We Live in the Golden Age of Ice Cream
I tried some absolutely outstanding ice cream yesterday that reminded me of yet another reason I feel lucky to be part of Generation X:
We are living in the golden age of ice cream.
In the 1970s, we had a few basic flavors to choose from: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, chocolate chip, mint chocolate chip, and rocky road. There were a few shops like Baskin Robbins that marketed some scary stuff like Rum Raisin, but if you were just getting ice cream at the supermarket or some other ordinary location, those were your choices.
There also wasn’t as much science to ice cream back then. The term mouthfeel was still relatively obscure. It all seemed perfectly good back then because… ICE CREAM!!! … but compared to what we have today, it was, as the kids say, “supes basic”. In the 1980s, along came the frozen yogurt craze which pointed to how much untouched frontier was ahead of us. Shoutout to Humphrey Yogart, by the way — the world’s best named frozen dessert shop. Shoutout also to Aaron Cohen’s Gracie’s, which not only has excellent ice cream, but the world’s only bathroom dedicated to Dolly Parton.
Anyway, we’ve learned so much about fat content, texture, and flavor combinations since then that we have practically invented a new food group.
A few years ago, during a trip to the underrated gelato mecca that is Croatia, I had a variety which tasted different than anything I’d ever tried. It was a “fig yogurt gelato” from a little shop in Cavtat. I usually stay away from frozen yogurt because it’s generally not as good as ice cream, but this was intriguing. A great flavor (fig), combined with a beautiful tartness (yogurt), along with best texture for frozen desserts (gelato). It was outstanding, and I have not been able to find anything like it ever since…
Until yesterday!
Behold, Hellenika Cultured Gelato:
I don’t think I will ever purchase another brand of ice cream at the store ever again. It is the most perfect ice cream I have ever tasted. The creamiest mouthfeel, wonderful flavor combinations, and that little bit of tang which reminds you this is no ordinary substance.
Hellenika is a small creamery run by three Greek/Australian siblings with a single location in Pike Place Market in Seattle. Until recently, it was not available in stores, but you can now pick up pints in Metropolitan Market.
If you live in Seattle, you need to try this immediately.
If you don’t, you should try to get someone to mule you some in dry ice. Hopefully one day it will ship on Goldbelly.
Don’t get me wrong. I like a good low-grade Blue Bunny mini-cone as much as the next person, but I feel like we’ve passed through some sort of intergalactic hyperspace with this gelato. The future is now. Get this to your freezer any way you can. 🙌
⇗ America’s Best Decade, According to Data
The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.
I remember having a conversation with a friend of mine around 2016 about this, and he artfully explained this theory to me at the time. It was an aha moment for me, as I tend to view each new decade as "the best one" because of how the world has advanced over my lifetime. Your view on this appears to depend quite a bit on the degree to which the news you read enriches or poisons your psyche, but also the happiness and agency you feel over your own life as you've grown from a child into an adult. For some, this arrow points up, for others, it points down, but I bet the biggest increase in the last decade or so is those for whom the arrow points up but feels like it points down. Outrage and fear-fueled information platforms are partially to blame, but so is the very American culture of determining your own happiness by comparing yourself to your neighbors or peers.
I had the good fortune to attend the excellent Pearl Jam concert at Climate Pledge Arena last week, and it reminded me of something I already knew: I liked music in the 1990s more because I had the excitable mind of a teenager, and being 30 feet away from them brought me back to the very best of those times... but you couldn't pay me enough to go back in time to any decade.
There is no time like the present! 🙌
How to Order Fast Food while Inflicting as Little Damage to Yourself as Possible
Let’s get this out of the way first: I am not a dietician, an economist, or an ethicist. I am, however, a guy who likes to occasionally eat at fast food places. I’m also a guy who stops running over the winter, puts on a few pounds, and then has to lose them again in the spring… so I’ve been paying attention to how to eat “least badly” at fast food places.
Below is my dollar-store wisdom, in case you also want to enjoy fast food in moderation.
First, some golden rules:
Rule #1
No soda. This is an easy one. A medium Coke is 210 calories, 56 grams of carbs, and no protein. It’s also about $2 for something that costs about a nickel to make.
Instead, go with free tap water or an unsweetened iced tea. Zero calories and nothing artificial. Another nice hack that works at some places is going to the soda fountain and filling your water cup with club soda. There are usually two small tabs and one of them says “water”. The other one is the “off-menu” free club soda.
Rule #2
No fries… or if you must, get a small every now and then. I understand people like fries. I like fries too. But even a small order of fries is another 220 calories, 29 grams of carbs, and only 3 grams of protein.
Rule #3
Study menus for what’s overpriced and what’s underpriced. For instance, at Mickey Dee’s, a McChicken, a hamburger, and a 6-piece McNuggets are all $2 apiece or less. Meanwhile, a Double Bacon Quarter Pounder with Cheese is $7.
These places all encourage you to buy the Value Meals, but since you aren’t getting the soda or the fries, individual prices matter.
Now onto the meat of the matter: what should you order at each of the major national fast food places?
The Making of Blood Sugar Sex Magik
Everyone has their favorite album that never appears in any famous “Top 10 Albums of All Time” lists. That album, for me, is Blood Sugar Sex Magik, by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. To me, Blood Sugar is the greatest rock album of the last 25 years or so, and it is by far the best album the Red Hots have ever released. Much like U2, their commercial success continued long after their seminal album, but they were never able to match the energy, originality, and overall “breakthroughness” of their early work.
I have a theory that everyone’s all-time favorite album is one they heard during their formative music listening years (usually between age 15 and 25) and Blood Sugar falls right in the middle of that zone for me. There’s just something about how your brain works when you are that age which you can never reproduce later in life. You enjoy music now, but you were shaped by it then.
I remember reading an article (in Rolling Stone, I believe) 10 years ago or so about how this fantastic album was produced. It turns out instead of recording it in a studio, the band camped out in Harry Houdini’s old mansion and laid down each track in low-fi fashion using tools like metal pipe and an empty oil drum. I was amazed to find out how sophisticated of a sound they were able to produce with such a higgledy piggledy setup. The only modern musician I can think of who succeeds at this breed of music production today is Jack White.
So tonight, when one of my favorite cellists, Nick Ogawa (a.k.a. Takenobu), tweeted that he was researching how his favorite bands of old recorded their music, I asked him if he had heard the story of Blood Sugar. He said he hadn’t. I pointed him to a 60 minute documentary on the making of the album which he then discovered existed on Google Video here:
It’s a great documentary to watch if you enjoy this album as much as I do. It’s even been listed in some Top 20 Music Documentaries of All Time lists. It’s a bit NSFW at times, but it’s a great look into how great albums are created: with volatile personalities, at volatile times, in volatile surroundings.
How to Permanently Prevent OS X 10.7 Lion from ever Re-Opening Apps After a Restart
While the latest version of Mac OS X, Lion, is generally wonderful, there is one “feature” that annoys thousands of people to no end: whenever your machine is restarted, every single application you happen to have open at the time is also relaunched and restored to the state it was in before you restarted. If you restart manually via the “Restart…” menu item, there is a checkbox you can uncheck which is supposed to shut off this behavior but it doesn’t always work. Additionally, if your computer restarts for any other reason — e.g. a power failure or a crash — you don’t even have the option of trying to prevent this behavior.
The downside of the behavior is obvious: it increases the time it takes to start up your machine into a steady state and it re-opens apps you may not be using anymore.
If you want to prevent this behavior entirely, there is now a foolproof, fully reversible way to do it. Simply:
- Quit all of your apps.
- Navigate to here:
~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*.plist(whereby * is a bunch of characters) - Click the file, do a
File > Get Info(or command-I if you’re a pro), and lock it using theLockedcheckbox.
Voila. You’ve now prevented Lion from saving what apps and windows are open. To reverse this setting, simply unlock the file!
Another helpful hint as well: Lion, by default, hides your ~/Library/ folder. To make it visible again without showing all of your other invisible files, simply open up Terminal and type:
chflags nohidden ~/Library/
Never Be Another
When someone dies, the phrase “there will never be another” gets used quite frequently. It’s one of those phrases that is both always true and yet almost always not true. It’s true that, yes, no other person will ever be exactly like any other person, but it’s usually false in the compliment it’s actually trying to pay.
In almost every case, when a public figure dies, there are plenty of his or her contemporaries ready to fill the void. A great guitarist died? Well we at least have hundreds of other world class guitarists to listen to. A basketball star died? Luckily we have plenty of those too.
The truth of the matter is that even best of the best in most fields, at any given time, is only a little better than the rest.
Counterexamples to this seem to happen only a handful of times per century. The number of times we lose someone whose impact was so dramatic and whose substitute seems so unfathomable is vanishingly small.
We lost that person yesterday in Steve Jobs, and we are only beginning to feel the impact of his absence.
What gets lost in all of these Steve Jobs tributes you read online is just how dark things were for personal technology only ten years ago. People forget that until the iPhone came out, “The Apple Way” was still largely on the sidelines. Windows PCs were unavoidable. Cell phones were unapproachable. There were even a few years around the turn of the century when many websites didn’t even work on Macs because developers only coded to PC Internet Explorer “standards” (airiest of air quotes there, of course).
It was just dark as hell out there; especially for those of us who wanted so badly for the story to end differently. The lesson that idealism and attention to detail could lose out to “good enough and a little cheaper” was not something we wanted to learn.
The long, but impeccably planned, turnaround that Steve Jobs has led over the last 14 years is impressive for thousands of reasons. None is more astounding to me than this one though: he was quite literally the one person on the face of the earth capable of pulling it off.
One. Out of 6,800,000,000 people.
He wasn’t just the best choice. He was the only choice. And that’s why we’ll miss him so much.
When people die after suffering from prolonged illness or pain, my thoughts are almost always positive. Death is not something I fear, and when it’s ultimately the relief method for someone’s pain and suffering, I feel happy for their newfound peace. I felt this way when Kurt Cobain died, for instance.
With Steve Jobs, however, I don’t get the feeling death was any sort of relief at all. Yes he was obviously at peace with the concept, as he expressed beautifully in his Stanford commencement speech, but SJ put the pedal to the metal until his final breath.
What would you do if you knew you had a short time to live? Most of us would quit our jobs. Many of us would travel. Some of us would relax and keep our stress levels down. What did Steve do? He hit the gas. He released the iPhone, unveiled the iPad, and led Apple to its current and still unfathomable status as the most valuable company in the world.
Just as incredibly, he was able to lift his body out of Apple without also removing his soul; on a day when many once feared AAPL stock would dive precipitously, it’s comfortably unchanged from the day before.
He had his flaws and he may not be the greatest person to ever live, but no one has ever left this world more on top than Steve Jobs has just left it.
Thanks for everything.
Mind Your MeTweets
You know how when someone compliments you, the first thing you do is e-mail everyone you know to tell them about the compliment?
No, you probably don’t, because you have the good sense not to do something like that.
Why then do so many people feel no shame in rampantly retweeting compliments they receive on Twitter? Some examples, with names changed to protect the guilty:
“RT @joesmith I just heard the most wonderful speech from @lisafrench. That girl is a genius.” (retweeted by @lisafrench)
“RT @fred24 Just saw @jasongotham’s redesign. So good. So jealous!” (retweeted by @jasongotham)
“RT @cakester Scrummify’s sign-up process is a thing of beauty.” (retweeted by @scrummify or an employee of Scrummify)
Let’s count the number of things wrong with this practice:
- In real life, it’s considered impolite to brag. Unless you are authoring an anonymous satirical account on Twitter, this is your real life.
- If your intent is to spread a compliment your product received, you’re spreading it to people who are already believers, or at the very least, already aware of your product. You want other people to spread it. Oh wait, they already are.
- You’re filling your followers’ Twitter feeds not with your own thoughts, but with other people’s thoughts… thoughts about you. The practice of retweeting insults about you on Twitter can also be controversial, but that’s a different beast altogether; one that aims to dismantle trollery by elevating it ironically.
I know many people view Twitter as a medium that can be used by anyone in any manner they see fit — without regard to how other people use it or how other people think it should be used — but I’m not really talking about Twitter here. I’m talking about basic manners. Your mom taught you them when you were young. They haven’t changed that much.
Try not to forget them.
Reducing your DirecTV channels down to something reasonable
If you don’t have DirecTV, you can go ahead and skip this post. Just thought I’d post this list of non-shopping, non-religious, non-infomercial, non-stupid channels in the DirecTV channel lineup. When you sign up for DirecTV, you have somewhere between 200 and 900 channels and navigating through them via the guide takes 15 minutes per rotation.
To make your life a lot easier, you should delete all of these unnecessary channels off of your receiver as soon as you can. Since I’ve been through this process several times, I thought I’d publish my list of channels to keep, in order to give others a head start. Here they are:
4, 5, 7, 9, 11, 13, 16, 22, 28, 101, 202, 206-209, 212, 229, 231, 232, 235-237, 241, 242, 244, 245, 247-249, 251-254, 256, 258, 264-267, 271, 276-278, 280-286, 304, 306-308, 335, 337, 355, 356, 501-505, 507-509, 515-517, 525-531, 535-542, 545-552, 554-559, 603, 614, 687, 688-1
Note that this is from the Seattle channel lineup so your mileage under channel 100 may vary. Happy deleting!
A Train that Never Stops
I have been pitching this concept for at least seven years now to anyone who would listen: a train that never stops but instead uses accelerating and decelerating pods to shuttle passengers on and off at each approaching stop.
Normally, when I’ve drawn this out for people, the concept has been met with a reaction along the lines of “uhhh, good luck with that one!” The only difference in what I’ve been pitching and the concept in the video below (via kottke), is that my model uses individual pods instead of one big “group pod” in order to let people off and on at even more desirable locations, but it’s great to see someone finally put something like this into a video animation:
If I’ve thought of it, and now these people in Asia have thought of it, countless others have probably thought of it as well. Now it’s just time to make it happen. A great train ride is the most enjoyable way to travel, in my opinion.
What affects the taste of tap water?
The tap from the Waitsburg cemetery. Even the dead people get to benefit. (photo by J.C. Westbrook)
I don’t drink a lot of water, mainly because I’ve never really loved the taste. That, and I’ve always thought the whole “8 glasses a day” thing is bullshit. On a trip to Walla Walla wine country a couple of weeks ago, however, we stopped in a quiet little town called Waitsburg that is a dead ringer for Radiator Springs (from the Pixar movie “Cars”). We had a delectable dinner at the phenomenal Jimgermanbar but perhaps the most amazing part of the meal for me was the tap water. It was the first time in my life I ever remember thinking to myself how great a glass of water tasted.
Pure, zero flavor wetness without even a hint of aftertaste. Even at room temperature.
I asked our waitress about it and she said people comment about it a lot so I had her pour me two magnum bottles full and I brought it home (well, Tiffehr brought it home). Upon arriving back in Seattle, I had a few co-workers taste it and they also had positive reviews. Then I did a blind taste-test at home and it won with flying colors.
I’m now reasonably sure this is the best water I’ve ever been in the presence of, so of course my curiosity continues to grow. In researching the peculiarities of water taste, I came across this great but suuuuuuper fugly article explaining how minerals and other things affect the taste of water. Hint: use this readability widget to decrappify the layout.
Lots of interesting stuff in there. I’m convinced this water is extremely pure and contains very little mineral content, and now I want to have it tested. Anybody know what the easiest way to do this is? Are there local labs that will charge you a few bucks to quench your obsessive curiosities? If so, I’m all over it… and will report the results back here of course.