Yesterday I took my car to the shop for some minor service. The TV was on in the waiting room, and much to my dismay, my attention kept being caught by the morning show instead of my immunology notes. I saw two things that appalled me, though for very different reasons.
First, they showed part of the Pillsbury Bake-Off contest. The winning entry was baked chicken with spinach stuffing. It sounded pretty good, until they described the recipe: it was based on a frozen waffle kit. The glaze for the chicken is based on the “maple” syrup, and the bread in the stuffing is chopped-up frozen waffles! I can’t imagine how anyone could have ever thought of doing that (though I suspect this abomination might have been the inspiration), and I flat-out refuse to believe that it tastes good.
After that, a commercial came on for Healthy Choice frozen dinners. The commercial shows a dad and his two kids. The little girl keeps saying “That’s not how Mom does it” as Dad vacuums the baby and clears clutter with a leaf blower. Finally he serves them all Healthy Choice dinners, and the girl thinks Mom would approve of that.
I really hate commercials that trade on the stereotype that dads are incompetent buffoons who babysit their kids, while moms are loving caretakers who always know best. Not so much because it’s offensive to men (though it certainly is offensive to imply that a large group of people are morons), but because it reinforces the ridiculous idea that women are caretakers whose job it is to take care of the house and kids, while men can’t be expected to take any responsibility for their own children. Sexism is still with us, folks.
(Of course, the idea that a frozen dinner would be the highlight of someone’s day is pretty goofy too.)
No wonder I never watch TV.
Tim is making quite the splash lately: his Cato Policy Analysis on the DMCA came out today. As Tim writes at TLF,
A lot of DMCA critics have focused on how DRM undermines fair use by narrowing the ways in which users can consume the content they have legally acquired. That’s certainly a valid argument, but I tried to focus on the implications of another type of fair use: the fair use right to use reverse engineering to build a competing product. Prior to the enactment of the DMCA, the courts had consistently turned back efforts by incumbents to use copyright law as a way to exclude competitors from their technology platforms. Most famously, IBM was not able to prevent the creation of IBM clones, because a company called Phoenix used “clean room” reverse engineering techniques to develop a compatible BIOS without directly copying any of IBM’s copyrighted software.The DMCA throws that principle out the window, because it makes it a crime to “circumvent” a DRM scheme—that is, access the content without first getting the permission of the DRM creator. As a result, it’s effectively illegal to build third-party software that interoperates with software like iTunes or Real’s video streaming software.
It’s an excellent, thought-provoking perspective, and sure to raise the blood pressure of anyone who cares about technology and fair competition.
(Of course, my link is just a drop in the bucket. Slashdot, BoingBoing, Instapundit, and Hit & Run are already on it.)
I had a histology exam this morning at 9. Last night I studied until I was sleepy, then set my alarm for 6 so I could review slides until it was time to go. Then I experienced the following series of unfortunate events:
So now I have the envelope for a ticket, and I have to call the city tomorrow to find out how much my ticket was for.
On the plus side, I’m pretty sure I did well on the test.
Today the Washington Post has an article about how people are culinary illiterates.
At Kraft Foods, recipes never include words like “dredge” and “sauté.” Betty Crocker recipes avoid “braise” and “truss.” Land O’ Lakes has all but banned “fold” and “cream” from its cooking instructions. And Pillsbury carefully sidesteps “simmer” and “sear.”
I’m all about mocking stupidity, but really, is it a surprise that people who get their recipes from the side of the biscuit package are having trouble with technical cooking terms?
It does seem that there has been a decline in cooking knowledge - the article mentions that The Joy of Cooking has trouble figuring out what level to write at - and there’s no doubt what the reason is supposed to be:
For many people, cooking classes like his compensate for what they did not learn at home. “Food companies have to acknowledge that there used to be a level of teaching in the home by moms and grandmas that is not as evident today,” said Janet Myers, senior director of global kitchens for Kraft Foods who has been creating and testing recipes for the company for 30 years.A survey of women in their twenties and forties for Betty Crocker showed that 64 percent of women in their twenties had mothers who worked full time, outside the home, during their childhood, compared with 38 percent of those in their forties. The group in their forties primarily learned to cook from their mothers and at school; the younger women also learned from their mothers, but more of them learned from their fathers, television chefs, or on their own.
No wonder people are ignorant today! They learned to cook from their fathers and everyone knows men can’t cook!
Then there’s this, which I’m still puzzled about:
A survey conducted by Betty Crocker Kitchens in 2004 showed adults don’t even realize how cooking-challenged they’ve become. The national survey of 1,500 adults found that 70 percent rated themselves “above average” in cooking knowledge, even though only 38 percent scored above average on a 20-question cooking-skills quiz. [emphasis added]
I guess a whole bunch of people must have scored exactly at whatever the average was, which doesn’t imply that the quiz was very well written.
It’s Not the Sights, It’s the Sounds
Fueled by frequent stops at diners (this was my third pie and coffee, and it wasn’t lunchtime yet), I was in the midst of a road trip through the American linguistic landscape. My guide was not Rand McNally but rather The Atlas of North American English, by William Labov, Sharon Ash and Charles Boberg, the first complete survey of American phonetics, published late last year by Mouton de Gruyter.
[…]
When I called Professor Labov at his linguistics lab at the University of Pennsylvania and proposed I take a phonetic road trip — a journey about listening, much as a blind person or linguist experiences travel — he was enthusiastic. “When I travel,” he said, “I always ask myself, what do I expect to hear that tells me that I’m not just anyplace?”
This morning, while sitting in lecture hall waiting for our physiology exam to be distributed, I was distracting myself by looking around at everybody else. My inner monologue:
I knew green was trendy, but I didn’t know it had gotten that popular.
Oh. It’s St. Patrick’s Day.
Crap! I’m wearing green too! Now I look like one of those tools who dresses up for fake holidays!
At least mine is kind of olive-y. I’ll just hope there are a lot of people who share my dad’s particular colorblindness and think this color is grey, not green.
Maybe I’ll find something else to wear when I head back for this afternoon’s review sessions.
For the past year or two, I’ve been sort of tracking which of the states I’ve lived in (Ohio, Virginia, and now Missouri) wins the Most Backwards award. The competition is fierce, but sometimes one state takes the lead.
Missouri House rejects spending for birth control
“If you hand out contraception to single women, we’re saying promiscuity is OK as a state, and I am not in support of that,” Phillips, R-Kansas City, said in an interview.Others, including some lawmakers who described themselves as “pro-life,” said it was illogical for anti-abortion lawmakers to deny money for contraception to low-income people who use public health clinics.
“It’s going to have the opposite effect of what the intention is, which will be more unwanted pregnancies and more abortions,” said Rep. Kate Meiners, D-Kansas City.
Meiners is right. And I don’t think this is going to have a good effect on Missouri’s bottom line, when more children are born to low-income parents and end up being supported by the state.
Tim has an op-ed in the New York Times today.
News reports tend to paint the practice [of wireless “piggybacking” - using others’ open wireless networks] as a growing problem. Reporters use words like “stealing,” “hacking” and “intrusion.” But despite the alarmist talk, the articles rarely explain what the problem is.Maybe that’s because there is none. To the contrary, the increasing ubiquity of free wireless Internet access is something to celebrate.
It’s good stuff - go read it.
I’ve had my wireless network open for ages, since Tim convinced me that it was a neighborly thing to do. If you’re in my neighborhood, feel free to hop on AmandaNet.
Apparently Newt Gingrich thinks WIC is a leading cause of childhood obesity. More on the merits of that claim later, but it did remind me of the following anecdote:
The grocery store closest to my neighborhood serves a wide variety of people, including a fairly large population using WIC. One day I was in line behind a woman who was buying, among other things, Kraft singles and Jif chunky peanut butter. The cashier scanned the peanut butter, the register beeped, and she told the customer “Sorry, WIC only covers the creamy kind. Want to go switch?” The customer went to grab some approved peanut butter, as the cashier scanned and bagged the “processed food product” that was next on the conveyor belt. So apparently on WIC you can’t buy chunky peanut butter, but you can buy nasty “cheese” that can’t even be labeled as such without a disclaimer about processing.
Anyway, I’m pretty sure Gingrich is confusing correlation with causation. Children on WIC probably do have higher obesity rates than average, but that’s because they’re poor, and poor people tend to be obese because of a whole bunch of things like not having access to supermarkets for fresh produce, choosing food with high caloric density, and a culture that doesn’t encourage cooking.
Along those lines, I learned something very interesting in physiology today. Quote from our course book, following a discussion of factors contributing to obesity: “Junk food is cheap because it is made of grains, corn, and/or processed meat and the production of all of these is highly subsidized by the federal government.”
I’m not sure I ever looked at it that way before (though I did know that the prevalence of high fructose corn syrup is due to sugar tariffs and corn subsidies). There’s something the federal government could do about the obesity epidemic!
The NYT profiles my favorite store.
“We decided to go in the other direction — to appeal to people who are well-educated, well-traveled and underpaid.”
Hey, that’s me!
Interesting stuff about how they select what products to carry. The tiramisu and chocolate-covered espresso beans mentioned are excellent. I haven’t gotten around to trying the chili-lime peanuts yet (I’d prefer cashews) but now I’ll have to. Also great: the nonfat yogurt (no, really) and triple ginger snaps.
What I really want to know, though, is how they manage to be so cheap! I can buy a bunch of things - including milk - at Trader Joe’s for cheaper than Walmart. And yet the people working there are clearly intelligent and educated; how much do you have to pay that class of worker to get them to stay in retail?