I can't decide if this video makes me want to take a shower or eat a hamburger. It does make me feel about 100 years old and I'm oddly at peace with that.
To all the folks talking about how we should place the Muslim community under more scrutiny: If you don't think said yet-to-be-defined scrutiny will also apply to you, hop over to the airport and see whether or not they make you take off your shoes.
It doesn't matter how you fill in the "Religion" box folks, you're already a suspect.
ASMR is a tricky feeling to describe, and I can only talk about it secondhand. From what I understand from conversations with ASMRers, it’s a tingle in your brain, a kind of pleasurable headache that can creep down your spine. It’s a shortcut to a blissed-out meditative state that allows you to watch long videos that for someone who doesn’t have ASMR are mind-meltingly dull. Not everyone gets this feeling, and though some people can get the tingles through sheer force of will, most depend on external “triggers” to set them off. Triggers can include getting a massage or a haircut or a manicure, or hearing someone talk in a soothing tone of voice (Bob Ross, the “let’s put a happy tree right here” painter from PBS, is a common trigger), or even just watching someone pay extremely close attention to a task, like assembling a model. It’s not usually sexual—everyone who talked to me about ASMR mentioned that right off the bat—but like sexual turn-ons, different people have different things that set them off: the sound of lips smacking together, a cashier’s fake nails tapping on the register, your friend drawing on your hand with a marker.
That's me flipping the bird at Cinderella's Castle in the Magic Kingdom in June 2008.
I knew there was something hinky about the whole damn place as soon as we drove onto the grounds. Disney World is like an otherworldly cartoon prison colony. You enter the land of the Mouse and the "action" is buffered by a desolate necklace of undeveloped land. No streets, no convenience stores, no people. No nothing until you get close to the Magic Kingdom and then it's all Disney. If you think you're going have a little stroll off grounds to take in some local color, forget it. You're in Disney and you're going to eat, breath and sleep Disney exactly as Disney thinks you should until you leave Disney.
Shit's plain weird.
Turns out my totalitarian depiction isn't that far off. T. D. Allman illuminatess my cynical observations in his explanation of, "the approach that to this day allows the Disney organization to avoid taxation and environmental regulation as well as maintain immunity from the U.S. Constitution," in an excerpt of his new book, Finding Florida, for The Daily Beast.
A couple select quotes from the link:
"The posthumous Walt Disney, like the mechanical Andrew Jackson in the
Hall of the Presidents, had joined Mickey, Donald, and the Sorcerer's
Apprentice in that special world where it doesn't matter whether you're
real or not."
"Disney and his successors pioneered a business model based on public
subsidy of private profit coupled with corporate immunity from the laws,
regulations, and taxes imposed on actual people that now increasingly
characterizes the economy of the United States."
MUST READ. Dear Mickey Mouse:
If you have your ears on somewhere out there, behold the five-year-old photo of my commentary on you and your environs above. My position remains unchanged. Go to hell.
I still make lecho exactly this way, although I do not use Echrich sausage, but a spicy double smoked garlic sausage I buy at the West Side Market. The other day, I posted briefly on the Evil Overlord Site facebook about how I was making lecho and how the house was filled with a wonderful aroma. A few people asked for the recipe, hence this entry.
My hot peppers didn't seem quite hot enough, so I used Skyline's Hot Sauce instead of Tabasco. That Skyline sauce is hot as hell and I think it made a difference. The lecho was rich and smoky and spicy. It was, indeed, some of the best lecho I've ever made.
I do not take making lecho lightly. It's one of the things I do when nothing makes sense in the world and I don't know how to fix anything or what to do with myself. Making lecho is like going to the Cleveland Museum of Art and ambling through Armor Court or saying hi to The Thinker. It's like eating a falafel sandwich on the balcony of the West Side Market.
Making lecho resets my head. It gives me something to hang onto when I feel like I'm floating away.
The funny thing about The Irish Hungarian Guide to the Domestic Arts is not just that it's funny (and it is), but the whole book is about those sorts of things--things like lecho that keep us in touch with who we are, who we've been and what we'll be in the future. My own full blown recipe for lecho is in the book, complete with all the asides and commentary that fills out a recipe, which (if you do it right) should always be more than a recipe.
Yeah, yeah, here's an excerpt of my expanded lecho recipe from The Irish Hungarian:
* * *
When I make Hungarian lecho (pronounced letch-oh, sometimes spelled lecsó), not only am I a control freak on the hand-dice of the peppers and onion, I get all the ingredients prepared and lined up like some miserable Next Food Network Star wannabe, which is the modern reference. If you're old school, you'll remember how the TV chefs would step onto the kitchen set and all these neat little bowls filled with chopped whatnot would be in front of them ready to go. The Cajun Cook (Justin Wilson) or the Galloping Gourmet (Graham Kerr) would make everything look oh-so-easy while we real Real Housewives knew that backstage, some poor lackey was slicing his fingers to shreds as he carved out interior pepper ribs and cried his eyes out over a pile of minced onions. Welcome to the real world, sugartits.
Whatever viewers take away from that footage, a few obstacles remain before John Q. Public is pumping viable machine guns out of his den. I have a little experience with this. During the research for this story, I had the privilege of seeing some 3D printers up close.
Lower end machines such as the MakerBot Replicator 2 run a couple thousand dollars and produce low quality, low resolution items, mostly suitable as models. At the top of the line, you'll find machines such as the Fortus 400mc, which can produce high quality objects and will run you about $60,000--pretty cost prohibitive (for the curious, creating any sort of weapon or gun is prohibited within the walls of think[box]--I know, I asked). I saw the Fortus printing with the same hard plastic used to make Legos; and while there are other options for input material, most metals require a little more muscle than the Fortus 400mc can muster. As for a study in polymers, I have no idea what sort Glock uses or if a 3D printer could process a such a material. Nonetheless, I think it's safe to say that 3D printed guns ain't quite here yet, but they're coming.
The one entity that will do everything within its power to stop that is the NRA.
Fortus 250mc and 400mc at CWRU
When those DIY guns make a solid landing, they will seriously threaten the sovereignty and bankrolls of the gun industry. I predict the NRA will obediently serve its master and become the most emphatic pro-gun control lobby imaginable. First order of business: demonize DIY guns as beneath industry standards, ineffective, unreliable and unsafe. They'll have videos of homemade guns misfiring, melting, whatever. The NRA will back all measures that restrict the home manufacture of viable weapons: taxes, expensive certifications, etc. I wouldn't be surprised if they turn a new leaf and back punitive laws for possession/sale of homemade
guns and gun parts or even a gun registration program that further delineates homemade firearms from the professionally manufactured ones that line LaPierre's pockets.
It won't be so easy for the NRA. Big Tobacco always billed itself as Big Tobacco. The NRA slithers around beneath the guise of a pro-gun owner organization. Thus far, LaPierre & Co., haven't had much trouble fooling gun enthusiasts (and a slew of others) into believing that the protection of their "rights" looks exactly like the protection of the interests of the gun industry. Unfortunately for LaPierre & Co., those two schools of thought will part ways when the viable DIY gun comes to fruition.
So to the gun campers, I say this: the NRA couldn't give a damn about your rights, buddy. It's all about the money.
On this morning's Today show, Matt Lauer and Savannah Guthrie goofed around on the Waterfall Swing, and although Clevelander Ian Charnas was there, he didn't say a word.
Really?
Charnas was one of the mightiest forces behind the Waterfall Swing project. Dig him testing it out in Cleveland a couple of years ago:
Ian is also the operations manager at Case Western University's think[box], which is featured in my article for this week's Fresh Water on high-tech making in the 216.
Cleveland never ceases to amaze me, but my findings during the research for this article utterly astonished me. Public access to a 3D microscope? A state-of-the-art laser printer? A petting zoo chock full of today's hottest mobile devices? Yeah, we've got that.
And dig this adjustable crescent wrench, it came out of CWRU's 3D printer with no assembly required. Um ... HEADS UP CRAFTSMAN.
Sometimes I am so overjoyed at the prospect of my first cup of coffee in the morning that I shower the rim of the mug with tender little kisses before taking a sip.
My slippers cost $100. I am neither proud of this, nor unproud of it.
I do not care if unproud is not a word, although I am a bit concerned about the comma in the previous sentence.
In the first sentence of this post, I refer to "my first cup of coffee." This is misleading. The usage of "first" implies there is to be a second or third. In reality, I rarely have more than one cup of coffee. As the readership can see, however, it is a very large cup of coffee.
One might say my coffee cup is as big as my foot. Or one might not.
I dislike removing toenail polish.
While not entirely obvious in today's photo, the soles of my slippers are fashioned from sturdy rubber and will, in fact, not slip (a determining factor in their purchase). Hence, my slippers are essentially unslippers.
Fortunately for the readership, Lil' OB entered the Offices of Erin O'Brien while I was taking the photo for today's post and said as I pointed the camera at my feet, "So this is what it's like being a famous writer," effectively bathing my life in truth and prompting an end to this post.
