While news spread through the rest of the country that the Civil War was over, Confederates in Texas fought on for another six weeks until June 19, 1865, when General Gordon Granger announced in Galveston that slaves were now free. That date has been commemorated in Texas and elsewhere ever since as Juneteenth. But it didn't mean that the enslaved people of Texas were actually free from that day.
5. NOT ALL SLAVES WERE FREED INSTANTLY.
Texas is a large state, and General Granger's order (and troops to enforce it) were slow to spread. According to historian James Smallwood, many enslavers deliberately suppressed the information until after the harvest, and some beyond that. In July 1867 there were two separate reports of slaves being freed, and one report of a Texas horse thief named Alex Simpson whose slaves were only freed after his hanging in 1868.
6. FREEDOM CREATED OTHER PROBLEMS.
Despite the announcement, Texas slave owners weren't too eager to part with what they felt was their property. When legally freed slaves tried to leave, many of them were beaten, lynched, or murdered. "They would catch [freed slaves] swimming across [the] Sabine River and shoot them," a former slave named Susan Merritt recalled.
A new survey reveals that millennials are skimping when tipping in restaurants, and men, Southerners and Westerners tip less, too. Guess how many leave nothing?
The IRS works with private companies to provide free software tax services. But only a tiny percentage of tens of millions of people who could use them do because of confusing offerings and a lack of advertising budget.
If you own an iPhone, in all likelihood you will drop it in water at some point in your life. The bath, toilet, kitchen sink, and more are all death traps for that expensive device in your hand.
But before you toss your wet phone in the trash and head to the nearest store, stop and read this first. We might be able to help you bring your cherished device back to life.
Let’s start with a quick list of what you should and should not do. Hopefully, these bullet points will get you on the right track in those precious first few moments. Here’s how to fix a water-damaged iPhone.
What to Do If You Drop Your iPhone in Water
Turn it off immediately.
Remove the case to allow air to circulate.
Remove any accessories (headphones, card readers, etc.).
Blot away as much excess water as possible using paper towels.
Put it in a warm, dry, non-humid place.
Wait at least 48 hours before trying to turn it on again.
Lastly, if you dropped your phone into the ocean or any liquid with particles (such as soup or a dirty puddle), wash it thoroughly under the tap for several minutes. It might sound counter-intuitive, but salt will corrode the electrics, and errant particles can short the circuitry.
What NOT to Do If You Drop Your iPhone in Water
Plug it into a wall socket or your computer.
Put it in the oven.
Blow a hair dryer on it.
Place it on top of a radiator.
Use rice. Rice is not a drying agent. It might even make the situation worse; the fine powder can get inside your phone and turn the water into goop.
Shake it or rotate it. If your phone only took a brief bath, you don’t want water to get into parts that are still dry.
Press the Home button.
Any of these steps could cause further damage to your wet iPhone.
How to Get Water Out of Your iPhone
This is the million-dollar question, isn’t it? How are you supposed to get the wetness out of your phone if you dropped it in water?
Again, it might be counter-intuitive, but it’s vital not to try and dry your phone too quickly. Rapid heating will cause the water to evaporate inside the phone. As soon as you remove it from the heat source, the water will condense and recollect inside your gadget. As any tortoise will tell you, slow and steady wins the race.
You need to find a warm and dry place that’s not humid. If you have a dedicated boiler room in your house, that’s a good place to start. If it’s a warm day, you can also leave it outside (though not in direct sunlight). Leaving your phone under a desk lamp is also a good choice.
In a dream world, you’d have some synthetic desiccants on hand. The most common example of a desiccant is the little packet of silica gel beads that you find in new electronics, as well as some food and medications.
If you’re clumsy and have a history of wet phones, it might be worth buying a desiccant that’s specially made for electronics to keep around your house. The most well-known brand in the sector is the Bheestie Bag. Just pop your phone inside the bag and leave it for 24 hours.
Even if you’re lucky enough to get your phone working again, you might still have an issue: water in the speakers.
An iPhone with muffled speakers isn’t of much use. You won’t be able to listen to music, play a podcast, or most importantly, hear what the person on the other end of the line is saying.
So how do you fix it? You could try using a can of compressed air, but you need to be careful. If you hold the nozzle too close the speaker, you might irreparably damage it.
You could also try using an app called Sonic, which probably has you wondering how an app can possibly get water out of iPhone speakers.
Well, to understand how it works, let’s look to the Apple Watch. In case you’re not aware, the Apple Watch has a native feature which uses vibrations at differing frequencies to dislodge liquid from the speaker. iPhones have no such feature.
Sonic replicates the Apple Watch functionality. It generates a sine wave tone and allows you to set the frequency to anything between 0Hz and 25KHz.
Best of all, it really does work. It boasts almost exclusively four and five-star ratings on the App Store, all from people who dunked their phone in water.
Note that if the speakers aren’t working at all, your iPhone could be stuck in headphone mode. Try restarting your phone, inserting a different pair of headphones, and checking for debris in the jack if this happens.
How to Fix a Water-Damaged iPhone Screen
If you’ve followed this guide precisely (and you’ve benefited from a dollop of good fortune), you might be able to get your phone up and running again.
But what should you do if you have a water-damaged screen?
Sadly, there’s no easy fix. You can have a stab at fixing it yourself, but you’ll have to disassemble your phone to pieces. And on iPhones, that’s no easy task. Still, if you’re confident in your technical capabilities, you can try.
Any water in the screen is almost certainly stuck between the backlight and the LCD. Backlights are cheap and easy to desolder and resolder. Peel the old one off, resolder the new one, and then stick it to the LCD.
The backlight must be perfectly clean before attaching it. Even the slightest mark will be visible when the phone’s screen is on.
Find iPhone Repair Shops Near You
If the soldering sounds a bit complicated, or if you’ve not managed to get your phone working again, it’s probably time to head to a repair shop.
You can find the nearest places to your home on Apple’s website. Google can also help you find third-party repair shops, but they won’t provide official Apple care.
For Next Time: Get a Water-Resistant iPhone Case
Lastly, it might be worth buying a water-resistant case to stop this from happening in the future.
Depending on your model of iPhone, you should be able to pick one up for cheap on Amazon. Try the below model from Vapesoon if you have an iPhone 7 Plus or 8 Plus.
As reported in The New York Times (Wirecutter’s parent company), the CDC recently announced that insect-borne illnesses have more than tripled in the US in the past 14 years. Those numbers are for mosquitos, fleas, and ticks combined, but if you’re going to get an insect-borne illness in this country, you’re statistically most likely to get Lyme disease, carried by black-legged ticks, aka deer ticks, and most prevalent on the East Coast and in the Midwest. As we say in our bug repellent guide, a 25 percent picaridin repellent works pretty well—against mosquitos. It’s not as effective against ticks. Plus, ticks that simply walk to a part of your body without bug spray can avoid DEET-treated areas, according to the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station (PDF).
The best thing to keep ticks from biting you is permethrin. As an insecticide, permethrin will actually kill ticks, not just keep them away, and it’s different from DEET in that you put it on your clothes rather than spraying it on your skin. If you need to get serious about tick protection this summer, we’ve done the research on where to find permethrin, how to use it, and what safety concerns may arise.
What you can do now
You have a few ways to use permethrin. You can buy a spray and treat clothes you already own, buy already treated clothes, or send your clothes to a service for treatment.
If you go into tick-infested areas only occasionally, we think buying a permethrin spray is the easiest way to quickly take action. The Sawyer brand has worked well for me. It has a concentration of about 0.5 percent permethrin, plus inactive ingredients to help bind it to fabric. Although we haven’t put Sawyer’s spray through the usual Wirecutter testing wringer, it’s what the TickEncounter Resource Center suggests too, and Amazon customers seem to dig it, with 4.5 stars out of five across 3,471 reviews at this writing.
Other permethrin sprays intended for personal use should be equally effective, but don’t get sprays made for a yard or for agricultural use. Since those formulas are meant to be sprayed on plants, they won’t stick to your clothes as well, according to Thomas Mather, aka The Tick Guy, director of the University of Rhode Island’s Center for Vector-Borne Disease and the TickEncounter Resource Center. Depending on what brand you end up with, treating clothes yourself means that the permethrin will last anywhere from four to six washings. Even if you don’t wash your treated shoes, Mather recommends re-treating them about once a month.
Pull Quote
Buying a permethrin spray is the easiest way to quickly take action against ticks.
Sprays are a great everyday fix, but if you’re a dedicated outdoorsperson, looking into pretreated clothes might be worth your time (and remember, they also keep mosquitoes from biting you). If you want to buy pretreated garments, you have a ton of options: Amazon, BugBeWear, Insect Shield, L.L.Bean, and REI all sell permethrin-treated clothes; Insect Shield also sells clothes just for kids (and a few things for dogs). These treatments last for about 70 washes.
Insect Shield can also treat clothes you already own. This is the same treatment the company applies to clothes it sells, both under its own brand and others (such as ExOfficio). Insect Shield charges per item of clothing but offers bulk discounts. Getting your treated clothes back takes about two weeks.
Pretreated is the way to go from a cost effectiveness standpoint, Mather told us. “Seventy washes probably gets closer to the life of the clothing for the most part. Four or five doesn’t.” And it can be hard to remember to treat clothing yourself every month, he added. Buying it pretreated solves the upkeep problem.
Where to spray it and when
Ticks are less likely to bite if you’re wearing permethrin-treated clothes, and by far the most important thing to treat is what you’re wearing on your feet. Although studies have found that wearing a treated shirt or shorts makes ticks about two to four times less likely to bite, if you treat just your shoes and socks, you’re about 74 times less likely to be bitten by a tick than if you’re wearing untreated footwear, which is a pretty big deal.
“We’ve done tests with clothing, and we can watch the ticks fall off and die. So there is good scientific evidence that this works and it actually works pretty well,” said Mather. However, you have to be strategic about what treated clothes you wear and when.
Pull Quote
In the spring and summer, it’s best to treat your socks and shoes. That could make you about 74 times less likely to be bitten by a tick, according to one study.
For the spring and summer, it’s best to treat your socks and shoes, Mather said. The immature, or nymph-stage, ticks are in the leaf litter at that time of year, and they’re most likely to get on your shoes and crawl up. They’re also so small that they can actually crawl through the weave of your socks, Mather said. “So spray your shoes the first of May, the first of June, first of July, first of August, and that will help you against the ticks that you can’t see.”
In the fall, the adult-stage black-legged ticks come out. They tend to crawl up on plants and get on your body higher up, usually around your shins or knees, Mather said. “Then you would like to have treated pants, and you’d like to tuck your shirt tail in so that the ticks stay on the outside of your clothing longer.” If you’re still wearing shorts at that time, make sure to spray them both inside and out if they’re not pretreated.
In the winter, black-legged ticks can still be active as long as they’re not frozen on the ground, Mather told us. “These are the first to emerge in the very early spring, followed fairly quickly by the American dog tick adults and the Lone Star tick, both nymph and adults.” So put those permethrin-treated pants back on when the snow melts.
Safety concerns
Some people worry that since permethrin is an insecticide, it will harm them. This is pretty unlikely. It kills ticks by interfering with how neurons fire in bugs’ little brains, causing them to spasm and die. But how our neurons fire is slightly different, plus we’re much larger and can metabolize permethrin before it can get to our nervous system (permethrin is over 2,250 times more toxic to ticks than to humans). Obviously, you shouldn’t eat it, but even if you’re exposed to a lot of permethrin, it’s unlikely to hurt you. According to the TickEncounter Resource Center permethrin fact sheet, a 140-pound person would have no adverse health effects even if exposed to 32 grams of permethrin in a day, and a bottle of clothing treatment has less than 1 gram of permethrin. (If you’re pregnant, know that animal studies have found no evidence that permethrin is harmful. The government gives it a Category B rating since there haven’t been meaningful permethrin studies with pregnant women.)
Permethrin can potentially harm bees, fish, and aquatic invertebrates. And oddly, cats—but only when it’s wet. When the permethrin spray dries, it’s okay for your cat to be around. This goes for fish too—if you step in a stream wearing permethrin-treated shoes, it won’t wash off and hurt the fish, Mather said. “Once it’s dried onto the fiber, it doesn’t come off very well. That’s why it can go through the wash five or 70 times, depending on the mode of application, because it’s stuck.”
But will it come off in the laundry and pollute the environment? That’s a much bigger question. Permethrin is a type of molecule known as a pyrethroid. These substances are pretty widely used: They’re in more than 3,500 registered products, including those used on pets and in treated clothing, in mosquito control, and in agriculture, according to the EPA. It’s also the main ingredient in some over-the-counter lice treatments. Permethrin spray for clothing is designed to stick to fiber and comes off only minimally in the wash. Still, research into pyrethroid pollution is ongoing.
Our favorite tick-check method
If you do get a tick, it’s important to remove the insect relatively quickly. Once one crawls onto your body, it can be hours until the tick attaches its horrible sawlike mouth onto you, and then another 12 hours until it starts transmitting disease—except for deer tick disease, which took only 15 minutes in a study on mice (yikes). Remember, black-legged ticks are tiny when they’re nymphs, about the size of a poppy seed (thank you for ruining all poppy seed things forever, CDC), so they can be hard to see.
Because ticks often attach in areas you tend not to pay much attention to—which makes finding them harder—Mather suggests doing tick checks fairly regularly, perhaps during one of life’s most intimate moments. “I noticed that I could see a lot if I just paid attention while I was sitting on the toilet,” Mather said. “I can see down the inside of both of my legs and behind my knees by doing a little twisting. I can push my junk to the left and to the right, and I can kind of check it out to see if I see any ticks there.” He did note that it’s hard to see your own butt, and you might still need help in that area. “But if I do that once or twice a day, I’m doing a pretty reasonable tick check just while I’m multitasking.”
If you do find a tick, don’t panic. First, get some fine-tipped tweezers. Grab the tick as close as you can to your skin, and pull it straight out. Rub the bite with alcohol and wash your hands. Take deep breaths. Eat a poppy seed muffin. Mather said you should try to ID the tick before doing away with it. The TickSpotters program can help identify the type of tick and give you a risk assessment if you send in a clear picture. “If the tick is a risky tick, attached long enough to transmit any germ they might be carrying, then we suggest that people might want to have the tick tested, for peace of mind, and to have more information to pass along to their primary care or veterinary care provider,” Mather said. If you come down with a fever a few weeks later, call your doctor. But remember that if the tick is on you for less than 24 hours, your chances of getting a tick-borne disease are small. And if you remember to wear your summer socks, you have a good chance of killing ticks before they attack.
The question “What aperture is best for landscape photography?” is often asked in various online forums. While there isn’t one “correct” aperture, certain scenes benefit from using a specific one. For standard landscape photography (excluding night photography, macro photography and other niches), the optimal aperture for front-to-back sharpness lies within f/7.1 to f/13.
This range is not just randomly mentioned. In fact, it’s carefully calculated and known as a lens’ sweet spot.
Find the Lens’ Sweet Spot
If you’re new to photography and just learning about aperture, this might sound confusing, but the sharpest aperture depends on the lens.
Note that when writing about sharpness in this article, we’re talking about overall front-to-back sharpness not depth-of-field sharpness. The sharpest aperture is when the overall image is at its sharpest.
The sharpest aperture of your lens, known as the sweet spot, is located two to three f/stops from the widest aperture.
Therefore, the sharpest aperture on my 16-35mm f/4 is between f/8 and f/11. A faster lens, such as the 14-24mm f/2.8, has a sweet spot between f/5.6 and f/8.
Since the majority of professional lenses have a widest aperture of either f/2.8 or f/4, you’ll often hear that the best aperture is either f/8 or f/11. While they often are the sharpest, I still recommend using the 2-3 stop formula to calculate the sweet spot of your lens and then test it in the field with some comparison shots of a single composition.
Now, this article is titled “What’s the Best Aperture for Landscape Photography”, not “What’s the Sharpest Aperture for Landscape Photography”. As I’ve mentioned, there isn’t one correct aperture; the best aperture depends on the specific scene.
When to Use Open Apertures
Open apertures (low f/stop numbers) are commonly used to blur the background of an image. For example, placing a flower close to the lens and using an open aperture such as f/2.8, will result in the flower being sharp and in focus while the background is soft and blurred.
An open aperture was used to blur out the background
Another common example of when an open aperture is ideal is during night photography. There’s not much natural light available at night, so you may need to increase the ISO, use a slower shutter speed and use an open aperture.
Keep in mind that how blurred (or focused) an image becomes depends on where you focus in the image (foreground, middle, background), how close the foreground element is to your camera and what lens you use (wide-angle vs. zoom).
When to Use Narrow Apertures
Despite more of the image being in focus, a narrow aperture can lead to less sharp images than desired.
Narrow apertures are often used when there’s a significant distance between the foreground and background, and you wish to have as much as possible sharp and in focus.
A narrow aperture was used to keep the image sharp front-to-back
Another scenario in which a narrow aperture is beneficial is when the sun is partially obscured. Using an aperture somewhere between f/16 and f/22 will result in a nice and crisp “sunstar”.
What is the Best Aperture for Landscape Photography?
As you might have picked up by now, the best aperture for landscape photography depends on the image you’re taking and the lens you’re using.
An open aperture such as f/2.8 results in less of the image being in focus but the parts that are in focus are sharper than they would have been with an aperture such as f/22.
On the other hand, a narrow aperture such as f/22 keeps the entire scene in focus but it won’t be as sharp as the sharpest parts captured with a wider aperture.
And again, the rule of thumb is: the sharpest aperture (where the biggest portion of the image is in focus but still sharp) is between two and three stops out from the maximum aperture, i.e. the most popular aperture for standard landscape photography is between f/8 and f/11.
About the author: Christian Hoiberg is a full-time landscape photographer who helps aspiring photographers develop the skills needed to capture beautiful and impactful images. The opinions expressed in this article are solely those of the author. Download Hoiberg’s free guide 30 Tips to Improve Your Landscape Photography and open the doors to your dream life. Hoiberg is also the founder of CaptureLandscapes. You can find more of his work on his website and Instagram. This article was also published here.
This story is probably best told as the fried-chicken-that-almost-got-away. Camping over in Eufala, we were as close as we were going to be, in the forseeable future, to Blakely Chicken – within an hour’s drive. It had hit my radar in an article in Garden n Gun with this quote from Linton Hopkins:
“If we follow the original definition of a three-star restaurant set by Guide Michelin—that it is an establishment worth a special journey—then Blakely is worthy of those three stars! Crisp skin and cravable flavor in an authentic place.”
I looked on line and saw that they were open until 11:00 and we headed east. Arriving around 3:30, the walk-up only restaurant looked dead. No signs of life, whatsoever. Dejected, I went back to the car and looked it up on my phone. Open until 11:00. What the heck?
So we started driving toward Dothan and my dear wife said, “what’s that?”
Next door, there was an almost brand new Blakely Chicken – it has been open since last November. The sign on the door read,
Same good cookin’, just better lookin’
We turned around, parked and walked up to the counter.
Looking at the choices on the menu, I decided on a three piece and my beloved chose a two piece. The young lady taking our orders wrote them, with a sharpie, on the boxes.
Still carry out only, we took seats at the picnic table out front. Here’s the delivery – very similar to that at Chicken Delite in Ocialla: a box, lined with wax paper with the chicken and a small bag of fries inside.
Check out that skin!
The chicken was hot, the skin was crispy (like cornbread batter) and the breast meat was tender and moist – difficult to achieve. The wings were delightfully crispy – we could have eaten a box of those, alone.
Mr Hopkins was dead on, as you would expect of a man who makes his own excellent fried chicken, at Hop’s. Definitely worth the drive. Crazy how we almost missed it…
For a (of recently) rare Saturday of roaming the city, we were heading to the Scott’s Antique Market. The State DOT wasn’t cooperating, however, as the exits to both Jonesboro Rd and Moreland Ave, east–bound on 285, were closed with roadwork. We had to sneak up on it, and found several spots to stop, along the way. I had worked up an appetite, so I did a quick search for barbecue and John’s Fine Food came up, with over 600 good reviews on yelp. But not for barbecue – for fried chicken! That worked, too.
Walking up to the door, we were greeted with this sign:
How could we go wrong?
I stepped into the mens’ room to wash my hand and when I got back to the start of the line, my beloved said, “did you see their score?” It was above 65 (my floor), so we went ahead and entered the cafeteria line. We could see, in the kitchen, the bags of greens and sweet potatoes.
They had a steam table, the length of the restaurant, with meats (fried chicken, ribs, smothered chicken, hamburger steak and baked chicken and a couple more) and eight or nine vegetables, followed by desserts and a salad condiment bar. Note that I did not include a hyphen in salad-condiment bar, because it wasn’t a salad and condiment bar – it was items you’d find on a salad bar, sold as condiments (a slice of tomato, sliced jalapeños, etc). That did come in handy when my beloved asked for pepper sauce for her greens – they dipped a to-go cup in the sauce for the peppers and put a lid on it for her.
The lady working the register was a gem – she was carrying on a running conversation with everyone that came through the line. I asked how long they had been open – she said they had been open since 1998. And she’d been there since 2006!
My dear wife went with a vegetable plate – greens, fried okra, steamed cabbage and sweet potatoes. She said the okra was great and enjoyed the cabbage, a lot. The sweet potatoes were just average and the greens were a little sweet, but with that pepper sauce and the cornbread crumbled up in it, she enjoyed the greens, thoroughly. And that coconut cake? She had part with lunch, a little in the car and the rest before bed.
I was leaning toward the fried chicken, but the smothered fried chicken lured me away. I had mac-n-cheese and cornbread dressing as my two sides. Given the choice, I had the gravy from the smothered chicken on the dressing. The mac-n-cheese was a little sweet, but tasty, but the cornbread dressing was the best dressing I’ve had since my mom’s cooking, back in her glory days. I kept seeing this fork creep across the table and grabbing a forkful of dressing…
And I finished it off with the banana pudding. I was only able to eat half, after the plateful of dressing, but I finished the to-go container late evening, while the last of the coconut cake was disappearing. It was interesting pudding – almost like the bananas had been soaked in a citrus juice of some kind.
Another find from Garden & Gun’s Fried Chicken Bucket List, LT’s Wings and Other Things was hailed as staying “busy, with lines out the door.” We arrived around 6:00 on a Saturday and seemed to hit at a good time – there was only one person waiting for food and a couple who came in behind us. A carry-out only spot, the lines are waiting for wings, not for a table. My beloved ordered a split ten – medium hot wings and lemon pepper.
Lemon pepper is very much an Atlanta “thing” according to an article in Atlanta Magazine last summer – “the cult of lemon pepper“. My dear wife, however, liked them long before they became linked with hip hop and strip clubs. These were tasty, with that combination of sour and spicy that makes the combo so desirable. The medium wings had plenty of flavor, without being just “one note” of heat.
I ordered “hot” wings and garlic parmesan.
The garlic parm wings were a panic decision – I knew I wanted to try the hot wings and had no idea what the other five would be. I remembered that one of my co-workers was talking about garlic parmesan wings the day before and when I saw them on my menu, “garlic parm” came out of my mouth. They were fine.
This is one place where the “hot” wings are not just the medium wings with more sauce – it is a distinctly hot flavor. And these wings were meaty. The only downside was the fries – there were plenty of them, but they were fried to nowhere near crispy and they had not flavoring whatsoever. Next times? Wings only.
Yet another tip from the Garden n Gun Fried Chicken Bucket List, OJ’s Diner was noted for fried chicken that’s “moist, with super crispy skin.” Those four words were enough to draw me in. As we were heading south through South Carolina, a lunch stop in Greenville seemed in order. This is an old-school cafeteria style meat-and-three,
that’s been in business since 2005, even though it looks older. Actually, it is older. The owner, named the restaurant after his uncle, Olin Johnson, who had developed a following for cooking southern classics at another Greenville meat-and-three, McBee’s. When the owner of McBee’s retired in 2004, she offered the business to OJ. He went to his sister, and her son, Greg, decided to start the “family” business.
We went through the line pretty quickly – I knew what I was having before we got there – and found a table. I went with the chicken, rice and beans and mac-n-cheese.
The chicken was as reported – moist with a really crispy skin. And it was coming out of the kitchen, by the plateful, fresh and piping hot. The rice and brown gravy was a good accompaniment and I enjoyed the mac-n-cheese, even though it was a little bit sweet.
My beloved, however was lured by the fried pork chop, as we passed through the line.
Both of our moms made fried pork chops when we were growing up, and we both remembered them fondly. Was it good? Here’s the “after” photo…
The bite that she shared with me was so good, that while she had banana pudding for dessert (which wasn’t bad at all – I had a spoonful), I had a fried pork chop.
The crust fell off in big flakes – it shattered as soon as you hit it with a fork. The chop was moist and needed the same “tug” to pull the meat from the bone that a good rib does. It was excellent.
Fueled up, we hit the road, headed for home. (The Zomato link below is for their second location, in Easley, which opened in 2012.)
Today’s lunch is at another spot sent to me from the pages of Garden N Gun – K&K Soul Food. (It’s like these pages speak to me – “if we fry it, you will come.”) K & K has been in business for fifty years, and I’ve been seeing it on one version of my drive home for the last couple of years. On Donald Hollowell Parkway (US78), just west of Northside Drive, they’re always closed when I drive by (they are open 5:00 – 5:00, Tuesday – Saturday). Today, when I had a meeting at the AU Center, I was talking with one of the security guards about K&K and she didn’t recommend anything – she recommended everything. I was obligated to go, as my stomach growled through the last half of my meeting.
I walked in, joined the line that stretched toward the door, and stared down the steam table. That line was ten-fifteen people deep for the entire half hour plus I was. They seem to do a good business. It was a tough choice, with at least ten meats (a cornucopia of soul food – oxtails, pig feet, ribs and fried anything),
I decided on a fried pork chop, lima and as many vegetables. The sad thing, on the vegetable side, was that they were out of mac-n-cheese – and it was going to be twenty minutes before they had more. The back wall of the restaurant is a mural reflecting the family that started what was then called Bankhead Restaurants and regulars. One thing that is really hard to see in this picture is the bathroom (which is where the guy in the red booth is sitting in the painting), that you have to be “buzzed” into, from the front counter.
I decided on a fried pork chop, lima beans, mashed potatoes with gravy and green beans and cornbread. And a slice of key lime cake…
The pork chop was excellent, as were the limas and potatoes – although everything needed salt. The batter on the chop was thin and flaky, but didn’t shatter – it held onto the meat well. The green beans were, sadly, lacking in flavor and not very hot. That key lime cake? This is one of my favorite desserts of the last few years and it’s “natural habitat” appears to be a small plastic container, with a piece sliced. Most places I find it, it appears to be cooked by someone outside the restaurant and brought in. It’s one of the simplest cakes – but so moist and it always hits the spot. This one didn’t disappoint.
I’ve been thinking about Mary Hoopa’s House of Fried Chicken & Oysters, for about three months. Maybe longer. I knew it was coming, as I’m a fan of Chef Robert Phalen and his One Eared Stag, and, some time last year, I heard that he was opening a fried chicken place, serving his “once-a-week” fried chicken every day. Then we went to lunch at the new Greater Good over New Years’ weekend and I saw where the location was to be. This Saturday, with a family event in Alpharetta mid-afternoon, I determined we’d be headed to dinner in East Lake.
The inside has very clean lines, with hardwood floors and wood and steel chairs. The menu is focused on two things – chicken and oysters. The chicken is served a la carte, with several sides that you can add to it. There are also five other entrees that seem to reflect the Louisiana meets urban chic vibe that they are going for, including trout, pork chops and shrimp and grits.
My beloved ordered the fried chicken sandwich, topped with slaw.
She said that the slaw was very good, but there wasn’t enough of it on the sandwich. But there was a surprise, as she went to slice it – this fried chicken sandwich was NOT a breast filet. I don’t know that I’ve ever had a chicken sandwich that wasn’t a breast filet, so it wasn’t that the menu was misleading. They didn’t say chicken breast sandwich, but that’s what we were expecting.
Other things to note:
They don’t do substitutions or modifications. They are “politely declined”.
They don’t have straws. They weren’t “out” of straws. They never got them when they opened and they haven’t ordered them since.
I went with the chicken:
When you order chicken you have three size choices (half bird, whole bird and two birds) and three preparation choices (house fried, sweet or hot). The chicken was not cheap – $18 for a half chicken, $24 for a whole and $49 for two birds. I asked the server if the “hot” was a Nashville-style hot chicken, and when she affirmed, I ordered a half chicken that way.
First, it is double fried – the second frying giving it the crinkly, crackly crust. This is the first place, in Atlanta, that we’ve tried, that does Nashville hot chicken right. Even though it is fried chicken, dipped and basted in hot sauce, is not greasy, at all. It leaves a dry, cayenne powder on your fingertips that you want to lick off, but ought to refrain from. From a side stand point, I ordered the Sea Island Peas with chiles and it was like a low country hoppin’ john. With the hot chicken, they were a bit much, spice-wise, but we brought them home and had them as a side with dinner the next night and they were perfect. They seem to be courting a “neighborhood” vibe and there were lots of folks with kids there, but the kids menu isn’t very deep. Luckily, as long as I don’t have to sit with someone else’s kids, the limited kids menu is not a problem that we have to contend with. But if you’re trying to build a neighborhood restaurant…
Why sign up for social media? Young or old, chances are you’ve taken a plunge of signing up to a social media account at least once. Yet, no other social media platform is quite as prolific and inviting as Facebook.
Let’s observe FarmVille as simple Facebook user would have. What’s not to love? It’s cute, entertaining, addictive, and free! According to CNBC:
“There are approximately 100 million people in America and the U.K. regularly playing social network games such as FarmVille and Mafia Wars … That’s nowhere close to the number of people playing on the Nintendo Wii or Microsoft Xbox 360—but for an industry that’s less than three years old, it’s impressive.”
Who was playing FarmVille, exactly? As stated in the article above, the average age of a social gamer at this point in time was 48. Isn’t that odd, considering both social media and gaming culture are centered around a young audience? For comparison, users under the age of 21 only made up 6 percent of the total amount of users playing games on social media.
That was just one of the quirks regarding FarmVille. In 2011, the methods in which FarmVille made money for Facebook were reported: payment processing fees (for assets like in-game currency), ad displays (throughout multiple in-game pages), and direct advertising. Prior to FarmVille, most of Facebook’s revenue came directly from ad revenue (98 percent in 2009, 95 percent in 2010).
Afterward, Facebook’s bottom line was dependent on the game. According to Forbes:
“Additionally, Zynga’s apps generate a significant number of pages on which we display ads from other advertisers. If the use of Zynga games on our Platform declines, if Zynga launches games on or migrates games to competing platforms, or if we fail to maintain good relations with Zynga, we may lose Zynga as a significant Platform developer and our financial results may be adversely affected.”
The above quote was released after Zynga integrated Facebook’s Payments into the app, which retained 30 percent of user purchases in Zynga games on the Facebook Platform.
Considering how much money Zynga was making, and how important they were, why accept a major pay cut to use an unnecessary payment application? Looking back, FarmVille seems less like a runaway hit and more like a trial run regarding app popularity. After all, at the time, it was nearly unavoidable.
Play to Pay
As told by Sandy Parakilas, former platform operations manager at Facebook, “one of the main ways to get developers interested in building apps was through offering them access to [their] data.”
In 2011, despite Facebook’s Payment’s cut and a drop in users—from 83 to 39 million active users, approximately half of its user base—Zynga’s FarmVille made more money in its first quarter than it ever had before.
The importance of this move cannot be overshadowed, because it exhibits Facebook’s handling of financial and personal information regarding third-party applications at a point where third-party applications were becoming integral to Facebook. From FarmVille came Mafia Wars, Words with Friends, and so on.
Still think FarmVille was harmless? In 2011, Facebook was charged by the FTC (Federal Trade Commission), stating they decieved consumers by failing to keep privacy promises. According to the FTC:
“Facebook represented that third-party apps that users’ installed would have access only to user information that they needed to operate. In fact, the apps could access nearly all of users’ personal data—data the apps didn’t need.”
I would suggest the reader head to the official FTC website to view the charges filed, all of which ring eerily true to the issues faced by Facebook today. Every charge involves, in some capacity, the sharing of data via third-party outlets.
From Quizzes to Quislings
Ever taken a Facebook quiz? You’ve probably seen one, at least. They do seem cool, right? Answer a few questions and you’ll readily find out whether you’re more Batman than Superman, more Virgo than Capricorn, and so on.
Unfortunately, it’s been revealed that these quizzes mine data from your Facebook profile as well. A popular example of this type of data harvesting occurred in 2015 with a third-party company called Vonvon.me. They created a smash hit—similar to FarmVille in terms of user popularity—that created a visual graph of your most used words on Facebook. In a matter of days, the quiz app was shared 16 million times. It was even advertised on notable tech websites like The Independent.
What actually happened when a user took the quiz? They shared, including other information, the following: your name, picture, age, sex, birthday, friend list, text posted on timeline, hometown, like pages, and IP address. Vonvon also mentioned in their privacy policy:
“We do not share your Personal Information with third parties unless we have received your permission to do so, or given you notice thereof (such as by telling you about it in this Privacy Policy).”
To be clear, Vonvon has since stated that no data is saved or stored by the company. The app only accessed this information, and projected the results within the user’s browser. Nevertheless, the access part is key.
Afterward, the Facebook quiz industry grew and grew. Quizzes about everything from Disney to Shakespeare characters now occupy many corners of the Facebook landscape.
“We always knew someone was trying to trick us with social media quizzes, because they are free” says BBB’s chief security officer Bill Fanelli, CISSP. “If there is no charge, then the value is the data they can collect. We also knew that it was for a use we probably would not like, because they went to such great lengths to hide their purpose. Now we know we were right on both counts.”
Over time, the theory that Facebook uses these very popular quizzes to extract user data becomes more and more credible.
It was even revealed as recently as last month by Cambridge Analytica employee Brittney Kaiser that the specific purpose of some of these Facebook quizzes was to extract data from users rather than being a fun and jocular pastime. Reported by TechCrunch:
“What you’re saying is … that actually the purpose of the survey was to gather [Facebook] information and by completing it with your Facebook login as well then CA would also get access to your data on Facebook too?”.”I believe that was the point of the quizzes in the first place, yes,” responded Kaiser.
Facebook Login (Your Name, Date, and Data Please)
Don’t you just love Facebook logins? Why deal with a website’s possibly long and boring registration when you can fill all your information with a mouse click? This was the initial draw of Facebook’s third-party login feature.
Facebook Login is the perfect combination of programming, design, advertisement, and ease of use, which is why it was repeated by so many other social media platforms.
Surely this innovative and useful piece of programming technology couldn’t be misused? Turns out, it was thoroughly misused.
While only around 270,000 Facebook users took the quiz, with which they were paid using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk function, the application was also able to access their friend’s data too.
You may recall seeing a popup after logging into Facebook a while ago.
From the relatively few users that took the quiz, Dr. Kogan was able to access the data of approximately 50 million Facebook users. For a comparison, that’s larger than the population of both New York City, New York and the whole of California. That’s locations, interests, check-ins, photos, status updates, and likes, taken from you via a friend.
I remembered something similar happening in Myspace as well. In 2005, hacker Samy Kamkar was poking around Myspace looking for exploits when he found a crucial one. It allowed Kamkar to continually add friend onto his friend’s list via other friends. Since the virus spread from profile to profile, it compounded the amount of friends Samy would receive from a one person. After less than 24 hours, Samy went from a few friends to over a million.
One problem: when Samy’s Myspace page was taken down, so was everyone else’s. Soon after, Myspace crashed. This event occurred at a point in time wherein Myspace was being used by more people than the Google search engine.
Mass connection, it can be argued, was what this whole internet thing was about. When it comes to social media giants, however, that means we’re also massively susceptible to viruses of this sort. Most data breeches are mass breeches for a reason; user data is often stored in huge data sets pertaining to a particular class or id.
That’s part of why online accounts can function in the first place. If Kogan’s app goes to show anything, it’s that social media profile don’t create a network of people. How many Facebook friends do you speak to personally, after all? It’s a network of data, gladly provided by you and me.
Love Those Likes
Facebook loves it when you like things, and if you use Facebook, so do you. Why not? It’s a form of expression, after all.
Exactly. The function of a Facebook like is simple and harmless, but the potential repercussions can be insanely lucrative. In 2013, psychology researcher used “easily accessible digital records of behavior, Facebook Likes” to accurately predict otherwise private personal attributes. According to The Guardian:
“Just a few apparently random ‘likes’ could form the basis for disturbingly complex character assessments. When users liked ‘curly fries’ and Sephora cosmetics, this was said to give clues to intelligence; Hello Kitty likes indicated political views; ‘Being confused after waking up from naps’ was linked to sexuality. These were just some of the unexpected but consistent correlations noted in a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal in 2013. ‘Few users were associated with “likes” explicitly revealing their attributes. For example, less than 5% of users labelled as gay were connected with explicitly gay groups, such as No H8 Campaign,’ the peer-reviewed research found.”
The statement above sounds like a marketer’s dream. With a few data sets, you’d be able to coordinate ad efforts quickly and easily. Expression, in this instance, can be flipped for a profit. Unfortunately for us, other companies saw the advantage as well.
In 2014, Cambridge Analytica contacted the same Dr. Kogan and managed to secure millions of users’ profile data. After Kogan’s plot was revealed, CA was supposed to destroy the data accumulated. They didn’t. According to The Guardian:
“A former Cambridge Analytica executive conceded that Facebook could easily have insisted the company delete models it had built from Kogan’s data, and speculated that Facebook was aware of the enormous profits it was making from political advertising from clients such as Cambridge Analytica … But let’s be frank. Given where we were in the primary cycle, we were responsible for spending millions of dollars on their platform.”
“The events of the past week have been a total shell-shock, and my view is that I’m being basically used as a scapegoat by both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica. We were assured by Cambridge Analytica that everything was perfectly legal and within the terms of service.”
The Faustbook Bargain
Whenever you sign up for an online account, you are putting yourself at risk. While users aren’t necessarily in any danger when they sign up for a social media platform, consider what you gain from the content you provide and data you expose. There are over two billion Facebook users, over one and a half billion of which are considered daily active users. Facebook is, for many of its users, a daily and integral part a significant population’s everyday life.
“Faustian bargain, a pact whereby a person trades something of supreme moral or spiritual importance, such as personal values or the soul, for some worldly or material benefit, such as knowledge, power, or riches.”
In the case with Facebook, personal values are almost exactly that. Facebook took the comprehensive values that make you, you, for their own benefit, and has done so for several years and across several cases. What did the average Facebook user receive in return? A quiz here, a login there, a bit of news, and a conversation. That’s how Facebook was able to take, analyze, share, and profit from your daily online actions.
So what should you do with your Facebook profile? While it’s easy to recommend deleting your Facebook account, that’s easier said than done. There are, nevertheless, some ways to limit the backlash.
Strictly limit your use of third-party apps. While they’re found on Facebook, third-party apps are not exactly official. Avoid any third-party trends as well, as greedy developers pounce on trending opportunities.
Review your Privacy settings on Facebook. These settings are continually updated, and unfortunately abused, so don’t leave yourself open.
Take a day to download your Facebook data. While it’s easy to assume the data Facebook collects from you, you may be surprised by how comprehensive the data is.
You are not posting your thoughts on Facebook, per se. More accurately, you are broadcasting yourself—in text, picture, speech, or video format—to a broad audience. Post, and like, accordingly.
These tips won’t fix all the problems you may have had, or will have, with Facebook’s data sharing. They will, however, prep you for future schemes you may encounter.
There aren’t many tools or apps that Adobe gives you for free. But Adobe Spark is one that you should catch if you love making photo collages with minimum effort. With that photo collage, you can tell a story to others or create fancy visual bucket lists for yourself. Let’s start.
How to Make a Photo Collage With Adobe Spark
Adobe Spark is a storytelling application. Both the website and the iOS apps (Spark Video, Spark Page, and Spark Post), are free. Both the website and the apps help you create beautiful photo collages in seconds with its intuitive interface. You can use your Adobe ID or sign up for free.
Start. Log into (or create a new ID) Adobe Spark and its free collage maker.
Select a collage size. The collage size can depend on the platform you plan to publish on.
Choose the photos. Search Creative Commons images from sites like Unsplash and Pixabay, or upload your own photos.
Preview images. Image thumbnails appear on the left. You can finetune the selection by deleting the ones you don’t like.
Design the collage. Click Next to display the Spark Post Layout and Design view which has all the tools to tweak the look of the collage. A few arrangements, frame, and color options are provided. You can also add text, more photos, icons, and a logo to the project if you want.
Finish. Share or download the collage to your desktop as a JPEG file.
Adobe Spark is an easy tool to use, unlike many Adobe tools which come with steep learning curves. The fact that it is one of the nicer free tools from Adobe adds to the charm.
It's been predicted that by 2027, the majority of the workforce will be comprised of freelancers, not regular, traditional employees. I have my predictions too for the future of freelancing and here are the three most important ones.
Sainthood and incalculable influence aside, John Coltrane didn’t always break new ground in the studio. “If you heard the John Coltrane Quartet live in the early-to-mid 1960s,” writes Giovanni Russonello at The New York Times—referring to the classic lineup of bassist Jimmy Garrison, drummer Elvin Jones, and pianist McCoy Tyner—you heard “a ground-shaking band, an almost physical being, bearing a promise that seemed to reach far beyond music.”
Prior to 1965’s supernatural A Love Supreme, however, few of the eight albums the classic quartet recorded for Impulse! Records captured “the band’s live ethic.” The “funny problem” Coltrane had was his commercial viability, which made the label eschew recording the quartet’s considerably experimental tendencies in favor of “concept-driven and consumer-friendly projects.” Now, Russonello writes, “that story needs a major footnote.” A lost Coltrane album from 1963 has emerged, discovered by the family of his first wife, Naima.
Coltrane history may be rewritten on June 29th when the album, Both Directions at Once, gets its release. We have a glimpse at what fans have been missing for the past 55 years in the soaring first track, “Untitled Original 11383,” above, a “brisk minor blues.” The album’s remaining treasures may justify Sonny Rollin’s comparison of this discovery to “finding a new room in the Great Pyramid.” In addition to two previously unheard original compositions, the album features some very intriguing recordings.
The final track, a studio version of “One Up, One Down,” was “previously heard only on a bootleg recording made at the Birdland jazz club,” notes FactMagazine. “One of Coltrane’s most famous compositions, ‘Impressions,’ is featured in a trio without piano,” and the album also contains the first recording of “Nature Boy,” which later appeared on The John Coltrane Quartet Plays. (See Fact Mag for a full tracklisting of the standard and two-CD deluxe editions of the album.) This collection comes very close “to the breadth of what Coltrane and his associates were delivering onstage,” claims Russonello.
It may also represent a presciently transitional document, as its title suggests. As Coltrane’s son Ravi puts it, “you do get a sense of John with one foot in the past and one foot headed toward his future.” After the album’s 1963 recording at the Rudy Van Gelder Studio in New Jersey, the master tapes somehow went missing, but Coltrane had taken home the reference tape that only recently surfaced. Both Directions at Oncefills in a gap between the “marvelous” albums Coltrane and Crescent, showing off the band’s dynamism in the period between “spring 1962 to spring 1964” and letting them cut loose while staying within familiar harmonic forms.
Coltrane’s avant-garde brilliance may have changed the course of modern music, but some of his most forward-thinking experiments can be difficult listening for those uninitiated in the rites of modal free jazz. According to pianist and scholar Lewis Porter, commenting on an advance copy of Both Directions at Once, the rediscovered album, contains “a lot of that musical meat” that Coltrane’s quartet delivered to live audiences in the early-to-mid-sixties, “but in a context that will be more accessible to a lot of listeners.”
Maybe more conservative listeners, however, can find in the lost album a key that unlocks the incredible mysteries of later recordings like Ascension, Meditations, and the wild, posthumously-released Interstellar Space.
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