in our shared fight against the Jerries.  When Thatcher took over that consensus had degraded but her reforms did a lot to destroy it.

Jon: I DON’T NEED TO REMIND YOU THAT THOSE JERRIES WOULD’VE TURNED YOU INTO A SUBURB OF BERLIN IF IT WEREN’T FOR THE AMERICANS.

Herm: I WENT TO A FOOTBALL GAME IN LONDON AND HAD NO IDEA WHAT WAS GOING ON.

Jon: SO WHAT WAS SO BAD ABOUT THIS POSTWAR CONSENSUS?

Frederick: Well trade unions held a disproportionate amount of power; the country was inert and devoid of innovation.

Jon: THAT’S WHAT MAKES AMERICA SO GREAT, THE NFLPA NEVER COMPLAINED ABOUT THE WEST COAST OFFENSE.  HERE WE UNDERSTAND THAT YOU NEED TO INNOVATE IF YOU WANT TO DOMINATE ON THE FIELD.

Frederick: Yes, and in the United Kingdom we needed a disruptive force to teach us that.  The dynamic British society that you see today is a reflection of that.  But the social inequality that resulted could have been mitigated by a kinder leader.

Jon: THAT’S WHY YOU NEED REVENUE SHARING.  EVEN THE BILLS HAVE A CHANCE THANKS TO THAT AND THEY PLAY IN A DECAYING WASTELAND TOO.  THIS UPSTATE NEW YORK, I CALL IT 1970s ENGLAND BECAUSE IT AIN’T WORTH LIVING THERE.

Herm: YOU COULDN’T CATCH ME DEAD IN UTICA.

Frederick: Economically stagnant areas do have a lot to learn from Ms. Thatcher, yes.

Jon: THIS MARGARET, I CALL HER BILL PARCELLS BECAUSE NOBODY LIKES HER BUT SHE WAS ABLE TO REVOLUTIONIZE THE WAY WE LOOK AT THINGS.  WHETHER IT’S THE BRITISH ECONOMY OR THE 4-3 DEFENSE SOMETIMES YOU GOTTA ROLL THE DICE TO SHAKE THINGS UP.

Herm: MARGARET THATCHER IS A BETTER DEFENSIVE COORDINATOR THAN GUNTHER CUNNINGHAM.

Frederick: I’m afraid that I don’t follow.

Jon: THAT’S OK BECAUSE WE’RE OUT OF TIME ON GRUDEN TALK.  PLAY US OFF, HERM EDWARDS 7.

Herm: TRAMP THE DIRT DOWN ON 3, FELLAS, LET’S SHOW MAGGIE THATCHER WHAT WE THINK.

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