the brandensite

Jackson Hole, China 2024 Nov 27
Chinese real estate developers back in 2004 recreated Jackson Hole, Wyoming about two hours north of Beijing. Linked is a YouTube who goes there to visit and is underwhelmed by the town square but impressed by the houses' dedication to mimicking America's west. It all looks a little ... flat, to me. The true mark of a great city is when a copy of your city is made into a casino in Las Vegas (Venice, New York, Paris, Egypt, Lake Como's Bellagio... did I miss any? Where's our Kremlin-themed casino?) and this imitation Jackson Hole from the video reminds me less of those and more of the "Wee Britain" joke in Arrested Development.

CostCo Butter Conspiracy 2024 Nov 24
I missed this eleven months ago when it happened, but apparently a reddit post gained some attention for accusing CostCo's store-brand butter of having secretly changed, causing their butter-centric recipes to start failing. When others started chiming in "same here" it sparked Allrecipes to do an investigation, the results of which were entirely inconclusive. But along the way, we learn all sorts of interesting facts about butter, such as that European butters are slightly more fat-to-water than American sweet-cream butters.

But what of the conspiracy? Did CostCo change how they make their butter? People are still saying yes this season, which is how I heard of this. And whether they did or not, it all speaks to the basic, fundamental underlying issue: food standards in America are old, and the allowances are more generous than needed for modern manufacturing. So whether or not CostCo really is doing this devious thing – decreasing the fat percentage in their butter to the legally allowable tolerance in order to save money – the fact that they can at all is problem enough. And in an era of increasing shrinkflation, is it any wonder that nobody trusts the massive corporations to be actually selling you what they claim to be selling you?

Why do most bagels suck? 2024 Nov 24
This is a 2015 article from NPR's The Salt called Chew On This: The Science Of Great NYC Bagels (It's Not The Water) that explains that a proper bagel must be, before being baked, first "poached or boiled in a solution of water and malt barley for anywhere from 30 seconds to 3 minutes" in order to thicken the crust and lock in the bagel's moisture. This is what makes it a chewy, delicious bagel and not just a round bread.

Why would anyone do it wrong and make crappy bagels? Because it's cheaper to skip the boiling step and just bake them. And then, proving that there is no god, some people grew up eating them made wrong and now prefer them this way.

Now, why do some toast their bagels and make them with things like blueberries and pumpernickel? I don't know, why do some people turn to lives of villainy?

“Think of how stupid the average person is, and realize half of them are stupider than that.” 2024 Nov 23
George Carlin is full of great lines, and this might be his best.

Tulpas 2024 Nov 23
Tulpas are imaginary friends that these people believe are sentient. No, really. They have their own subreddit, which goes without saying.

Tulpas are people just like you or me, and if you forget about them or get cold feet and stop, it will essentially kill them.

Yikes.

Etymological Twins: Boulevard and Bulwark 2024 Nov 21
One of the neat things you find in etymology (nerd alert, obviously) is when a foreign word enters the English language multiple times, each successive borrowing taking on a new meaning in English. This is called "etymological twins," a sub-type of linguistic doublets. Famous examples of etymological twins include the words chief and chef, host and guest, hotel and hostel, warranty and guarantee, goal and jail. These twin words can drift in both form and meaning, sometimes to the point where the pair becomes quite obscure, such as in entire and integer. The linked ThoughtCo blog post collects excerpts from language experts on how these twins come to be, and other forms of doublets as well. There are lists online of course of etymological twins, such as (as you'd expect) the big wiki, but those lists are not exhaustive.

So it's fun when you stumble across twins new to yourself, as I did today, with bulwark and boulevard. Both come via the Middle Dutch word bolwerc meaning "wall of a fortification," although obviously it is boulevard that has drifted further in both form and meaning. For how we got there, I'll let the Online Etymology Dictionary do the honors:

originally "top surface of a military rampart" (15c.), from a garbled attempt to adopt Middle Dutch bolwerc "wall of a fortification" into French, which at that time lacked a -w- in its alphabet.

The notion is of a promenade atop demolished city walls, which would be wider than the old streets. Originally in English with conscious echoes of Paris; in U.S., since 1929, used of multi-lane limited-access urban highways.

Toto, David Lynch, and Brian Eno: Dune 2024 Nov 19
Steve Lukather, from the band Toto, on sharing a credit with Brian Eno on the soundtrack to David Lynch's 1984 Dune:

I’ve never met Brian. Love his work, but he wrote a 30-second theme and basically got the same credit as us. They used him because of his name value, so people attributed our work to him and his work to us, and it was confusing. It was much hipper to say Brian Eno wrote the score than Toto at the time. If they didn’t like the movie, they’d go after us. If they liked it, they’d give Eno all the credit. I have no beef with Brian Eno, I have no beef with David. That’s what he wanted so he should have it. I love Brian Eno.

And later in the interview, David Paich, the primary songwriter for Toto, on visiting David Lynch's home:

I remember when I went to his house, he had this haunting, low, whistling sound. I said, “What is that?” He said he went to Scotland up into the hills where there was supposedly a haunted castle. This was the wind whistling through the castle, and he recorded that. He puts it on all of his movies. This low wisp of a sound. It’s almost like a foghorn.

This is not a photograph 2024 Nov 16
The wonderfully vibrant photography of Edwina Hay, who specializes in musicians and portraiture.

Open Letter to President Trump 2024 Nov 14
I wholeheartedly agree with and have added my name to the letter to President Trump written by Rabbi Rick Jacobs and Union for Reform Judaism over which he presides and of which I am a member:

Dear President Trump,

I hope and pray that in your next term in office, you will be a president for all Americans, advancing the principles of democracy, justice, and commitment to rule of law that have been sources of strength for our nation throughout its history.

As an American and a Reform Jew, I am committed to the protection of the orphan, the widow, and the stranger. I will support any serious effort by your administration to combat antisemitism, and I will champion a strong U.S.-Israel relationship that fosters democracy in and security for the Jewish state and demands the rights, well-being, and national aspirations of Palestinian civilians in Gaza and the West Bank are upheld.

At the same time, I will join in fierce opposition to any further efforts to eviscerate reproductive rights, to target the safety and rights of the LGBTQ+ community, to harm communities of Color, or to undermine the health of our air, water, and land. I will join in defense of the security of immigrants and the right to claim asylum. I will vehemently oppose the weaponization of political power against individuals and institutions that are core to our democracy, including the courts and the press. And above all, I urge an end to the repeated demeaning of women, the use of hateful language against those who hold different views, and the persistent coarsening of our political culture.

We are all made more whole when we treat others with the respect every human being deserves. Please, help heal the wounds our nation bears and govern as a president for all Americans.

Why America is in such a mess 2024 Nov 13
Excerpts from a July 2022 The Sunday Times article written by the Oxford scholar who directs their America Institute:

None of us have seen the United States as divided and distressed as it is now.

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Watch the talk shows and listen to people in the streets: both sides genuinely believe that if the other wins, everything they hold dear will be destroyed.

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And while division is now more serious than for decades, a longer historical perspective suggests that extreme polarisation is not the exception in American politics but the norm.

Until the 1950s, the Supreme Court allowed states huge latitude to evade constitutional provisions which, on parchment at least, guaranteed equal rights to all citizens. The so-called “Jim Crow” apartheid laws in the South meant that, for people of colour at least, travelling across state lines meant moving into dramatically different legal regimes. Maintaining racial segregation required authoritarian government including a heavily armed police and equally heavy restrictions on freedom of speech and private life. Policing sexual politics was an essential part of the system.

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And then there was the actual Civil War of the 1860s, a conflict in which three-quarters of a million people died (in proportional terms the equivalent of about seven million today). Over the century and a half since the South was defeated in that war, a huge amount of emotional and literary effort has been expended on making the case that the war was a tragic accident, which somehow brought the country together, that despite taking up arms against the government the white South were somehow still fighting for American values.

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Perhaps the harsh truth is that the United States has always been a nation divided by a common flag.

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But if they share a reverence for their Revolution, Americans have never agreed on what it means. Did the rebellious colonists of 1776 create a republic dedicated to the radical idea of human equality? Or did they create a fundamentally conservative republic, shaped by Christian values? ... The most dangerous moments in US politics have been fights over who is “really” an American.

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But even as Washington retired to his wife and slaves in Mount Vernon, bitter partisanship convulsed the republic, and it did so for the same basic reason that it does today—partisans genuinely believed only they were true patriots and that their opponents were enemies of the republic. If that’s what you think, naturally you will do anything to win, including, if necessary, overturning election results that don’t go your way.

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The United States has prospered, despite its divisions and institutional sclerosis, because – most of the time — it has given well-founded hope of prosperity to ordinary people. If that proves no longer to be true, then the game may finally be up.