I live Santa Clara, California – not far from where I was born. I work in IT and make a lot of photos. I'm Jewish. My dream vacation involves sitting at a sidewalk cafe for hours, sipping coffee.
I live Santa Clara, California – not far from where I was born. I work in IT and make a lot of photos. I'm Jewish. My dream vacation involves sitting at a sidewalk cafe for hours, sipping coffee.
I've created some postcards and now they're just laying around my house. If you send me your address, you will
get a free postcardEvery once in a while I update my ultimate list of the best
storytelling video gamesDoes it bug anyone else that in English
it's called Saturdaythe brandensite is a vanity project where I collect all of things I've put onto the internet in a big, fat glorification of myself. I've maintained this monument to arrogance in one form or another since I was thirteen years old in 1995. This is my social media.
I love photography. I love learning about photography and making my own photos. I share my new photos on Flickr almost every day, and I have a photo portfolio website. I will talk about photography at the slightest provocation. This website is one such provocation. Beware all ye who dare:
My recent favorite musical artists are VNV Nation, mind.in.a.box, The Decemberists, The National, genCAB, Project Pitchfork, Moby, purity ring, unitcode:machine, and Röyksopp.
I obsess over an extensive, curated, eclectic and growing library of music which is meaningful to me. I put the library metadata online (not the music) and it consists of 17,404 tracks from 2,131 albums from 870 musical artists. Since February 2006, the library has logged 509,197 track plays, or a total time I've spent listening to music:
running commentary
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.
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?
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?
George Carlin is full of great lines, and this might be his best.
Tulpas are imaginary friends that these people believe are sentient. No, really. They have their own subreddit, which goes without saying. Yikes.
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:
Steve Lukather, from the band Toto, on sharing a credit with Brian Eno on the soundtrack to David Lynch's 1984 Dune: And later in the interview, David Paich, the primary songwriter for Toto, on visiting David Lynch's home:
The wonderfully vibrant photography of Edwina Hay, who specializes in musicians and portraiture.
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:
Excerpts from a July 2022 The Sunday Times article written by the Oxford scholar who directs their America Institute:
older!