And what’s worse, they have the unfortunate habit of hopping over the edge!
(Sorry. Couldn’t resist.)
(Amphibians. Frogs, etc. Get it? It’s a joke, son, a joke!)
Year: 2004
Your DVDs Are Obsolete!
. . . or they will be . . . sooner than you imagine.
Here’s the deal:
You know how George Lucas announced at first that he wouldn’t release the original Star Wars trilogy on DVD until after Episode 3 comes out in 2005–then he released it suddenly last month?
You know how they are currently releasing Star Trek: Voyager season-by-season on DVD and then decided to release the original Star Trek series on DVD at the same time–instead of maximizing their profits by getting one series completely out and then releasing the next so that it doesn’t overtax the Trekkies’ pocketbooks?
You know how they are currently talking about releasing Star Trek: Enterprise on DVD next year even though the series isn’t even complete yet (contrary to the normal way Star Trek series are released)?
You didn’t know that? Well, now you do.
There’s a reason for all this sudden releasing of DVDs.
The reason is called Blu-Ray.
Blu-Ray is widely viewed as the REPLACEMENT for DVDs. It is expected to make DVDs obsolete.
The Blu-Ray format uses disks the size of CDs/DVDs but packs 25-50 gigs of data onto them (that’s 13-26 hours of programming, compared to 2-4 hours of programming in the DVD format). One Blu-Ray disk could hold a whole season of a TV program.
And if you want video quality rather than quantity, Blu-Ray beats DVD by similar margins. It can pack far more HDTV onto a disk than something in DVD format could.
As a result, Blu-Ray is expected to be the hot new format that will make DVD obsolete. It has the major industry players behind it, who are currently developing commercial versions of their Blu-Ray players/recorders.
These are expected to hit the market in 2005-2006.
That’s why we’re getting all these sooner-than-expected DVD releases right now.
The companies are afraid that Blu-Ray will roll right over DVD and quickly make it obsolete, depriving the companies of their chance to make money off the DVD format. So they’re rushing DVD releases of their programs out in anticipation of Blu-Ray bursting onto the market.
Is this a sound marketing strategy?
Well . . . I’m glad to be able to get DVDs of favored stuff sooner-than-expected. But I doubt the release of Blu-Ray will change things too much. I’ve already got Bablyon 5 on DVD, so I’m not inclined to buy it on Blu-Ray just so I can reduce the number of disks I have to put into the player in order to watch the whole thing in one run.
You’ll have to decide for yourself whether you want to buy DVDs now or wait for Blu-Ray versions of your favorite programs to start to be released (probably several years from now).
Mmmmmmmm! . . . Umami!
What comes next in the following list?
1) Sweet
2) Salty
3) Sour
4) Bitter
5) ________
You may be drawing a blank (pun intended). If so, it’s entirely understandable. Traditional Western cooking identifies only the four items named above as the “basic tastes” our taste buds are designed sensitive to. But it’s recently (in the year 2000) been proven that there is a fifth basic taste that our taste buds are designed to detect.
The name of the fifth basic taste?
Umami.
No, I didn’t just insult your mother. Umami is the name of the taste. It’s a fusion of a couple of Japanese words that together mean something like “essence of savor.” It was first identified in 1907 by a Japanese professor named Kikunae Ikeda, who also found a way to crystalize from seaweed broth the substance that causes this taste. He then sold the process to a company named Ajinomoto, which is makes about a third of all the 1.5 million metric tons of this substance that is used as a food flavoring every year in the world.
Despite the exotic origin of the good professor’s artifically distilled substance (i.e., seaweed broth), national versions of the substance are actually very common. In fact, it is the most common amino acid in the food we eat, found in virtually anything with protein. Our bodies even make the stuff. It’s part of us. Humans have a umami taste.
It’s also in loads of things we eat: meat, fish, fowl, cheese, tomatoes, mushrooms, seaweed, soy sauce, green tea, red wine, and a host of others. As a result, umami is an extraordinarily common taste . . . so common in fact that Americans don’t normally identify it as a separate taste. It’s in too many of our foods.
If you want to get a full strength taste sensation of umami, here’s what to do: Go to your grocery store (or simply your kitchen) and get a container of Accent flavor enhancer. It has just one ingredient: the artificial umami-inducing substance that Prof. Kikunae distilled. Put a little of the Accent in your mouth (or dissolve it in water and hold that in your mouth) and in a few seconds you will experience full strength umami.
It a kind of “meaty” flavor (unsurprisingly, since the stuff is in meat). Almost like salty, but not salty.
Once you taste it, you can instantly identify it in foods you’ve eaten in the past. After I did the Accent test, I immediately identified it as something I taste when eating very ripe tomatoes (ripe tomatoes have ten times the amount of the umami-causing substance as unripe ones).
While doing some web searching about umami, I found a good number of articles on it. Here are two of the more informative:
FIRST ARTICLE (WARNING! Evil file format! [.pdf])
Now, at this point you may be all curious to go out and try the Accent test to find out what umami tastes like. Good! But you may be a little less anxious to do so once I tell you the name of the substance Prof. Kikunae distilled from seaweed broth.
The ubiquitous amino acid that causes umami is glutamic acid. That may not mean much to you. (It didn’t to me, though I take its derivative L-glutamine as a nutritional supplement for muscle building.) The name of the artificial version that Prof. Kikunae discovered, however, is much more well known: It’s monosodium glutamate or MSG.
MSG has gotten a bad rap in recent years, with some people absolutely convinced that the substance is pure evil and others equally convinced that it has no harmful effects at all. However that may be, a small taste of MSG for purposes of identifying the taste umami is worth it.
After all, if I’ve got a basic taste that I never knew about, I want to know what that taste is like!
(What I want to know now is whether there is yet another basic taste–hot–as reckoned in traditional Chinese cooking. Whether “hot” or “spicy” is a distinct taste is something I’ve looked into a bit and would love to see thoroughly argued.)
Beans Snack!!!
Y’all may remember a while ago I mentioned that when I go to the Japanese market for low-carb noodles, that–just to figure out what kind of product I’m holding in my hand–I often have to rely on tiny nutritional labels slapped on by the importer. Sometimes the product name on the label is kind of comically descriptive, like “Corn Snack.”
Well, I can’t eat Corn Snack (too high in carbs), but I just found one I can eat: Beans Snack!
I am so totally amused by Beans Snack. It has so many great things going for it.
1) With only six grams of carb per serving, and three of that fiber, I can indulge in Beans Snack . . . in moderation.
2) It has a really cool package with all these little green pea Japanese warrior-lookin’ dudes performing incomprehensible tasks. They are so cool! I wonder if they’re the Japanese equivalent of the California Raisins (remember those “Heard It Through The Grape Vine” commercials about fifteen years ago?). Maybe the Beans Snack pea-warriors are part of a major advertising campaign over there or something. I sure hope so.
3) The helpful English nutritional label was written by someone who speaks Japanese rather than English as his native language. You can tell because of the Engrish name of the product: “Beans Snack.”
Now, obviously that’s not what we could call such a product in English. We’d have fancy-schmancy made-up name like “Beanoritos” or something. But I assume that’s the case in Japanese, too. “Beans Snack” is probably an attempted description and not a translation of the product’s name (which I assume is either “Calbee” or “Saya Endo Sappari Shio-Aji”; probably the latter). Yet a native-English speaker wouldn’t have called it that, as you can tell by two things:
a) The principle ingredient of Beans Snack isn’t beans at all but green peas (hence the little green pea warrior dudes). A native English-speaker would know that green peas aren’t considered beans (at least the way they are popularly spoken of, regardless of what a botanist might tell you).
b) We’ve got a plural adjective here: “Beans.” The thing is, English doesn’t have plural adjectives. We pluralize our nouns, but not our adjectives. Thus we might have “a bunch of grapes” (“grape” functioning as a noun) but not “grapes soda” (“grape” functioning as an adjective). In Japanese, the rules regarding pluralization are very different: There isn’t any, at least normally. Japanese nouns (and adjectives) don’t inflect (change form) for number, so they are neither singular nor plural (or both singular and plural, depending on how you look at it).
The Japanese-speaking label-writer knew that English does have plural nouns and misinterpreted “bean” as a noun in this case. Since peas normally come in a group, he used what he thought was a proper English plural form, not realizing that here the word is an adjective and adjectives in English don’t inflect for number.
4) Beans Snack actually tastes good! It has a kind of . . . well, green pea taste. A little salty. A little sweet, but not very much. It has a nice, crunchy texture. After sampling it, I find myself thinking “Hey, I’d like some more Beans Snack now!” It’s one of those hard-to-eat-just-one snacks.
Low carb . . . cute package . . . comical and interesting language issue . . . good taste. What more could you want in a snack?
Three cheers for Beans Snack!!!
Group Includes Vile Suggestion In Ad
Okay, remember how I pointed out Kerry’s despicable attempt to make political hay by turning Mary Cheney against her will into a political weapon to be used against her father?
That was me criticizing someone on the Left for a vile attempt to exploit the issue of homosexuality.
Now let me criticize someone on the Right for a vile attempt to use homosexuality to make political hay.
There is a draft of a new ad out by a group called the Club for Growth. I don’t know anything about this group except that they produce Right-leaning political ads (of which I have previously seen one or two on TV).
Now they have an ad up (at the very top of this web page) that tries to poke fun at Kerry’s flip-flopping in a semi-humorous way. It involves showing people unable to commit to a decision in extreme and absurd situations.
One of these people, who is featured prominently in the ad, is a groom who is at the altar and suddenly finds himself unable to commit to his bride. He then begins romping about the church kissing every woman in sight. At the end of the ad (this is the “stinger” the ad ends on), he turns his gaze lustfully on . . . the priest, who then looks very alarmed and exits hastily while the bride sobs.
THIS TURNED MY STOMACH.
Since this is a “draft” of an ad that is not yet finalized, and the Club for Growth solicits feedback from those who visit its site, I immediately used the feedback form to send them this message:
I found the part where the groom looks lustfully at the worried priest to be HIGHLY OFFENSIVE. It will alienate Catholics who are already very sensitive about priestly sexual conduct.
This HAS TO COME OUT OF THE AD. Find a different stinger to end on. If not, expect tons of Catholic bloggers, including myself, to venomously denounce the ad in the strongest possible terms.
If you’re trying to persuade Catholics, do so in a way that doesn’t turn their stomachs. Kerry recently got himself into trouble with a vile attempt to exploit the homosexual issue. Don’t make the same mistake.
Watch the ad, and if you feel similarly, by all means let them know.
Papal Cab
Bill Kristol Has A Question
After his despicable attempt to turn Mary Cheney into an embarrassment and a political weapon to be used against her father and his boss, John Kerry defended himself by issuing a written statement in which he said this:
I love my daughters. They love their daughter. I was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue.
Now commentator Bill Kristol has a question:
How stupid does John Kerry think the American people are?
Does he really think they will believe that he singled out Mary Cheney because he “was trying to say something positive about the way strong families deal with this issue?” Does he think they will accept his claim that he was saying something about the Cheneys’ “love of their daughter”? Of course, he wasn’t. In his answer, he never mentioned or came close to mentioning the Cheney family, or the Cheneys’ love. He merely brought up Mary Cheney as a lesbian, out of left field, in order to get her name and sexual orientation into an answer where no such citation was expected, called for, or remotely appropriate. His campaign manager let slip the truth when after the debate she told Fox News’s Chris Wallace that Mary Cheney was “fair game.”
Kerry’s desperate attempt at next-day spin was also revealing. It showed the way he had been supposed to bring up Mary Cheney–the way he and his staff had planned to pull off this maneuver. Kerry was supposed to do what his more skilled and cleverer debating partner, John Edwards, did. He was supposed to sugarcoat his use of Mary Cheney more effectively. Edwards prefaced his answer to Gwen Ifill’s same-sex marriage question in the vice-presidential debate with, “Let me say first that I think the vice president and his wife love their daughter. I think they love her very much. And you can’t have anything but respect for the fact that they’re willing to talk about the fact that they have a gay daughter; the fact that they embrace her is a wonderful thing.”
But Kerry forgot his lines. And while Cheney had to pretend to accept Edwards’s phony, condescending compliment, and everyone else allowed Edwards’s deftly exploitative comment go by, Kerry’s appropriation of Mary Cheney came in no such lawyerly and sugary packaging. The rawness of his ruthlessness was there for all to see. The Democrats are terrified of a debate on same-sex marriage, and used Mary Cheney to try to brush back the Bush-Cheney ticket from forcing a real policy debate.
Blessing In Disguise
For a Worth1000.Com photoshop contest on “literalisms” (common phrases visualized as literal situations via tthe magic of Photoshop). [WARNING: Some images may be mildly offensive.]
Brumley Explains It All
Mark Brumley of Ignatius Press is an apologist’s apologist. He’s a true gem. One of the very, very best.
In recent days, he has turned his formidable talents to commenting on moral matters raised in the current political debate.
In one piece on National Review Online, he takes on the argument that abortion is an article of faith for Catholics that shouldn’t be “imposed on others.”
In another piece on Ignatius Insight, he debunks the attempt to level out the importance of political issues and pretend that things like the war in Iraq are as important as abortion.
Well worth reading.
Why The Remark Was Despicable
People often realize that something is wrong before they are able to quite put their finger on why.
An example was Sen. Kerry’s use in the debate Wednesday night of the fact that Vice Pres. Cheney’s daughter is homosexual.
When this began to be criticized in the commentary immediately after the debate, Kerry campaign manager Mary Beth Cahill applied the language of cynical political exploitation to this remark by declaring the subject to be “fair game.”
Many people were not persuaded, and Thursday the Cheneys expressed their own displeasure at the use of their daughter as a political football by Sen. Kerry (as, it is reported, they previously had expressed it after Sen. Edwards did the same thing during the vice presidential debate).
Watching some pundits on TV yesterday, I observed a number of Republican pundits displaying a strong intuition that Sen. Kerry was wrong to use Cheney’s daughter in this way, but they were unable to clearly articulate why it was wrong.
Asked by Democrat pundits what was wrong with it, they would say things like “It’s a violation of their privacy,” to which the Democrat pundits would point out that Cheney has himself publicly acknowledged his daughter’s homosexuality.
This is a fair point.
Since the matter is not only publicly known but publicly acknowledged by Cheney himself, Sen. Kerry’s use of the situation does not constitute a violation of privacy–at least not in the way privacy is conventionally understood.
But it’s still wrong.
Here’s why: The fact that the vice president’s daughter is homosexual is a very sensitive issue for him and his whole family, both personally and professionally. Personally, no parent (or virtually no parent) wants to find out that one of their children is a homosexual. Even if the parent has no moral problem with homosexuality, the discovery of the fact means that the child will face additional hardship in life that no parent wants for their child to experience.
Similarly infinitessimal numbers of parents want to acknowledge the fact of a homosexual child in public. It doesn’t matter whether you think this is a good thing or a bad thing; it’s true. The matter is a source of agony for parents, no matter how brave a face they try to put on it in public–or in private for that matter.
It is even more sensitive a subject when you are a vice president who belongs to a party whose base is strongly opposed to homosexuality. It is further sensitive when there is a homosexual marriage crisis brewing and your boss (i.e., the president) has proposed a constitutional amendment to prevent courts from imposing homosexual marriage as the law of the land. Finally, it is especially sensitive at election time when the fact that your daughter is homosexual could be used against you as a political weapon to try to alienate the voters of your party and cause them to stay home on election day.
What Sen. Kerry did was not violate Dick Cheney’s privacy; it was to attempt to turn Cheney’s daughter into an embarrassment and a political liability to him and his boss.
It was the exploitation of an extraordinary sensitive family situation for his own political ends.
No child should be made to feel that she is an embarrassment and liability to her parents, and no parents should be placed in a situation where their child feels this way.
Kerry tried to turn the vice president’s child into a political weapon to be used against him.
Cheney may have acknowledged his daughter’s sexual orientation in public, but it is one thing for a parent to muster up the courage to admit such a sensitive fact and it is another thing entirely to have it thrown in your face in an attempt to harm you politically by using your child as a weapon.
What Sen. Kerry did was heartless.
It was cruel.
It was vile.
It was despicable.
It was wrong.
UPDATE: Welcome, HughHewitt.Com readers!
UPDATE: Now someone else is using a vile suggestion involving homosexuality to make political hay.