The short and tasty edition
On empty fridges, reheated food nostalgia, the power of a sentence, the red color and pink salt
Refrigerator Elegy by Lindsey Harding
Do all things expire? A very short story about the topography of fridges and to do lists.” Flowers in the vase on the kitchen island, stinking water and slimy stalks, petals like cereal flakes spilled across the countertop. Unused herbs and seasonings in tiny glass jars above the stove. Eventually they become concrete sediment, a geological record of our family’s era, this time we have together. All things expire. Even this moment, you and I, on the couch like this: your head on my shoulder, our four feet poking out of the blanket we share.”
https://www.craftliterary.com/2020/11/11/refrigerator-elegy-lindsey-harding/
Proust’s Madeleine, But for People Who Grew Up With a Single Dad
The food memories of a daughter who had a single dad, four other siblings and an American suburban lower-middle class background. Even if my salivary glands activated while reading this article, my brain reacted in disgust to the amount of junk food people low on time and manpower do have to ingest. “The orange juice that comes in a frozen tube — There was a whole routine: let it thaw a little, dump it into the pitcher, fill it with water from the sink (this was before we knew how bad LA water was) get out the weird potato mashing tool and crush it down, stir and drink. Nevermind that we had actual citrus trees in our backyard, this was what we drank.”
https://mara.substack.com/p/prousts-madeleine-but-for-people
Simplicity or style: what makes a sentence a masterpiece?
A journey into sentence aesthetics and it’s power with examples from Samuel Johnson, Edward Gibbon, Orwell, William Gibson and Jane Austen.“If we think of a library as a city and a book as an individual house in that city, each sentence becomes one tiny component of that house. Some are mostly functional – the load-bearing wall, the grout between the bathroom tiles – while others are the details we remember and take away, perhaps recalling their texture and colour when we assemble our own verbal dwelling-place.”
https://aeon.co/ideas/simplicity-or-style-what-makes-a-sentence-a-masterpiece
Barns Are Painted Red Because of the Physics of Dying Stars
Have you ever wondered why barns are red? This explanation attempt says barns are painted red because red paint is cheap. Red paint is cheap because iron is plentiful & iron is plentiful because it is the final element formed out of a dying star.”As soon as the star hits the 56 nucleon (total number of protons and neutrons in the nucleus) cutoff, it falls apart.The element that has 56 protons and neutrons in its nucleus in its stable state? Iron. The stuff that makes red paint.”
How Pink Salt Took Over Millennial Kitchens
Himalayan salt is no different on the nutritional scale than usual salt; the pink color comes from geological intrusions, but that does not mean it contains other minerals than halite. A product that grew on the backs of instagram influencers and the pleasant color. “For others, though, Bouzari understands the impulse. “It’s theater, it’s performance,” he says. “Little flecks of unicorn cocaine on a nice charred beet? That’s aesthetically appealing, and that will influence flavor indirectly … Functionally, it’s good for everything that salt’s good for, full stop.””
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2018/12/himalayan-pink-salt-in-your-kitchen/577390/
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Video Pill
Free To Play Games: Our Reluctant Future
Why The Longing Takes Four Hundred Days to Play
You Are The Universe Making Sense Of Itself
Podcast Pill
Sahel of a mess: France’s impossible peacekeeping mission, Podcast: Economist Radio
Jihadism is growing in a continent-wide strip of Africa, and the riskiest operations to contain it fall to French troops. Our correspondent witnesses a fraught and seemingly endless mission. Peru has ousted yet another president, at a woeful time: the pandemic is raging, the economy cratering and politics fracturing. And the movement to water down Sweden’s state monopoly on booze.
How Did Friday the 13th Become Unlucky? , Podcast: Kottke Ride Home
Why do we associate Friday the 13th with being unlucky? The weird and creative solutions some offices are coming up with for virtual holiday parties this year.
https://player.fm/series/kottke-ride-home/fri-1113-how-did-friday-the-13th-become-unlucky
Design Pill
Floris van Schooten - Cheese stack
Poetic Pill
Incantation By Czeslaw Milosz
“Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
It does not know Jew from Greek or slave from master,
Giving us the estate of the world to manage.
It saves austere and transparent phrases
From the filthy discord of tortured words.
It says that everything is new under the sun,
Opens the congealed fist of the past.
Beautiful and very young are Philo-Sophia
And poetry, her ally in the service of the good.
As late as yesterday Nature celebrated their birth,
The news was brought to the mountains by a unicorn and an echo.
Their friendship will be glorious, their time has no limit.
Their enemies have delivered themselves to destruction.“
Underground Pill
Aesop Rock - Button Masher
“Tangentially related in the sense of one's environment
Informing what they're made of
There was a ghost who broke it all up into tiny numbers
And dated vector graphics and New York Times puzzles
Who struggled knowing love as more than boring data entry
More reported from an orbit all his own, to say it gently
I'm reporting from an orbit all my own, to say it gently
Catch a wave in the jalopy down to burn up on re-entry
Man the laser, do you copy? Keep invaders on the business end
Autopilot zeroes in on zero wind for pissing in
Fixer-upper, she putt like a Plymouth Duster
From bucket to mothership, if you're up for a little sunburn, stat
Neighbors at the mercy of a thin wall
One side nap, one satellite pinball
Fun size asteroids pingin' off the cabin
Ping, ping, the soundtrack of shrinking into blackness
I blink through 4D, droid sitting bitch scorned
The voice of destroy and rebuild
Who rose above the partly cloudy counting on a Galaga hack
His only carry-on's a napkin of math
From packed in a menagerie to cheese and crackers at the apogee
Add a little finding God and trying not to atrophy, um
I know you're whispering about me at the corner store
"We've seen the glowing light from under his apartment door"“
Dictionary Pill
palimpsest = 1.something having usually diverse layers or aspects apparent beneath the surface; 2.writing material (such as a parchment or tablet) used one or more times after earlier writing has been erased';
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