Wednesday, July 16, 2008

corn and iphones!

corn is in season now and 50 cents an ear in my neck of the woods. has been for a few weeks now. i really love when corn is in season. i'm still perfecting my grilling technique for grilled corn. it's easy to think it's too dark! take it off! and then be bummed that you should have left it on for like, 18 minutes longer.

so it's... soak the corn, cook the corn, butter the corn, season with (salt + pepper + cayenne + whatever? or leave your own suggestion in the comments?), then eat, right? how long does it have to stay on?! argh. how can you tell when it's done to ohshit i burned it?

sooo... besides corn, what else is there to do on a tuesday night? I know! let's surf the tubes!

wait, do you know what surfing the tubes even is? ok, back up backup. do you know who senator ted stevens is? of alaska?

he's this old fart who's almost certainly corrupt (not a little corrupt either, but i'm just saying, whatevs). you may remember him from his frequent clips on the daily show. some old jackass on the senate floor yelling NO!

aaaanyway, there was something that happened awhile ago. stevens was talking to somebody about something and it was being recorded. they started talking about the internet... and he starts trying to explain it or something, which sorta comes off .... just wrong. it's like he's explaining it to himself but the details are just not right; clearly stevens just does. not. get. it. which is sort-of understandable. i mean, the guy is older than alaska. he's probably as old as abe lincoln! imagine trying to explain fucking match-dot-com to abe lincoln, should the opportunity present itself. as smart as we figure that guy was, that'd be a LOT of explaining, right?

so stevens rambles for awile, which is hilarious, and eventually gets to how the internet isn't a truck, it's ... a series of tubes. it's... it's pretty awesome. checkit:



besides ted stevens (no!) what else do we got... ok, time for another recommendation.

you should be checking out slate. they cover a bunch of stuff and mostly are funny... like this iphone review I found titled Can I Resist the iPhone 3G? An Apple obsessive confronts the company's shiny new bauble .


it's fun and worth checking out. my favorite quote:

The first thing I noticed was that even though the iPhone 3G is slightly bigger than the original, it felt a tad lighter. Otherwise, my old iPhone and his new one were all but identical. The first iPhone was a revolution in smartphone design and a dramatic leap forward into an age of ubiquitous connectivity. To match the original in revolutionariness, the 3G version would have to fire lasers, electronically impregnate you with your own clone, or at least be way smaller. But this was … the same thing. I mean, I knew the two phones were to be basically the same, but seeing this with my own eyes made a difference.

there's also a bunch of other stuff. they try to do sports, like Derek Jeter vs. Objective Reality Why baseball researchers are obsessed with denigrating the Yankee captain's defense


the article read more like an analysis than a fun read...
One reason why baseball statisticians didn't get too excited about the study is that Jensen's methods ("for each grounder ball-in-play—g-bip—we have the—x,y—coordinates in the field where the g-bip was fielded" and on and on) are grounded in the familiar language of the sabermetric literature. Mostly, though, the paper didn't provoke much intrigue because Jeter's badness is already an axiom of said literature. In fact, debunking the conventional wisdom about the Yankee captain's fielding prowess has become a standard method of proving the validity of a new fielding statistic.

they have a bushism of the day section. today's is
"Should the Iranian regime—do they have the sovereign right to have civilian nuclear power? So, like, if I were you, that's what I'd ask me. And the answer is, yes, they do."—Speaking to reporters in Washington, D.C., July 2, 2008

so basically... what I'm saying is eat corn if it's in season near you, don't be afraid to blacken the corn, and read slate, because mostly it's fun.

3 comments:

jay mcg said...

aaaand leave any corn grilling or seasoning tips please

Anonymous said...

No grilling ideas but if you have freezer space, buy a bunch now, blanch and freeze it. You'll have good corn all year round.

Here's a cool site to check out: http://www.pickyourown.org/

jay mcg said...

thanks, pam! the allure of the second fridge/freezer is powerful, but we have not yet succumbed.

as it is our freezer is kind of a game... the name of the game is: "how much do we need to eat out of the freezer this week in order to be able to go to the grocery store and pick up something that goes in the freezer"