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.

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!

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?

Restaurant-specific recommendations

The general pattern you are aiming for is “one or two protein-filled items and a water or tea”. Let’s see what each place can offer you in that regard.

McDonald’s

People like to rip on McD’s because it’s the canonical fast food restaurant, but it’s usually quite solid in terms of food predictability. One strange thing about the place though: pretty much all new items they ever add to their menu suck. Crispy Fried Chicken sando? Not great. Arch Deluxe? Not great. Buttermilk Fried Whatever? Not great. To succeed at McDonald’s you need to stick with the classics… the stuff that’s been on their menu for decades.

My three favorite orders here are:

• Two hamburgers with ketchup and mustard only. 500 calories and 24 grams of protein. About $4. That’s right. Regular old J. Wellington Wimpy style hamburgers. Always tasty and tidy enough to eat while you’re driving. You can leave the pickles and onions on if you want, but I feel they drag the quality down.
• One hamburger with ketchup and mustard only and a 6-piece McNuggets. 500 calories and 26 grams of protein. About $4. Same idea as the first order but more variety of flavor for you.
• One McChicken sando. 400 calories and 14 grams of protein. About $2. This is probably the best value on the entire McD’s menu. You could consider cutting the mayo to lower the calories but you need some sort of sauce on there. Dry sandwiches are for raccoons and pigeons.

Burger King

I have friends who swear that Burger King is the only fast food place they won’t go to, for well-documented reasons, but I think it’s generally fine. I don’t seek it out, but if it’s there, I will consider partaking, if for no other reason than a change of pace.

Some BK ideas:

• Whopper Jr. All Whoppers are giant, messy, and filled with calories, but the Jr. is manageable. Weighing in at only 336 calories, with 15 grams of protein, and about $4.30, it’s a solid choice.
• Rodeo Burger. I’ll be honest, in researching this article I had never even heard of the Rodeo Burger so I went down to my local BK to give it a shot. Holy shit… this might be my new favorite fast food item. A nice, tidy burger with BBQ sauce and onion rings in it, and it’s only 336 calories? With 13 grams of protein and only $1.29, I am comfortable saying this is the best deal in fast food right now.
• Spicy Chicken Jr. Alright, we are already running out of things to order at Burger King, so I’ll just include the only other acceptable item in here. It’s not the best chicken sandwich in the world, but at 386 calories, it’s a whopping 74% less calorific than the 1498 calorie “Spicy Ck’King Deluxe” sando. Holy crap. Also, 11.5 grams of protein and it’s only a dollar!!!

I wanted to include the Impossible Whopper in here, but like all other “regular” sized burgers at BK, it’s pretty huge and loaded with calories. Also, it tastes exactly like a Whopper, so you can use your own judgement as to whether that’s a good thing or a bad thing. Impossible Meat is so tasty on its own that you are better off making your own burger out of Impossible Sausage at home.

Time for another fast food video review. This time we try an under-the-radar item from Burger King that has actually been around for quite awhile: The Rodeo Burger! pic.twitter.com/KDxmfHVmGf

— Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) February 19, 2022

Jack In The Box

Jack gets a bad wrap, and I’m not entirely sure why. They almost went out of business after an E. coli scare in the mid ’90s, but since then, I feel like they have been consistently one of the best and most innovative fast food joints around. They also have some of the very best commercials of all time:

Probably my favorite thing about Jack in the Box is that they’ve been piling new stuff onto to their menu for the last 30 years and never take anything off of it. Want a classic Jumbo Jack? No problem. French toast sticks? We got you. Teriyaki bowl? Giddyup. You could literally order all three of those things during a single trip to the drive thru.

Unfortunately however, most of things on the menu are better suited for your already-in-shape summer body. Take for instance, the Grande Sausage Breakfast Burrito, which weighs in at a whopping 1040 calories. I’m not a believer in breakfast burritos as a thing that should even exist in this world, but it’s just important to pay attention to these giant menus because trouble is around every corner.

Some ideas for your next trip to Jack in the Box:

• One of the healthiest things at Jack is something I have been ordering since its introduction in 1988: the Chicken Fajita Pita. Every time I order one, I am half expecting the person behind the counter to look at me funny and say “we haven’t had those for decades, pal!” but nope, they seem to always have one at the ready. With 27 grams of protein and only 330 calories, this is guilt-free fast food at its finest. $4.79 isn’t dirt cheap, but just think of it as a small price to pay for (perhaps) adding extra days or weeks to your life.
• The Junior Jumbo Jack is an oddly named burger that should perhaps just be called “The Jack” at this point, but it’s a good option if you need your burger fix but don’t want to feel gross afterwards. It’s still 420 calories and only 14 grams of protein, so not nearly as good of a proposition as, say, Burger King’s Rodeo Burger, but it probably won’t kill you. It’s also only $1.39 so how are you going to complain too much?
• The last item I’m going to recommend at Jack in the Box may shock you: the Two Tacos deal. Oh boy, where to even start with these things. They aren’t so much tacos as they are Flappy Meat Pockets. They look nothing like they do in the amazing commercials, but once they are in your stomach, you can’t really tell the difference. Two of these bad boys are only 99 cents, and contain a total of 340 calories and 12 grams of protein. If you’re low on dough, you could keep yourself alive on these things for months before your body slapped you upside your face and asked you what it did to deserve this. Seriously though, they’re not bad. You just need to believe.

Wendy’s

I don’t know why Wendy’s isn’t more popular. A solid menu with good ingredients and IMHO the best fries in the business. Some good orders from Wendy’s:

• Dave’s Single, no cheese, no onion. Listed at 590 calories and 29 grams of protein, but without the cheese it’s probably more like 500 and 24. About $5.
• Grilled Chicken Sandwich. 350 calories, 33 grams of protein and $5.50. A good thing to order if you want to sneak in a small order of Wendy’s excellent fries.
• Spicy Chicken Sandwich. 500 calories, 28 grams of protein, and $5.50. Pound for pound, not nearly as healthy as the grilled chicken, but a big taste upgrade. Deffo skip the fries if you order this one though.

Wendy’s also has some other interesting items like chili, baked potatoes, and Frostys, but this is not what we go to fast food restaurants for. Canned chili is just as good, if not better, and you can find a lot better ice cream than what you get in a Frosty. Don’t waste your calories on this stuff.

Chipotle

Out of all restaurants in this list, I feel healthiest when eating at Chipotle. I think if it was a sit down restaurant that served you your food on a ceramic plate, no one would even accuse it of being “fast casual”, let alone “fast food”. It’s just really tasty Tex-Mex, made quickly (through the magic of sous vide!), and offered affordably.

My go-to orders at Chipotle:

• You may be on team burrito, but I am team taco all the way. Better portion control, crispier produce, easier to stuff in your mouth. A reasonably dressed, crisp taco is only 170 calories, with 11 grams of protein, for $2.75. Barbacoa is by far their tastiest meat, but the vegan chorizo and sofritas vegetarian options are great as well. I usually get three, but through the magic of taco-specific portion control, you can dial it up or down.
• If you’re trying to go even healthier, Chipotle now has a wide variety of bowls to choose from that are all pretty good. Choose vegan chorizo for your protein, stay away from things like sour cream or rice, and go to town. You can get yourself a protein-packed, veggie-rich lunch for under $10.

Chick-fil-A

There are a lot of moral dilemmas one must wrestle with when choosing to eat meat — especially meat from fast food places — but Chick-fil-A offers up another dilemma entirely: is it ok to eat at restaurants whose leaders look down on people based on their sexual orientation?

If you look closely enough, you will probably find that a lot of the companies you give money to are reprehensible in one awful way or another, but given what we know about Chick-fil-A, I have tried to eliminate my patronage there.

I did, however, find one neat trick recently that will keep me from ever having the urge to go there again. Chick-fil-A sauce in a bottle. It’s only $5 at your local grocery store, and at least for me, it’s about a two-year supply. Do they make a couple of bucks off me? Sure. But it pales in comparison to making regular visits to that place. F’ that place, and f’ it twice on Sundays.

KFC

I can’t in good conscience recommend going to KFC if you are trying to shave off a few pounds, but I did go there the other day to try the “Beyond” Chicken Nuggets, so I thought I’d post the video:

Alright, as requested, video review time! I will also say that after I ate these first two ones, there were some less fresh ones in the box, and as some people mentioned, there is a substantial quality difference. pic.twitter.com/nJg08nT00i

— Mike Davidson (@mikeindustries) January 29, 2022

To sum it all up…

The goal of this post is not to tell you what the very tastiest items are at each restaurant. If you don’t care about calories or feeling gross — as I didn’t until I hit my mid-forties — go to town and eat whatever you want. But if you’ve successfully migrated to a healthy diet 6 days a week and just want to get your grease game on once in awhile, I hope this article has been helpful to you. As bad as some of this food might be for you, eating a single portion of it three or four times a month probably won’t affect you too much.

I also look forward to food engineering really coming into its own over the next decade. We spent the ’80s and ’90s making food demonstrably worse for you and worse for the planet, but with recent innovations in food science, we can now do amazing things like make real cheese without cows. The 2010s ushered in the golden age of ice cream (among other things), but my bet is the 2020s and ’30s will be the golden age of high-quality, lab-assisted healthy food. If you want to find out more about it, watch David Chang’s The Next Thing You Eat on Hulu.

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.

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:

1. Quit all of your apps.
2. Navigate to here: ~/Library/Preferences/ByHost/com.apple.loginwindow.*.plist (whereby * is a bunch of characters)
3. Click the file, do a File > Get Info (or command-I if you’re a pro), and lock it using the Locked checkbox.

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/

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.

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:

1. In real life, it’s considered impolite to brag. Unless you are authoring an anonymous satirical account on Twitter, this is your real life.
2. 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.
3. 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.

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!

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.

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.

By the way, why is it that the guys in the video look ten times as dorky wearing this thing than the girls do?

Also, why do I still totally want one?

(R) Alabama – 9
(R) Alaska – 3
(R) Arizona – 10
(R) Arkansas – 6
(D) California – 55
(D) Colorado – 9
(D) Connecticut – 7
(D) Delaware – 3
(D) Florida – 27
(R) Georgia – 15
(D) Hawaii – 4
(R) Idaho – 4
(D) Illinois – 21
(D) Indiana – 11
(D) Iowa – 7
(R) Kansas – 6
(R) Kentucky – 8
(R) Louisiana – 9
(D) Maine – 4
(D) Maryland – 10
(D) Massachusetts – 12
(D) Michigan – 17
(D) Minnesota – 10
(R) Mississippi – 6
(D) Missouri – 11
(R) Montana – 3
(R) Nebraska – 5
(D) Nevada – 5
(D) New Hampshire – 4
(D) New Jersey – 15
(D) New Mexico – 5
(D) New York – 31
(D) North Carolina – 15
(D) North Dakota – 3
(D) Ohio – 20
(R) Oklahoma – 7
(D) Oregon – 7
(D) Pennsylvania – 21
(D) Rhode Island – 4
(R) South Carolina – 8
(R) South Dakota – 3
(R) Tennessee – 11
(R) Texas – 34
(R) Utah – 5
(D) Vermont – 3
(D) Virginia – 13
(D) Washington – 11
(D) Washington D.C. – 3
(R) West Virginia – 5
(D) Wisconsin – 10
(R) Wyoming – 3

Final Tally

Barack Obama: 378
John McCain: 160

I also think the race will be officially called by the networks within ten minutes of 10:15pm Eastern. This is just my opinion as an observer, of course. Best of luck to both candidates.

Today in the office, we had one of our recurring disagreements about what the most important element of bread is: freshness or “goodness”. In other words, would you rather eat bread that would be judged of Grade C based on ingredients and preparation but came out of the oven within the last hour or two, or bread that would be judged of Grade A based on ingredients and preparation but came out of the oven more like 24 hours ago?

The fresh vs. quality debate arose from another recurring office disagreement about Quiznos vs. Subway. Some have argued that Subway is better because its bread is fresher, while others have argued that Quiznos is better because its bread is of higher quality (both statements, you may of course disagree with).

To help settle these two arguments, please vote in the polls to the right, and leave any brilliant additional insights in the comments below.

Debates, theoretically, are rare opportunities to hear from candidates when their words are unscripted. In reality, however, candidates often prepare for weeks ahead of time, including last-minute intense cram sessions like the ones you remember from your college days.

What I love about the prospect of a debate Friday night is that both candidates have been severely preoccupied with the financial bailout fiasco all week and are likely much less prepared than they would otherwise be. I think seeing Barack Obama and John McCain debate each other without all of the usual coaching and grooming that goes on before debates will be an extraordinarily better view into how much each of them really knows about the financial crisis.

I want to see what each candidate will say in the middle of a storm, not after it. Debate on…

Side note: If you haven’t read the New York Times article linked to above yet, give it a read. It’s some pretty dramatic stuff, with Henry Paulson actually getting down on one knee in front of Nancy Pelosi.

Why a second blog when I only post to Mike Industries a few times a month? Well, I’m building a house, together with Build LLC.

The first thing I noticed after deciding to build a house is that there aren’t any well-written, well-designed, detail-oriented blogs about building a house from the perspective of someone who has never done it before. There are a number of books on the subject, several of which I’ve purchased and zero of which I’ve opened, as well as random articles and photos from people at various points in their construction, but nowhere could I find a start-to-finish, real-time chronology of the entire process. That ends today.

Ahousebythepark.com will cover searching for the right property, dealing with real estate agents, interviewing and choosing an architect, making your way through the design and build process, and probably a thousand other things… all with the goal of helping future custom home builders better prepare for their own projects. I’ve backdated a bunch of entries before pushing the site live so there are already 26 posts to thumb through.

Somebody told me once that every human being should go through the home building process once in their lifetime. I don’t know if I agree with that, but if you feel you may ever decide to build a home for yourself, I invite you to subscribe to A House By The Park’s RSS feed and follow passively until something strikes your interest. I can’t guarantee the same highly intellectual nuggets of thought that fill the pages of Mike Industries, but I will try to write with the same level of detail and accuracy. For instance, I’m making my entire spreadsheet of expenses available online and within the blog posts themselves so readers can get a specific idea of what everything costs (Yay EditGrid! Separate post on this coming soon).

Finally, please feel free to link to or write about A House By The Park on your own site or other places of interest. Every little link helps. I estimate there are somewhere between 5,000 and 10,000 subscribers to Mike Industries so there are always great comments here, but on launch day, A House By The Park will have zero. Writing stuff is no fun until intelligent discussion and/or controversy ensues.

So that’s the pitch. Head on over, the water’s warm. I’ve even published a top-to-bottom complete chronology page to get you all caught up from the beginning without having to jump from page to page.