The Six (?) Best Songs That Would Be Really Great If They Didn't Have That One Part In Them. (SemiDaily List!)

I think the title pretty much explains this one, doesn't it?

I love music as much as the next guy, unless the next guy hates music, in which case I love music a lot more than the next guy, and what's his deal, anyway? I can understand not being crazy about music, not caring about it one way or the other, really, not thinking much about it, but hating music? Really? Lighten up, next guy?

What really bugs me about music, though, aside from the lingering feeling that the Next Guy has issues that he needs to address, are when people take a perfectly good song and throw something into it that just wrecks the song, that derails it and leaves you scratching your head and thinking "What's going on there?" It's like they're trying to ruin the song.

It's hard to explain, so let me jump into the list and begin with an example of a really great song that just falls apart at one point and then tries to pull itself back together. Here's song number one on this list,

1. Englishman In New York, Sting.



What's Great About This Song: 99% of it. The chamber-music, quiet quality of it embodies what many people associate with the English, or, as they're sometimes called, "the British," but it's not I'm a Britishman In New York, so I'm going with English. Also, correct me if I'm wrong*

*Don't.

but aren't Englishmen specifically from England, while you could be British and from, say, Wales, because it's a part of Great Britain?**

**I think.

It's quiet, civilized, proper, and moves along briskly, just like the English.

What Goes Wrong: Drum solo at 2:36; Did Sting owe his drummer a favor? Is that supposed to poetically illustrate the cognitive dissonance***

***I can use big words, too, you know.

of an Englishman living in New York? Because it doesn't work. It's the equivalent of someone suddenly smacking you in the back of the head during a discussion of poetry, and then going back to what they were saying. You can't shake it off and it lingers with you the rest of the song, turning a nice little musical number into an annoying piece of work. And even if that was the point, it's a stupid point to make; we can gather that an Englishman in New York might find the experience somewhat unsettling without being rabbit punched, Sting. A true poet does it with his words. W.H. Auden didn't come over to people's houses and beat them about the neck with J. Alfred Prufrock's love song.

Get what I'm talking about? See if number two helps clarify the point.

2. You Dress Up For Armageddon, The Hives.



What's Great About This Song: Most of it. I'm off again/on again about The Hives' particular kind of garage/grunge rock; The White Stripes did it better and The Strokes were hipper, but The Hives can still put together a good song when they try hard enough. Armageddon has a sort of early-Green Day Hitchin' A Ride beat to it with just enough clashy-guitars and shaggy shouted choruses to enjoy this song that appears to be about a guy who's turning down a (possibly crossdressing?) Goth because of their differences. It's got a good beat and you can dance to it, but I don't recommend doing that in your car, because you should be driving.

What Went Wrong: Quiet part with a pause beginning about 2:15, and ending with "But I disagree." The actual lyrics are:

Who is the man with the microphone?
Today he is here but tomorrow he is gone

But I disagree

And not only does the tone of the song shift for just a few seconds to a quiet, creepy kind of thing, but those lyrics make no sense in the context of the rest of the song -- even if I'm wrong about what the song's about.***

***I'm not.

Is it a newsbreak? Is the quieter tone meant to emphasize the raucous nature of the rest of the song? Either way, it's annoying and makes me less likely to listen to the song when it comes up on shuffle.

2A.: Well Alright The Hives:



What's Great About It: When I first posted this on a Sunday morning, I was going off memory rather than my usual written-down-over-time lists, and later on that morning, after a walking on a treadmill for a while -- the spot I typically get my best ideas -- I remembered this song, and how much I liked the stomp-and-rock feel of it, until...

What Went Wrong: ... at 1:40 they slow it down to mope about for a bit, and I don't get why they felt the need to do that, because while that might work on some songs, on this one, it doesn't at all. It's like that moment at a dinner party when the conversation's been going well and the talk is lively and then one member of a couple says something kind of mean about another couple that hints at a fight which occurred on the way over and which is clearly going to be continued after the party, and everyone tries to ignore it, but things never really get back their verve.

Now on to one that really hurts:

3. Modern Love, by David Bowie:



What's Great About This Song: Almost... almost... everything. I love this song, which should be a part of every person's musical library. Even Next Guy's. It is, to put it simply, The greatest rock song ever recorded. Even with the flaw. And I've said that since it came out. For over 20 years, I have listed, at the top of the Greatest Rock Songs Ever, two songs:

1. Modern Love, and
2. Faith, by George Michael.

Three-through-infinity have changed, but positions 1 and 2 never changed. So it's very hard for me to say

What Went Wrong: It's that sax solo. At about 1:45, the sax solo comes in and takes front and center, and I... hate ... it. I grit my teeth through it and try to rationalize it: Oh, it was the 80s; everybody had a sax solo. Clarence Clemons even had a hit record. But it makes it so hard to love this song. It's like when Brett Favre started sexting, or when Obama gave up being president and began counting the days until he could go back to Chicago. You really really want to forgive them, but the best you can do is try to look the other way.

Especially when he lets the sax guy do it again at the end of the song. On to song number 4:

4. Folding Chair, Regina Spektor.



What's Great About This Song: Ever since I first discovered her song Fidelity I have been a diehard Regina Spektor fan, and I have a whole special playlist on my iPod for her songs -- the only artist to merit such a position. And Folding Chair is among the best of them: the hopeful upbeat manner of the song jibing perfectly with the lyrics to create an optimistic but still somehow realistic view of a relationship that's just beginning.

What Went Wrong: Really, Regina? You had to sound like a dolphin? Do you know how hard it is to get people to listen to a song after that happens? I know you were trying to be playful, but it comes off as amazingly lame. When, in writing the song, you inserted [Make dolphin sounds here] you ought to have chuckled and then hired help to follow you around to ever avoid thinking that again.

Also, you really sound more like a seal.

Speaking of people misjudging their singing:

5. Dearest, Buddy Holly:



What's Great About This Song: Not only is this song kind of ahead of its time for the 50s -- it seems oddly out-of-place with what I imagine I know about that era -- but the Juno soundtrack was the only lasting good effect of Diablo Cody's short-lived Hollywood career, and this was on it. It's a sweet, kind of dreamlike ode to someone the singer is in love with; the whole song feels like it should be set to a montage of people romping in the summer sunlight. George Lucas should've used it for Anakin and Padme's love interlude on Naboo.

What Went Wrong: At 1:10, Buddy kind of turns from a guy in love to an overly-breathy stalkerish serial killer, mumbling scarily I love you... I love you... into the microphone. Listen to it carefully, and then imagine hearing that over the phone late at night. And oh my god, the call is coming from inside your house!

6. All My Friends, LCD Soundsystem.



What's Great About This Song: I don't really get LCD Soundsystem. I picked up this album after The New Yorker wrote an article about how they record in rooms lined with aluminum foil and quoted the lead singer (?) as follows:

“LCD live was set up to be an argument about what’s wrong with bands and why bands should be better,” Murphy said. “Nobody onstage can hear anything the audience doesn’t hear. No click tracks, no guides… If it’s an organic sound, it absolutely cannot be put on a sampler… No sunglasses. No rocking out… No pretending you’re cool.

So I wanted to see what that was about, because pretending is about as close to cool as I can get. I then picked up the album that had All My Friends on it and I really liked the song -- the driving beat, the lyrics about where your friends are and being nostalgic and lost in adult life, the repetition of the piano chords...

What Went Wrong: The repetition of the piano chords... the repetition of the piano chords... this song goes on for seven minutes. That is a long time to basically hear the same two notes over and over, and it deters me from listening to the song at all, for the same reason I don't like hourlong TV shows: I feel it might be too much of a commitment from me. When the song comes on, I think "Am I up for this right now? Am I ready to be this intensely committed?" and the answer is usually no and I skip ahead to Convoy. Cut that song in half and I'd consider moving it higher on the playlist. As it is, I can't always promise I'm going to devote 7 minutes of my life -- that's nearly 0.000000001% -- to this song, and that, in turn, makes me even less likely to go listen to other LCD Soundsystem songs, because I expect they, too, might end up being kind of needy and clingy and keep talking to me forever and not let me get on with my life.

So congratulations, LCD Soundsystem: You made a song that exactly mirrors what I was like in seventh grade.

Read more Best Of Musics here.

Read more SemiDaily Lists here.

Welcome a new TBOE reader! Oh, and some stuff about cooking (POP!Best!)

Or maybe two new readers: A Twofer Sunday! Or something.

Hot on the heels of my posting The Best Cookbook, in which I opined that

We have, then, reached a point in our culture where cooking is purely for entertainment,

and also noted that

Cooking... has all the other hallmarks of an art that isn't practiced by most people. We have more TV shows about chefs and cooking than we do about detectives with troubled homelives, and we have shows about restaurants and how to find them, and we have shows where cooks go to restaurants. We've done from dinner theater to dinner as theater...

Which I thought was clever, and which also spurred on a Chicago chef and a New York food writer to use me as their muse; in a New York Times article titled (less cleverly) In Chicago, The Chef Grant Achatz Is Selling Tickets To His New Restaurant, food writer Pete Wells expands on my thesis:

BY this point, nearly everyone agrees that dining out has replaced going to the theater and that chefs are rock stars. So why don’t restaurants sell tickets? Grant Achatz, the highly praised chef of Alinea in Chicago, has asked himself the same question.

Grant Achatz didn't just ask himself the question I thought of first, but he answered it by deciding that (as the NYT headline spoiled for you) he's going to sell tickets to his restaurant, called Next (which is a pun -- because not only is it Grant's next restaurant but it's the next thing in restaurants. I'm starting to really like Grant.)

Tickets will go for $45-$75, assuming you don't buy them from a scalper and assuming you don't get confused and buy old tickets to a Charlie Sheen live show, and can be resold; the cost of the ticket includes the whole shebang, as nobody in the restaurant business says but they should: drinks, food, and whatever else it is people get in restaurants that don't have playlands (the only kind of restaurants I eat in anymore.)

And, apparently, restaurants sans playlands feature more than just mere food and drink from this era: Grant Achatz is going to time travel:

The menu will change four times a year, with each new edition featuring the cuisine of a particular place and time. When the restaurant opens, Mr. Achatz said, the theme will be Paris in 1912, with painstakingly researched evocations of Escoffier-era cuisine. Three months later, the kitchen will turn out a fresh set of recipes — evoking, say, postwar Sicily, or Hong Kong 25 years from now, with modern techniques employed to imagine the future of Chinese cuisine.

One side effect of all this rock starrery is to put the hurt on waiters:

But the plan would also have value for Mr. Achatz and his main partner in Next and Alinea, Nick Kokonas. By law, restaurants may distribute tips only to those employees who work in service. But the service charge included in the ticket price “gives him control over the money,” said Bill Guilfoyle, an associate professor of business management at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y. “He can give it to whomever he sees fit.”

Mr. Achatz could pay cooks more than members of the wait staff, a reversal of the usual pecking order that could allow him to recruit shining kitchen talent.

Really? Waiters make more than cooks at restaurants? Is that true of every industry, that the person who carries things for you makes more than the people that make the stuff? Because I thought that the rule of Less Talent=More Money applied only to banks and Fox News contributors.

Of course, the idea that cooking is entertainment didn't originate with me...





Click here for more Best Of Foods

Click here for more POP!Bests

Click here to see who else reads this blog.

But when will we see "High School Musical 2" uncut? (Star Wars References)

I've been sitting on this one for a few weeks, hoping that I could finish watching it, but I haven't yet.

Remember that there are, by my estimate, over 33,000 movies made every second. (That's gotta be close, right? I mean, just consider how often J.J. Abrams combines Stand By Me with Signs to come up with a supposedly original movie like Super8*

*According to Entertainment Weekly's summer movie preview** which I tepidly paged through last night before rewatching the "Ladder to Heaven" episode of South Park, the movie Super8 will feature a widowed cop trying to reconnect with his son while four geeky kids filming a movie find an alien by the train tracks. So I'm not making up that mash-up stuff. It's real..

**Also, Sweetie says that we cannot go see Thor for our anniversary in May, which I was upset about until I read in the preview that Thor isn't actually a god in this movie, he's an alien.***

***That, too, is not made up.

So with 33,000 movies per second to choose from, including classics like Casablanca (never seen it) and Citizen Kane (never wanted to) and The Godfather (found it boring) and Revenge of the Nerds (a classic that will live forever), you can guess which movie fans opted to remake on their own, submitting fifteen-second clips online to form the entire movie in a grand homage ... no, that's not right.

In a tribute to..., no, not right either.

In something to something:

Star Wars.

Of course.

That, as I hastily glossed over, is the conceit and concept behind "Star Wars Uncut," a title I don't get: A Star Wars fan (which we all, by international law, are deemed to be) decided to cut the movie into fifteen second snippets and then have people around the world film their own homemade versions of them. The clips were then submitted, the best were voted on, and the results tallied and assembled into:

Star Wars Uncut.

(I know it was anticlimactic, but I forgot I already told you about the title.)

You can watch the entire movie on the Star Wars Uncut website. For a taste of what you're getting, here's a clip from "today's scene," titled Look, sir, droids!

Searching bots from ghent ooo on Vimeo.

The movie really is more entertaining than it might sound; I've watched it up to the part where the jawas meet Luke to sell some droids to Uncle Owen, and I can honestly say that it's better than 98% of the home movies I've made. (I still consider my magnum opus, titled "Mr F On The Swings" to be the greatest piece of filmmaking Western civilization has ever seen.)

The Six Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #6.

I'm a little reluctant to actually finish a MiniBest, as I traditionally like to cut these things off before the end, but I take some solace in the fact that I'm no longer limiting this MiniBest to things I've actually seen on TV, and I blame that, actually on TV.

Or, rather, on TV's lack of creativity when it comes to ads -- because if ads were better, I wouldn't be so inclined to skip past them and continue watching whatever show it is I'm currently fixated on watching (The Big Bang Theory) but would watch the ads.

But ads are pretty lame, and TV continues to not make interesting or funny ads, and continues to also not take my innovative solutions for how to get people to actually watch ads, which include:

1. Creating ads that can only be viewed when you're fast-forwarding, so that when you hit FF to skip past an ad, the Inter-ad appears and plays in, say, three seconds. Decide to skip that Burger King ad because the King is kind of creepy, and end up with a McDonald's ad exhorting you to go buy a baked apple pie.*

*McDonald's has probably trademarked Baked Apple Pie, given that they've trademarked just about everything else, including the prefix "Mc," which McDonald's once successfully pointed out in court was it's to use exclusively. So I'm using this at my own risk.

2. Putting little moving ads from corporate sponsors down in the corner of the TV screen, where they currently put tiny ads for their own shows, and allowing viewers to click on those ads to have them play; they could roll through little text/promotional spots that might catch your eye as you watch the show.

Both of those are genius ideas that someday will be adopted but will still not lead to more interesting commercials, so I'll probably still tune them out and not be introduced to exciting new products that I've seen on TV, and will have to continue using the better part of my "work" day to seek out new things to want to buy.

Which is why the Internet exists. That, and, of course, porn. But I never look at that.**

**Honestly, Sweetie, I don't. It was probably a virus.

Today, I looked up, because I was curious, clocks. I wanted to see what kind of innovations there'd been in clocks, because I think sometimes humanity has a tendency to leave well enough alone and not improve things because we think they're good already -- but if everyone thought that way, we'd still be driving around in buggies led by horses, albeit buggies led by horses that are guided by GPS and have MP3 players in them, because even if cars hadn't been invented I'm pretty sure Steve Jobs would have still come up with the iPod, since he did that purely out of spite, the way he does everything.

I went looking for clocks to see how clocks had developed because clocks have been around a long time and are simple enough devices that uneducated carpenters can build them and then get rooked out of the prize money by the elitists who dislike him, so I assumed that our society would have come up with something better or more original or ... something. I assumed our society would have come up with something that was something-er about clocks.

What I found was actually somewhat depressing: most innovations in clockery over the course the centuries have involved new and kind of creative ways to make sure we actually get up when the alarm goes off. Some of those are clever, like the Sfera Hanging Alarm Clock, which hangs on a cord above your bed, and raises a little each time you hit "snooze" so that eventually you have to sit, then stand, up.

Some of them are even more clever, like Clocky, an alarm clock that wanders away before you can turn it off:



But all of them are just clocks, albeit clocks that move. They don't change the way we look at or think about clocks at all.

Then I found a list of the "10 Coolest Clocks," which amounted to clocks that were shaped like things, or which ran on unusual sources of power like oranges or water.

These clocks, too, which I found by searching for "most inventive clocks," were just clocks in different shapes.

It's not just me that wanted to see something more than just a clock, who wanted to see a different way of looking at time. Stephen Hawking (who steals material from Dane Cook) unveiled a clock called the "Time Eater" back in September 2008. Created by a horologist, the clock is described like this:

the unique clock, which has no hands or numbers, was revealed at Corpus Christi College. Dubbed the strangest clock in the world, it features a giant grasshopper and has 60 slits cut into its face which light up to show the time. Its creator John Taylor said he "wanted to make timekeeping interesting".

But looks like this:





So it looks, more or less, like a regular old clock, with a grasshopper sitting on it. And before you get all excited about the hyperbolic description of the clock as demonstrating that "time is relative," consider that the "Time Eater" clock is only accurate once every five minutes.

It took five years to make and is less accurate that simply estimating the time.

Again, I'm not sure what I was looking for -- but none of those things were it. None of them really made me think about something in a different way, which all of the inventions on this list (silly as some were) did: say what you want about rolling ice cream around the backyard, but it does show you that making ice cream isn't that difficult, and PajamaJeans raise the important philosophical question "Why don't we make clothing more comfortable?"

The thing is, it seems like we should have newer, or weirder, or different, clocks. Our world isn't the same world that James Harrison's world was, but we're using the same clocks. He had to invent a clock that would let people know when ships were going to run aground. Nowadays, we can get information around the world in a millisecond and can use GPS satellites to tell us exactly where our horses and buggies are, so clocks don't necessarily serve the same purpose.

(I note, too, that clocks don't necessarily work. I have five clocks in my office, and as I write this, they read: 10:02, 9:59, 9:58, 9:58, and 9:52 a.m.)

(That, more than a solid gold grasshopper, proves that time is relative.)

So I was looking for clocks that demonstrated how they fit into this world, rather than the world of my grandparents or their grandparents, and so on. Clocks that demonstrated a newer understanding of time, or provided a way of looking at time differently.

Which we do, now, you know, even if you don't realize it. Moe, on The Simpsons, once commented that his deep fryer could "flash fry a buffalo in forty seconds," to which Homer responded "Forty seconds... but I wanted it now."

That's part of how we look at time now -- forty seconds is an eternity, and if you don't think so, go watch a video that's forty seconds long. (I bet you, like me, didn't even watch the full videos above.) When I make microwave popcorn, it takes 3 minutes -- and I think that's pretty long, so long that I considered buying pre-popped popcorn. I almost never pop my own corn on the stove, even though I like that better, because it takes too long.

Other things seem like an eternity -- like driving to work, which takes 30 minutes but seems far longer when there's traffic, because if I'm in traffic I feel like I'm being impeded, and remember, studies have shown that elapsed time is largely perception based.)

So while our perceptions of time have passed -- we have 15-minute long TV shows now -- the way we measure time has stayed the same: We still have clocks with circular hands going around in a 12-hour measure.

Is that the best way to measure time? Are digital clocks the best we can do to show the passage of time and measure its impact on our life?

Imagine, if you will, a few simple changes to clocks. Say, a clock that shows not just hours and minutes, or hours, minutes, and seconds, but milliseconds.

Or a clock that only measures hours.

Which of those would you choose to use? The first would give you a sense of urgency, the second a sense of leisure.

Expand beyond that completely, to remove hands and numbers from clocks, and that doesn't measure time based on celestial motions at all... like a water clock:



Or a clock that doesn't measure time in hours and seconds, but in longer terms, like the 10,000 year clock:




That's a prototype from The Long Now Foundation, which wants to build a 10,000 year clock as a monument to long-term thinking.

A lot of innovation and invention comes from looking at something and saying That doesn't seem to be quite what I need, or I can think of a better way to do that.

Can it really be that we can't look at clocks and think of a way to improve them so that they're more useful to the way we live or want to live? That the only thing we can think of to do is to make clocks force us to get out of bed in the morning?

I've never yet found an area of human life that can't stand to be improved somehow, from dishwashing to space travel. I don't believe that clocks or timekeeping is that area, the one area where (ironically?) time stands still and we have to do things the same way we ever did.

It's not as though a new clock would have to be a quantum leap forward into something that we don't recognize as a clock; PajamaJeans, after all, aren't a new kind of clothing so much as they are simply an advance into a better society.

It just seems to me that there should be newer, better, more creative clocks out there: clocks that are particular to certain occupations, or clocks that are embeddable in our contact lenses or earrings (where you could press it and the sound would travel through your ear, telling you what time it is but being inaudible to the world) or clocks that ...

... I don't know. That do something different. I'm a little disappointed that we don't have that, and a little letdown that I can't think of something that would represent a clock breakthrough. I've come up with tons of other ideas, but I can't come up with something I think is truly new now, and that's depressing me.

On the other hand, I do kind of want to go buy a Clocky. That might cheer me up.




Previous entries on the list:

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

3. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball.

4. Quirky.com

5. Joulies.

Click here for more MiniBests.

Why You Should Follow Me On Twitter

Typically, I've used my Twitter account -- @whyihatepeople-- just to put links to posts from my various blogs. But I've made an effort over the past few days to make it something more than just a blogvertisement*

*Note: I'm following the rule that everything on the Internet has to have a stupid name.

And now it features pictures that you won't see on my blogs, and comments that you won't find on my blogs, and also stuff like my series of Tweets while I rewatched Revenge of the Sith:



That's good stuff, there -- you won't find anything like that anywhere on the Internet, I'm sure.

Follow me on Twitter.

The Six Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #5

Like number 4, I didn't see this one on TV, either, but dammit people, we're talking about inventions that save lives here, so I can't be bogged down in technicalities.

Technicalities like "technically, this invention does not save lives but I still want it."

Thing-I-Didn't-Know-I-Wanted Number 5 is:

Joulies.

Joulies, which I read about on a science-blog app that I have on my phone -- I read it over breakfast in the morning -- are like high-tech ice cubes, only they do the exact opposite of ice cubes. Which makes them not like ice cubes at all, I suppose, only it seems to me that they really are like ice cubes, only in reverse. I'll let you decide; here's how their website describes them:

Coffee Joulies are miniature thermodynamic heat storage devices. They cool your coffee by absorbing excess thermal energy when it is too hot. This energy is stored inside the Joulies. When your coffee reaches the right temperature, the Joulies slowly release this stored energy, keeping your coffee at the right temperature

You had me at miniature thermodynamic heat storage device. But for those of you who need convincing via video, they've got that, too:





Not convinced by diagrams and chamber music? PopSci has more information:

Each Joulie is a small metal shell filled with a phase-change material that melts at 140º Fahrenheit... So the Joulies absorb heat from the coffee till they reach 140º, and then start emitting heat. The effect (if you put in enough Joulies for your volume of beverage) is to maintain the coffee at the desired temperature for long enough to savor it.

Finally, science is doing something for me. I mean, what has science been up to, other than inventing velociraptors? Not a whole lot. It's about time, science. I was about to tell you that we should start seeing other disciplines. Sociology's been looking pretty hot lately.



Previous entries on the list:

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

3. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball.

4. Quirky.com

Click here for more MiniBests.

The Six Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV.

Get suckered in by TV ads... and stay for the philosophy of it all...

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

3. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball.

4. Quirky.com

5. Joulies.

6. It's about clocks, or something. I don't know.

Welcome a new reader!

The Best Of Everything is not just a chronicle of pop culture; it's a leader in pop culture, as evidenced by the fact that Chuck Lorre obviously reads this blog and uses it as a basis for his material.

Just watch this clip from his show The Big Bang Theory:





And then consider that three years ago, I wrote about what actually is The Best Number.

(That post is no longer on the site; to get the answer you'll have to read the hilarious book Do Pizza Samples Really Exist?, available by clicking this link.)

By the way, I know Kaley Cuoco isn't the new reader (but you can't prove she doesn't read this blog), but would you rather look at her or Chuck Lorre? Yeah, I thought so

Click here to see all the other people who obviously read this blog.

The Best Cookbook

I have about seven cookbooks on our counter which, admittedly, I almost never use. They range from the "Betty Crocker Cookbook" my mom gave me a long time ago to the two Rachael Ray 30-minute cookbooks I got Sweetie as a retirement present when she stopped working in an office and opted to spend every day chasing after twin boys to the "It's a Wonderful Life Cookbook" which has lots of recipes for food that we imagine people in the 1930s would eat (or at least people in the 1940s would eat if they weren't busy having their banks shut down and leaping off bridges, that being my understanding of both the movie It's A Wonderful Life, which I've never seen, and life in the 1930s, which I've never seen, either.)

What those books all have in common, besides not ever really being used, is that they all try to make cooking more fun or interesting, bringing new combinations of flavors and textures to meals, teaching us how to cook like Grandma imagines she used to cook back in the 30s, or how Han Solo would cook in a different galaxy...

... did I mention that one of the cookbooks is actually the Star Wars Cookbook?...

...teaching us, in short, how to come up with something other than "throw the hot dogs in the microwave and put them on the table next to a bag of chips," which I personally have never done. I always boil the hot dogs. It only takes about 3 minutes, after all, so it's not that much longer than in the microwave, and I prefer my hot dogs to have that authentic home-cooked flavor. I don't want my kids growing up having only tasted microwave-warmed, individually-wrapped hot dogs.

Which, as an aside, how did we get to a point where hot dogs are individually packaged and wrapped but Reese's peanut butter cups are not? Was unwrapping the Reese's really all that difficult? And couldn't a case be made that for most of us, me included, making it easier and faster to eat candy isn't really a wise idea?

I have all these cookbook options, allowing me to cook a meal that almost-literally spans space and time, slow-cooking a ham while whipping up a side dish in 30-minutes or less and topping it off with a dessert of Wookie-ookies. And when I look at those cookbooks, all I can think of is why bother?

Cooking these days has stopped being functional. And you probably didn't even notice, because didn't even notice until recently. We no longer have to cook, not for any practical reason, and that has led to some interesting (but stupid) developments.

The realization that cooking isn't functional anymore, that it's become a luxury like racquetball or commuting to work, things we do for fun or romanticized reasons or because we've not yet adapted to the new world (like people who still read books), dawned on me slowly, beginning with the KFC $10 Challenge. Remember that?



I remember that - -and I remember it well, because I watched that commercial and thought "That's stupid; cooking the stuff yourself is always cheaper," which at the time I thought was true for the same reason almost everyone thinks everything is true: because I believed it.

Cooking stuff for yourself might once have been cheaper than eating out or letting someone else cook it for you and bringing it home, or making frozen meals; that may have been where I and probably everyone else began to believe that cooking for yourself was cheaper than having someone else do it. So I initially, believing that cooking for myself and my family, was cheaper, dismissed that ad... until I was in the grocery store a few days later and thought to myself "I wonder just how wrong that ad was," and looked at the ingredients of such a meal myself, and found out the ad was right.

It didn't immediately sink in at that point that letting someone else do the cooking was almost always, if not actually always, cheaper and easier. That ad came out a long time ago and I only recently decided that cooking is no longer practical, that it's a hobby and something that people do because they want to, not because they need to, and it took a while to get there as I noticed that meal after meal, basic meals that we love around our house, were cheaper and easier if we simply ordered out or got frozen stuff.

We like, for example, to make burritos (or soft tacos, or chimichangas, whatever we might call them that week), beef and cheese and salad-y stuff wrapped into a shell. And I began to notice that there were frozen versions of those selling for two bucks. And they were good, and they were done in 20 minutes without any frying, chopping, mincing, or grating. One dish Mexican food for less than the cost of the meat I'd have to put into them.

The final straw was pizza. I pride myself on cooking pizza, and cooking it well. I make my own dough (using a basic mixture that I then customize) and fry the meat and use fresh ingredients and I even once owned a pizza stone and I let the dough rise. I experiment with sauces and cheeses and meats and even fruit, and I make a damn good pizza, as everyone who ever has tried it has said. (I also make a damn good cheesecake, but I don't do that as often because if you eat leftover cold cheesecake for breakfast people look at you all funny.)

I originally began making my own pizza back in law school, when my grocery budget was $20 per week; I was able to afford pizza back then by scrimping on other groceries -- lots of Ramen noodles and oatmeal -- and by getting the ingredients myself and making the pizzas myself. I bought flour and yeast and cheese that I'd grate myself and meat that I'd fry up, and the total ingredients, about $10, would make 3 or 4 pizzas overall, and they were good, and as I got better at it I'd occasionally imagine myself, someday, running a successful chain of pizza restaurants that would have people flocking to them, waiting in line to get into them.

(Two things stand out from that story: One, I'm completely incapable of doing anything without imagining that the thing that I'm doing will someday lead me to be rich and possibly famous, although I'd settle for rich. Whether it's blogging, cooking pizzas or raising twins, I'm always certain that I'm moments away from that serendipitous, Harrison-Ford-painting-doors-moment that will lead to my discovery. And, Two: In my imagination, people still go to restaurants to sit down and eat pizza, which really hasn't happened since 1983.)

But nowadays, I don't have to do that, and not just because my grocery budget now exceeds $20 per week. Not only are there frozen pizzas at the grocery store that cost as little as $1.00 -- one dollar -- but there are higher-quality, really-pretty-good frozen pizzas that go for only a few bucks, too, and there's delivery and carry-out pizza for five bucks, also, and all of them don't require that I fry, grate, mix, roll, and otherwise work for my food, so why bother?

And so on, with almost every food you can think of, including peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, which it's now cheaper to buy pre-made than to make yourself, and how hard was it to slather PB&J onto some bread? Not very hard. But hard enough, apparently, that our civilization found a way to put the ingredients into a little pocket of bread called an "Uncrustable" and sell it to us for less than the basic ingredients of that sandwich, too.

We have, then, reached a point in our culture where cooking is purely for entertainment, which is demonstrated not just by all those facts I just gave you, but by the fact that there is a cookbook out there, and a cooking movement out there, which is "reinventing" the PB&J sandwich and urging you to cut your oven in half or cook with liquid nitrogen.

I'm talking about "Modernist Cuisine," and I'm using that phrase to denote both the cookbook and the trend. If you haven't heard about modernist cuisine then you either don't subscribe to The New Yorker, or you don't eat at restaurants whose menu might read like this:

Foods that change temperature when you eat them,

a cup of tea that is cold on one side and hot on the other,

a “Styrofoam” beaker that turns into a bowl of ramen when the server pours hot water over it,

edible clay and rocks,

a pocket watch that turns into mock-turtle soup,

a bar of soap covered in foam that is actually a biscuit with honey bubbles,

a milkshake volcano

Those are actual items listed as part of "modern cuisine" in an article in The New Yorker that talked about the trend and the cookbook that details the trend. Apparently, restaurants are now employing Penn & Teller as the cook and waitstaff. (Also, the article mentions, at some places the menus are edible. But you should probably wait to snack on it until after you choose your entree.)

Those all sound fascinating, true -- who wouldn't want to take their watch off and have it become a soup? -- but also they sound less like a meal than a show, and when did we go from "dinner and a movie" to "dinner is the movie?"

Whenever it happened, it was a major shift, because the book that chronicles what modernist cuisine is all about -- a book titled, obviously, "Modernist Cuisine" -- is huge.

Not huge like "a lot of people want to read it" but huge like "so big that you'll never be able to order it and sneak it past your wife... she's going to find out." Here's the description from the book's website:

Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume, 2,438-page set that is des­tined to rein­vent cook­ing. The lav­ishly illus­trated books use thou­sands of orig­i­nal images to make the sci­ence and tech­nol­ogy clear and engaging.

It takes six books and 2,438 pages to describe how to boil a hamburger that's been frozen using liquid nitrogen... whereas it only took J.R.R. Tolkien half of that to invent an entire world.

So what does it take 2,438 pages to tell you how to do? I haven't read the book yet -- it's on back order, despite being self-published (although "self-published" doesn't mean the same thing when the self-publisher is Nathan Myhrvold, the millionaire former chief technical officer of Microsoft who once worked with Stephen Hawking; it's safe to say he can afford, even with a book this size, to get a few advance copies and send them to reviewers) but the reviews and articles about it I have seen make a point of mentioning that it will teach you to slow cook things -- extremely slowly, apparently, over days -- and how to cook things in vacuum-sealed bags boiled in water that is precisely one temperature, or another.

There's even a recipe for freezing a hamburger in liquid nitrogen and then cooking it. Or maybe you're supposed to do that in reverse; I forget.

Amidst all that are pictures of stoves cut in half and deconstructed tomatoes, or something. It all sounds, frankly, fascinating -- one article pointed out that Myhrvold notes that ovens heat up at different rates and hit different top temperatures depending on sea level and air density, so that there can be as much as a 59-degree difference if you're cooking something in Mexico City versus New York City, and the idea of freezing hamburgers with liquid nitrogen will appeal to anyone who (like me) bought a deep fryer and then began imagining just what else he could deep fry.

But is it helpful?

That's the question I was asking myself as I read about Modernist Cuisine, and I followed it by this: Is it really a cookbook?

The first cookbook I ever owned was -- and still is, as I have it -- is that aforementioned red-and-white-checkered Better Homes & Gardens cookbook that has about 500 pages in it and is broken down into sections like Cakes and Meat and pastries. It has recipes in it that I use from time to time -- last night, I used the recipe for Meatloaf as a starting point for making meatloaf, freely replacing some of the ingredients with others: I substituted "club crackers" for breadcrumbs, left out the onions at Sweetie's request, and inserts a layer of Ritz crackers and parmesan cheese midway through. The result was delicious and unexpected, and I couldn't have done it without the Better Homes & Gardens cookbook, primarily because I didn't know how long to cook a meatloaf for and at what temperature, here or in Mexico City.

Even with that, I didn't need the cookbook; I wanted it because I wanted the experience of making a meatloaf. It wasn't faster or cheaper or easier to make a meatloaf from scratch. I'm sure that I could have bought a meatloaf already made and simply put it in the oven (and, having checked, I know now that you can), but in this case, the process was what I wanted. It was a Sunday afternoon, and I didn't have much else to do, and Sweetie wanted meatloaf, and I enjoy cooking things and experimenting.

As I made that meatloaf, and thought about Modernist Cuisine, it struck me that cooking really has become an art -- exactly like books and movies and paintings and sculptures and other art forms that serve as decorations or enhancements to our life but which for the most part we simply consume rather than produce.

Cooking, for about 2,011 years, has existed in a sort of limbo between art and activity: it was art that anyone could do, or almost anyone. From Jell-O molds to birthday cakes to homemade pizza to Christmas cookies to breakfast, we all not only had to eat, we had to make what we ate or at least get someone close to us to do it for us.

It wasn't, really, until recently that food became both fast and easy: drive-through restaurants were still relatively rare when I was a kid, and while there have been restaurants for decades (if not centuries) they haven't been convenient or cheaper than simply doing it ourselves.

But as food dumbed down and became easier and cheaper -- as chicken went from having to kill the chicken, pluck it, and cook it to a McNugget, it became less and less like a do-it-yourself necessity and more and more like an art, until we hit the stage we have, where food is an art.

Like clothing before it, food has jumped from things we all do to things we all mostly consume, joining that pantheon of arts that most of us look at and say "Wow, that's neat: wish I could do that."

Most of our art forms have done that. Cave paintings used to (judging by the quality, and not based on any knowledge of my own) be done by just about anyone. Then, in the middle ages, art moved to being done by masters with apprentices working under them. Now, "art" is commissioned by corporations and done by teams of people working for them. (Or it's done by James Franco, but either way it's not very accessible to the common man). Art is in museums and sells for billions and has to in some way involve a preserved shark corpse, and for the rest of us there's that guy who paints while jogging on a treadmill:



Writing and storytelling, too, have taken this route before cooking. In the olden days (before 2002), stories were communal affairs, people taking old legends and adding their own twists on them and re-telling them. Then someone started writing them down, and the Brothers Grimm hired J.K. Rowlings' lawyer when he was just a boy, and suddenly everything was set in stone and nobody told stories anymore: they bought them on their Kindle or went to see them at the Globe Theater. Nothing stops us from writing a book, and it's easier than ever to do that (unless, like Nathan Myhrvold, you want your book to include sawed-in-half stoves, which can get expensive, I bet), but you only write a book, nowadays, if you like to write; if you just want a story, it's far cheaper to download a book for $0.99 on your Kindle than to sit down and write up the story yourself.

So it's gone with all our other art forms, and so it now goes with cooking: Cooking is now something you do for fun, or not at all, and people will begin (or continue) the process of dividing themselves up into people who consume other people's cooking or people who try to do it themselves.

Cooking, after all, has all the other hallmarks of an art that isn't practiced by most people. We have more TV shows about chefs and cooking than we do about detectives with troubled homelives, and we have shows about restaurants and how to find them, and we have shows where cooks go to restaurants. We've done from dinner theater to dinner as theater, something you know about if you've heard of the Messi Dessert.

Cooking, I think, is the last activity to fall, too -- clothing ourselves went from activity to art a while ago, and I can't think of anything that's left in our lives that can go from pasttime to part-time, so we've finally hit the point where all of society either does something or consumes something but rarely does both. (People who make a thing, after all, rarely seem to take part in that thing. If you followed Stephen King's columns in Entertainment Weekly, you know he rarely reads horror or talks about it. Paul Simon, in an interview with The AV Club, recently seemed to admit that he doesn't listen to much pop music.)

Most of us fall on the side of the consumer -- partaking of art that other people have made, although there's hope that it won't always be a one-way street, that as our society advances we'll find ways to let people make their own art, whether that be music or cooking or painting. You may criticize her, but Rebecca Black's "Friday,"



is an example of how a regular person, with a modest investment that ddn't even include sawing a stove in half, can create something (sure, with some help, but I bet that Myhrvold didn't typeset his book himself), and the Internet has been helping regular people get back into making art that others can enjoy for some time, as people make home movies that get them not only fame, but a $30 million Hollywood contract -- as Fede Alvarez got for his movie, Panic Attack!:




So cooking, having spent the better part of human existence as a shared task but now having become art, may someday cross back over again, the way music and writing and filmmaking are, but for now, cooking has moved on and is the province of the Da Vincis, the Rays, the Myhrvolds, and the rest of us can dabble in our kitchens in anonymity, and buy our take-out chicken, and marvel at the wonders that the brilliant minds out there have come up with, and hope that someday, we, too, will be able to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich like an expert.

Wait, what? Even that's an art now?

It sure is: The following is taken from the highbrow article "Deconstruction, Architecture, and a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich,"

One of the signature dishes served at Alinea, the Chicago restaurant that's now widely regarded as the best in the country, is a deconstructed peanut butter and jelly sandwich (above). The dish is architectural: the sandwich is presented on a structure resembling a whisk with the loops cut off. At the top of the structure is a single grape, still attached to its stem, dipped in peanut purée and wrapped in brioche.

This is that sandwich, which The New Yorker called a "cutting edge classic":




And just to show you how deconstructed (read: arty) that sandwich is, the article notes this important point about that "Deconstructed Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich:"

There's no jelly.


Click here to read more food-related posts.

The Six Best Things I Didn't Know I Wanted Until I Saw Them On TV, #4

Technically, I did not see this thing on TV. That's my disclaimer. But it's not like there are very rigorous rules here on The Best Of Everything, other than the rule that we never, ever make fun of Paris Hilton, again. One nearly-causing-an-apocalypse is enough for any blogger.

By all rights, I should be as famous as Thomas Edison, who, I think we can all agree, was (is?) pretty famous. (I'm not sure how to refer to someone who is famous but who no longer exists because he's dead. Should I use the present tense? The past participle? What is the past participle? And why did we have to learn how to diagram sentences? What was that supposed to teach us? Because I remember how to diagram sentences but not what I was supposed to learn by doing so, which makes that exercise kind of pointless.)

(Also, I'm not so sure I remember how to diagram sentences, either, now that I think about it.)

I should be famous, like Thomas Edison someday might be, because I, like Thomas Edison and Charles Jenkins, am an inventor.

Charles Jenkins, you don't know but probably should, claims to have been the inventor of the television, only he didn't call it TV; he called it radiovision and using his "mechanical radiovision" claims to have transmitted the earliest television program, in 1923. The program was a series of moving silhouette images which didn't say or do much while on screen. MTV later adapted this idea for The Hills.

Thomas Edison, meanwhile, invented the Electric Death Ray Pistol, but you don't know about that because the U.S. Government bought every copy of it and the patent, and then had Edison shipped to an internment camp to silence him. There are still 73 working models of the original Electric Death Ray Pistol, all of them in the possession of the Department of the Interior, which is why every year when Congress does the budget nobody ever suggests cutting the funding for that Department even though nobody knows what it does.

I'm an inventor, too, in the grand tradition of Charles Jenkins, in that my inventions, too, have received absolutely no notice or attention and also have not made me rich, even though they should have because they are genius. I have come up with many inventions which share the common characteristics of being brilliant and also of having never been produced, because while I have many great ideas, I have zero technical knowledge and so I also have zero capacity to take a brilliant idea from the "brilliant idea" stage to the "thing you can buy at Wal-Mart" stage, which is why the world has not yet benefitted from the luxury of using these many great ideas, such as my idea for the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher."

The "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher" is, like many inventions, a simple idea: It's a dishwasher that's also a kitchen cabinet, or many cabinets if you have many dishes. The idea is to eliminate that portion of cleaning up the kitchen in which you must move the dishes from the dishwasher all the way to the cabinet. If you have the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher," then, after dinner, you simply take your dirty dishes, put them back in the cabinet, close the door, throw a switch, and voila, the dishes will be clean the next time you want them.

Assuming, arguendo, that it takes 3 minutes to unload the dishwasher every day, and assuming, too, that there are 270,000,000 people in the United States, half of whom are husbands who won't willingly unload the dishwasher because it takes 3 minutes, and in that 3 minutes they might miss an important second down play where the running back gains 2 yards, then, by simple math, my invention will end divorce entirely and result in families being happy, and productive, unless they really wanted the coach to call a pass play on that down.

The problem with the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher" is that I had the idea, but no way to go ahead and make them because the only thing I've ever actually made in my life was a loft for my dorm room bed when I was in college in 1987, and that didn't turn out so well in that (a) I built it in my parent's basement and (b) I used nails, not screws, so I couldn't take it apart and it also wasn't sturdy, and (c) I dropped out of college before actually going back to the dorms, so I didn't need it anyway.

With that as my background, you can see where I've really got no idea how to start building the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher" which is why it's lucky for me that I found today's thing, entry number 4 on this Minibest, which is:

Quirky.com.

Quirky.com is not, technically, one thing. And, like I said, I didn't see it on TV, but instead heard about it on a podcast. But Quirky.com is definitely something I didn't know I wanted until I heard about it, and it's also full of things that I didn't know I wanted until I heard about them.

Here's what Quirky.com does -- and I should point out that this is not a paid advertisement or solicitation in any way. I'm not a member of Quirky.com and I only just looked at it for the first time today but I love it anyway, because that's the way these things work: you see something that you didn't even know could exist and then suddenly you love it.

Quirky.com makes inventions real.

They really do, or so it would seem from the story I heard and the website I read. They let any old person just go there and for a small fee submit and idea that gets voted up or voted down and if it gets voted up, then Quirky.com might just take your idea and make it a reality and they'll share the profits with you.

You don't have to have drawings or technical knowledge or even much more than a bare concept to get your idea onto Quirky.com. One idea that's up for voting right now goes like this:

We want to create a coaster that's beautiful and really works. No moisture build up and no sticking glasses that can lead to spills.

That idea goes on to have some specifics -- a "levered base" and LED lighting (for that futuristic feel, I assume) but nothing beyond that.

Other ideas up right now include a way to have beginner guitar players get calluses and finger strength and muscle memory without practicing, which, as a longtime guitarist who only plays about once a year now sounds excellent to me because when I do get the guitar out to play a round of Me & Julio Down By The Schoolyard, my fingers hurt for days afterwards and I have to reteach the chords to myself everytime, and a transparent sign that had digital capacity and can be programmed with a smart phone to change -- so that you can have store window (or bumper or other) stickers that change graphics easily.

Think about that last one for a bit. At first, I was, like "Well, that's nothing" but now I really like the idea of a bumper sticker that I can reprogram, and I just went and voted for that guy.

They've already invented stuff on there, too, stuff you can buy including the "Wrapster", something to help manage the cords for your earbuds, which is something I need and want and I practically ordered them immediately until I remembered that Sweetie keeps my credit card in a secure undisclosed location (probably the Department of the Interior.)

The more I looked around there, the more I got excited that something like this even exists, and the more I thought we should've had something like this long ago, a place where people like me and Charles Jenkins can go and share our ideas and maybe get them made, because it lets us be creative but not quit our jobs and pour our life savings into creating something while worrying our wives and making our children feel like outcasts at school -- we can continue being productive members of society (or, in my case, continue the ruse that we are that) while contributing even more to society.

So really, today's thing is a metathing: It's not only something that I didn't know I wanted until I saw it on TV, but it's a thing that helps people create even more things we didn't know we wanted until we saw that they existed, and encourages people to create things that only we know we wanted but we're pretty sure other people would want, too, if we could only figure out how to get them built and marketed -- and now we don't need to do that second part, we just need to do the first part.

It's genius, is what it is. Quirky.com deserves a spot high up on the ladder of society's esteem.

Let's put it one rung below the "In-The-Cupboard Dishwasher."

Previous entries on the list:

1. The Incredible Gyro Bowl.

2. Pajama jeans.

3. The Play & Freeze Ice Cream Ball.


Click here for more MiniBests.



Want to know how making fun of Paris Hilton almost brought about the end of the world? Read the hilarious book "Do Pizza Samples Really Exist?", available by clicking this link.

Really, though, I was suggesting he'd be a good VICE president... (Star Wars References)

If you want to get people to donate money to your political cause, you could always work hard to convince them that your political cause is the right one, that it's going to do good things for them or prevent bad things from happening to other people, or otherwise be worthwhile.

Or you could include Chewbacca, as Stephen Colbert does in his PAC ad unveiled on his show the other night:

You have to look fast, near the end -- but it's there, and I'll be the first to call for a Colbert-Chewbacca 2012 Presidential Ticket.

Or, rather, I'll be the 100th, as there are already 99 people who like the Chewbacca For President 2012 Facebook page:

But would he be for creating jobs?


Click here for more Star Wars References.