| From: Jon Koplik | 12/1/2023 1:30:34 AM | | | | | | WSJ -- Your Thanksgiving Alligator Is Ready for Pickup .........................................
WSJ
Your Thanksgiving Alligator Is Ready for Pickup
Why be a boar? More hosts opt for exotic meats this holiday; ‘a bear Manwich.’
Nov. 21, 2023
An alligator ‘tastes like alligator,’ says a brand ambassador for Meadow Creek, a manufacturer of smokers and grills.
By Charles Passy
Like countless Americans, Kimberly Darling celebrates Thanksgiving with a bountiful, home-cooked feast. Her take on the holiday has a swampy twist: She forgoes the familiar turkey in favor of an alligator she traps on one of her many hunting expeditions, then she brines, smokes and wraps it in bacon before serving her guests.
Pass the gator, please
"People walk in and they’re like, ‘Oh, my God, that’s a literal alligator. What did we sign up for?’” she says.
But the mild taste and tender texture can’t be beat, adds Darling, a 40-year-old nurse anesthetist who lives near Chicago.
While turkey remains the star of the Thanksgiving holiday table, enterprising hosts are adding a gamy touch to the meal, including antelope, camel, kangaroo, elk, squirrel and bear, along with gator.
Kimberly Darling with an alligator she trapped. She prepares one each year for Thanksgiving.
For those not partial to hunting down their main course, meat providers are selling the alternative fare, and they say holiday orders are brisk. At S. Ottomanelli & Sons, a butcher shop in the New York City borough of Queens that dates back some 60 years, exotic meats account for at least 25% of Thanksgiving orders, with kangaroo, ostrich and elk being among the favorites. One of the biggest challenges: sourcing python and rattlesnake, which are also on the list of holiday choices.
“There’s a big demand,” says proprietor Frank Ottomanelli. Many customers today, “they want something different.”
Ralph Forgione, a retiree who lives in Syosset, a locale on Long Island, says his family does have a turkey on the Thanksgiving table, but they like to complement it with everything from venison to elk. “We want to keep to tradition, but we also want to expand it,” he says. Forgione is a particular fan of elk, which he describes as having a red-meat taste, but with an unexpected sweetness.
Atypical meats don’t come cheap. At S. Ottomanelli & Sons, a pound of python steak runs $49.95 and an “exotic meats assortment package” costs $299.
For Ed Butler, a 58-year-old outdoorsman who calls Wolfeboro, N.H., home and owns a heating company, the Thanksgiving holiday is about serving guests a cornucopia of game meats, all of which he has hunted himself. On this year’s menu: bear, venison and squirrel.
Ed Butler processing a bear's leg. He makes a twist on Sloppy Joes -- with bear meat.
Sure, game meats can be a bit strong, says Butler, who dubs himself the “Working Class Woodsman” and does cooking videos. But it is all about how they’re processed and prepared. He makes his bear more palatable for Thanksgiving by fixing it as what amounts to a sloppy Joe—or a “bear Manwich,” as he likes to call it -- with the ground meat generously seasoned.
“It’s my wife’s favorite meal,” he says.
Antelope is among the Thanksgiving to-go options at Dai Due, an Austin, Texas restaurant with a companion hunting school. One of the dishes featuring it is antelope salami, which is yet another way to make a game meat feel slightly more familiar.
Austin resident Kim Famighetti, who works as a real-estate agent, has placed an order for the item, which she plans to feature as part of her holiday spread. Famighetti, 54, is a fan of antelope—she even served it to her wedding guests 15 years ago. And the salami format puts it on more accessible terrain. “It’s not crazy or anything,” she says.
With alligator, there are some who will deep-fry portions of the meat or feature it in a stew. But on Thanksgiving, it is indeed often about presenting the Cajun-country favorite whole for dramatic effect, with feet and head still attached.
“A whole gator is a jaw-dropper to say the least,” says Johnny Thomas, who handles marketing for the Louisiana-based CreoleFood.com.
The company, an online purveyor of just what its name implies, says it sees a huge uptick in orders for whole alligator tied to the holiday. This year, it has shipped out more than 1,100 of the skinned creatures for Thanksgiving, priced anywhere from $114.99 to $699.
Brothers Mike Ottomanelli, left, and Frank Ottomanelli. Frank sells an assortment of exotic meats in the family’s butcher shop in Queens.
Carlos Washington says he wants to shake things up for the holidays, so he is among those ordering an alligator from CreoleFood.com for his family’s Thanksgiving gathering in Sacramento, Calif. Washington, 36, whose work involves assisting disabled people, has had alligator many times before and evokes the common refrain that it can taste a bit like chicken.
This will be a first-time alligator experience, however, for some of Washington’s family members.
“My mom and grandmother are scared of it,” he says. “And my daughter called it a swamp monster.”
At the very least, smoking a whole alligator can be easier than smoking a whole pig, says Lavern Gingerich, a brand ambassador for Meadow Creek, a Pennsylvania-based manufacturer of smokers and grills. Gingerich says by virtue of the alligator’s leanness, the cooking time can be much quicker.
What’s alligator like? Gingerich makes comparisons to everything from pork loin to chicken and wild turkey, but ultimately offers this description: “It tastes like alligator.”
Those who track sales of exotic meats point to signs of growth on a year-round basis. One trade report, dubbed the Power of Meat, says annual sales of exotics, based on figures from December 2022 supplied by market researcher Circana, are up 21.8% over 2019 figures and have reached $120 million.
Culinary and history experts note that as odd as it might seem to serve alligator, antelope or other exotic meat for the holiday, it actually hews closer to tradition than a commercial-grade supermarket turkey. Pilgrims and Native Americans who marked the harvest celebration we call Thanksgiving today feasted on whatever they could hunt or gather, and wild game was bound to be on the menu.
Meats including alligator, elk and boar at S. Ottomanelli & Sons.
Turkeys still rule contemporary Thanksgiving celebrations, with the National Turkey Federation estimating Americans will consume 40 million big birds on the holiday. Many culinary professionals say they’re doubtful of how far the demand for exotic meats on Thanksgiving will go.
Count Pat LaFrieda, a prominent New Jersey-based meat purveyor, among the skeptics. LaFrieda carries venison and alligator as part of his namesake company’s product lineup, but he says it is risky to serve guests something like that on a day when they’re expecting the comfort of the familiar.
“I wouldn’t gamble my holiday meal on it. You’re going to run out of stuffing, that’s for sure,” he says.
Ironically, the biggest turkey fans out there may be alligators, according to Brandon Fisher, a spokesperson for Gatorland, an alligator-filled theme park in Orlando, Fla. There is a long history at the attraction of feeding whole turkeys to the gators around Thanksgiving. They chomp them up in a few bites, bones and all.
“When we pull out these turkeys, their eyes light up,” Fisher says.
Copyright © 2023 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 12/28/2023 1:03:28 AM | | | | | | BBC News -- Why British chocolate tastes the way it does .............................................................
BBC
Dec. 24, 2023
Why British chocolate tastes the way it does
By Veronique Greenwood
For some, there is nothing that beats the sweet, creamy, slightly baked flavour of British chocolate, while others find it an affront to their tastebuds. But why does it taste that way at all?
Imagine a taste test with identical-looking squares of milk chocolate, each from a different country. If you tasted them like a sweets-sommelier, swishing your mouth out with water before each to cleanse your palate, would you be able to tell which was British?
Online forums are littered with people insisting that there is a unique flavor to chocolate made in the UK. There are plenty of click-bait news stories as well. People love to weigh in -- and blanket condemnations of certain other nations' chocolates are hurled with glee.
According to food scientists, it's probably not in people's heads. "There do tend to be differences," says Greg Ziegler, a professor of food science at Pennsylvania State University who specialises in chocolate. But there's nothing all that surprising about that. Geographically, tastes vary quite a bit, and food companies are in the business of satisfying them. "A lot of what you like depends on what you were exposed to growing up," says Ziegler. It would be more unexpected if chocolate was the same everywhere. And anyone who has travelled will know this well -- the same big-brand chocolate bar you can pick up in the UK might taste different in the US, Australia and Asia, even if the packaging remains the same.
The real question Is, what gives British milk chocolate that taste?
An exhaustive search of the scientific literature, for both blind taste tests and details of national chocolate recipes, reveals surprisingly few results. There's a reason for that: the people who care most about this issue and have studied it most -- chocolate manufacturers, particularly those that cater to multiple markets around the world -- are not in the business of making their information public.
But Ziegler is able to shed a bit of light on what different groups of consumers tend to expect. "The Swiss like a fair amount of milk in it, probably a higher proportion of milk to cocoa, and a fresh milk taste," he says. In Belgium, milk chocolate is often darker, with a different ratio of cocoa to milk. American milk chocolate, at least of the Hershey's variety, is more acidic. This is because the milk is intentionally broken down during the manufacturing process, yielding a substance called butyric acid, while making a chocolate that's more shelf-stable. Famously, this acid is also present in vomit and partly responsible for its smell, a fact that has fueled many a headline. (Butyric acid is responsible for the smell of rancid butter, but it is also used to create certain food flavourings.)
If that gives you the shivers, you might wonder why Hershey's chocolate exists at all – much less an entire theme park in the sweet's Pennsylvania hometown and $10bn worth of sales in 2022, along with the largest chunk of the US chocolate market. Ziegler recalls that in the 1980s, when he was first working on chocolate, others had made that assumption. "Cadbury decided to put in a plant in Pennsylvania because they decided once people tasted Cadbury's they would no longer buy Hershey's chocolate," he says. "That didn't work out for them."
Hershey's bought Cadbury's American operations in 1988. People get used to a certain flavor, says Ziegler. After that, they like what they like.
If people are detecting a uniquely British flavour in milk chocolate, it's probably down to the way the crumb is made
The same ingredient, you may have noticed, comes up again and again in these discussions of chocolate taste: milk. Chocolate can be made without milk – mix cocoa butter, sugar, and a puree of fermented, roasted cacao beans, and you have a perfectly respectable dark chocolate. But in confections that use dairy, it contributes strongly to the flavor.
What's more, milk is about the only ingredient in which there is a genuine, consistent difference across borders, according to Stephen Beckett, editor of Beckett's Industrial Chocolate Manufacture and Use, the go-to tome for food scientists learning about chocolate. Beckett, who worked for the British confectionary brand Rowntree's, was from York, England, and in 2003, in the International Journal of Dairy Technology, he delved into the question of British milk chocolate's elusive flavor. It is almost the only public document tackling the issue, and Beckett begins by defining chocolate as a solid fat speckled with sugar, cocoa, and milk solids.
How quickly that fat melts when placed in the mouth affects the flavour of the chocolate -- but there is no particular difference between British chocolate and European chocolates in that respect, according to Beckett. The same is true of the proportion of milk fat in chocolate, and while adding vegetable fats to chocolate is something that is a unique practice among British manufacturers, these fats are tasteless, so they're unlikely to be contributing. What's more, the cacao used to make milk chocolate in both the UK and Europe come from what's known as "bulk" beans. They all tend to come from West Africa, and they're not a likely candidate for taste differences. Sugar, as well, is used in the same range of proportions in many countries -- the proportions used in the UK are not unique. The same goes for the relative proportions of milk.
But where things get interesting is how that milk is treated. Putting liquid milk straight into chocolate is a bad idea, as the extra water impacts the texture, so chocolate makers dehydrate the stuff to get a paste or powder. Just as Hershey's has a signature method of treating their milk, so do British manufacturers. Specifically, they use something called "chocolate crumb".
Beckett traces the origins of chocolate crumb to the early 19th Century, when milk powders, often made in the summer, went sour quickly. Chocolate makers were hoping to find a way to keep them fresh enough to meet the massive Christmas demand for chocolate. During the process, sugar is added to the milk until it reaches a consistency similar to sweetened condensed milk. Then cocoa liquor is added and the mixture undergoes a rapid dehydration process -- often by heating in a vacuum.
The process removes a great deal of water and that, along with the drying action of the added sugar, help control the growth of microorganisms, preventing the fats in the milk from going rancid. The resulting lumpy brown product resembles breadcrumbs, hence its name.
"When drying chocolate crumb at a high temperature, contact between moisture, proteins and reducing sugars is an ideal situation for promoting the browning, or Maillard, reaction," Beckett writes. "This occurs in an extreme form when milk is burnt in a saucepan, and gives rise to brown colours and cooked flavours that are usually quite distinctive and do not normally occur in milk powder products."
The result is a "unique, fruity, caramelised flavour" in the milk chocolate. Among the compounds that add to these flavours are maltol, which has a sweet caramel toffee flavour, and furfural, bringing a sweet, woody, baked-bread note.
Ziegler confirms that chocolate made with crumb, as British milk chocolates are, tends to have a slightly cooked note. "You can get some caramelisation in the milk," he says. If people are detecting a uniquely British flavour in milk chocolate, it's probably down to the way the crumb is made. Outside the UK, other methods for introducing milk, with their own distinctive flavour contributions, dominate.
The chocolate produced using crumb also tends to be more resistant to melting in hotter weather, as the softer fats in the product are bound together with less easily liquified ingredients. Key to this is ensuring the sugars -- sucrose and lactose -- crystalise as fully as possible. This also means the finished chocolate dissolves more readily in the mouth without feeling sticky, according to former head of Cadbury's UK research laboratories, Martin Wells.
Beckett himself made no claims about the superiority of one taste or another in his handbook on industrial chocolate manufacture, the latest edition of which was published three years before his death in 2020.
"There is no such thing as the ideal flavour, as what is pleasant to one person may be unacceptable to another," Beckett wrote. For those of us who find pleasure in a particular type of chocolate that others find unpalatable, it is something to relish: it means there is more for us to enjoy.
Copyright © 2023 BBC.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 1/9/2024 6:03:02 PM | | | | | | BBC News -- Mouse filmed tidying up man's shed every night ............................
[ there is also a video available at : bbc.com ]
BBC News
7th January 2024
Mouse filmed tidying up man's shed every night
By Charlie Bucklland
Despite being an avid wildlife photographer, retired postman Rodney Holbrook never expected to capture a Ratatouille-style scene unfolding in his own shed.
After regularly discovering that things from the night before had been mysteriously tidied, he set up a night vision camera on his workbench.
It captured a mouse picking up clothes pegs, corks, nuts and bolts.
He has since nicknamed the well-kept rodent Welsh Tidy Mouse.
The 75-year-old from Builth Wells, Powys, said the tidying ritual had been going on for two months.
"At first I noticed that some food that I was putting out for the birds was ending up in some old shoes I was storing in the shed," he said.
"Ninety nine times out of 100 the mouse will tidy up throughout the night.
"It is incredible really that they put them all back in the box, I think it's possible that they enjoy it."
Mr Holbrook believes the mouse is using the objects to hide away nuts, and so far the arrangement has been working in his favour.
"I don't bother to tidy up now, I leave things out of the box and they put it back in its place by the morning," he said.
"I think he would tidy my wife away if I left her in there."
No object seems to trouble the mouse either, as it has even been caught carrying cable ties to the pot.
"It's been a bit of an experiment really, I've added different things to the desk to see if they can lift it," said Mr Holbrook.
It is not the first time he has come across an organised rodent.
When living in Bristol in 2019, his friend reached out for help fixing up a night camera when another mouse was keeping their shed in order.
"That one video went viral and reached people around the world," he said,
"So I can't believe here in Builth Wells we have had the same thing happen years later."
© Copyright 2024 BBC.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 1/15/2024 4:19:58 PM | | | | | | WSJ -- Professor Wages Epic Battle Against Rats Attacking His Car ..............................
Jan. 12, 2024
A New York Professor Wages Epic Battle Against Rats Attacking His Car
From hot sauce to hiding, desperate auto owners are trying everything to keep critters from chewing expensive wiring. ‘They will find you.’
By Ginger Adams Otis
Tom Marion, a theater professor at the City University of New York, is a survivor of roughly four rodent invasions of his car, which he parks in a city that is home to an estimated two million rats.
It can feel like he’s tried as many tricks to defend his ride.
The 62-year-old Manhattanite has wrapped his ignition wires in minty tape, doused garlic-scented potion on his engine, and he purposely parks in a different spot each night, trying to stay a whisker ahead of the enemy.
It is as if his car is made out of cheese.
“They will find you,” he says, of rats. “And they all know each other and they talk to each other.”
Rodents have long ravaged automobiles, and anecdotal reports of critter-on-car B & Es rose in the pandemic, which reduced driving, a pattern that persisted. But skyrocketing now is the wild world of remedies being touted to confounded drivers, especially in cold weather when your stationary sedan can become a flop house for vagrant varmints.
“Help. I have rats in my car and they are destroying everything,” said a December Reddit post, one of many like it, that drew more than 150 replies, including tips to stick bars of Irish Spring soap in the cabin, center console and trunk; “pee next to the car”; spray ammonia near the wheels; place dryer sheets under the hood and seats, or take the nuclear option: “In a few weeks your best option will likely be to set the car on fire and claim insurance,” said one suggestion.
Arizona photographic artist Steve Love suspects a chipmunk snacked through about $700 of wiring in his dad’s Ford Explorer in November. Before that, a rabbit, he suspects, nearly chomped through battery cables and some blinker wiring on the same car.
Love, 59, investigated purported deterrents, including a motion-sensor strobe light, but found a simpler fix.
He props the vehicle hood open every night and secures it with a bungee cord to keep the wind from closing it. The idea? Deprive critters a getaway.
“That way the rodent won’t feel safe in the engine compartment,” he says.
The insurance industry is estimated to have paid out in more than 91,700 car-damage claims caused by rodents, squirrels, and rabbits nationally between July 1, 2022 and June 30, 2023, according to a recent analysis by State Farm.
After a recent relaxing night on a Hawaii beach, Davarus Shores jumped into his 2003 gold Infiniti to return home to Honolulu -- only to have the car die within minutes.
Shores, who is 31 and works in the medical profession, got it towed roughly 40 miles, and mechanics handed him a $2,000 bill and a dead rat. The rodent had entered his engine and nibbled through wiring.
“Poor little rat was just trying to find somewhere to chill that night,” Shores figures.
To prevent incursions, car owners also slather on hot sauce so thick it drips from car wires, or wrap aluminum foil around the bottom of vehicles, under the theory it’s too slippery for rats to scale.
One can buy shields and pastes that promise to make rodents turn tail and run, or invest in ultrasonic pest alarms. An online car forum mentions witchcraft: “Burn rodent bones and chant Druid expulsion alms.”
Will any of it work? Well, in the classic “Tom and Jerry” cartoons, Jerry the mouse usually outwitted Tom. If rats take a liking to your car, you are Tom.
Spraying engines with peppermint might deter some rodents, at least temporarily. Or it might not faze them, according to Jason Munshi-South, an evolutionary biologist and professor of biology at Fordham University.
Garlic oil? White Pepper? Pine-Sol? Same thing, he says.
The word rodent evolved from the Latin rodere, to gnaw. “And so they’re constantly gnawing on things, and that’s the reason they gnaw car wires,” the professor explains.
In some cases, the idea that certain smells or flavors are turnoffs stems from lab tests.
Given a choice, rats in captivity might avoid scented objects, says Munshi-South, but that doesn’t necessarily mean rodents in the real world will do so.
Love, the Arizona artist, suspects there is some truth to the unproven but popular theory that rodents nosh on cars more as automakers switch to soy-based products to insulate wires.
In legal cases, automakers have argued rodent behavior is essentially an act of God.
AAA has suggested rodents might find modern vehicles appealing because of all the wiring from sensors, computers and increased technology.
In New York, Marion’s first rat attack came in late 2022, when he was parking his 2015 Toyota Prius C in an open-air lot in his East Harlem neighborhood.
After rats chewed through wires, the car had to be towed to a garage. Marion’s insurance footed the roughly $1,000 bill.
He chalked it up to bad luck, but when it happened again soon after, he started dousing the car nightly with garlic-scented rodent repellent and “really smelly” peppermint oil. After each drive, he covered his engine with stainless steel wool, yet another rumored rodent barrier.
A few weeks later, his car died again, and Marion discovered a rat, unharmed and squeaking angrily, under the hood. He had to chase it off.
Next, Marion ditched the parking lot for open spots on the street, sometimes as far as a mile away. He still diligently applied rodent repellents nightly. But two weeks later, his car died as he crossed a bridge into Queens. It cost his insurance company another $1,200.
In a remove-the-cheese strategy, he sold his Prius and bought a hybrid Ford Escape. Coincidence or not, he says he hasn’t had an incident since.
But he can’t relax. He avoids parking near trash cans and never parks in consecutive spots.
A rat might case his car, plotting for a break-in, but “by the time they come back, I’m gone,” he says. “I’m never in the same place. I am all around.”
Write to Ginger Adams Otis at Ginger.AdamsOtis@wsj.com
Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 1/27/2024 4:43:40 PM | | | | | | WSJ -- What Being a Museum Guard Taught Me About Looking at Art .............................
WSJ
Jan. 27, 2024
What Being a Museum Guard Taught Me About Looking at Art
Working at the Guggenheim showed Bianca Bosker that reading labels makes it harder to see what’s actually in front of us.
A visitor looks at a work by artist Refik Anadol at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, January 2023.
By Bianca Bosker
In 2019 I applied to be a security guard at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. According to the job description, I’d need to tell people that flash photography wasn’t permitted, but I was also expected to make conversation about the art and invite people to share their questions. By this point, I’d spent more than a year immersed in the art world trying to develop my “eye,” after getting fed up with my abject failure to appreciate art. I loved the idea that I’d get to discuss paintings with members of the general public who, like me, might have spent a lot of time wandering through exhibitions feeling befuddled. I also wondered how being around art for hours each day, with no ability to escape, would affect me and my relationship with art.
As a guard, I hovered like a coiled jack-in-the-box ready to spring. I’d seize on the flimsiest excuse to draw you into conversation, which was part of my job description, after all. If you took a photo with flash, I’d be on you faster than the speed of light to say “Please don’t,” then ask you what drew you to that piece. People’s responses moved me more than anything I read in the wall labels. “Looking at art is like looking into the future,” said one visitor who couldn’t tear himself away from an Agnes Martin painting of a gray grid on a white expanse. A man stood in front of a Wojciech Fangor painting of a brilliant olive-green circle surrounded by a halo of sky blue, and I watched as his face broke into a huge smile. “Wow. Wow. Wow…It’s, like, pulling you into another dimension. It’s opening to another world,” he said.
Visitors at New York’s Guggenheim Museum, where the author worked as a guard.
I started to imagine how I’d lead my own tour. You’d meet me in the rotunda, just outside the ticket desk, and we’d begin by settling on some ground rules. One: You don’t have to look at everything. Two: You do have to look at something for at least five minutes. Three: Don’t you dare lay eyes on the wall text -- the paragraph-long explanation pasted on the wall beside many of the artworks. Lots of guards agree with me on this. Artists, too: Looking at a painting while reading the wall text “is like trying to have a conversation with the work and someone keeps interrupting,” an artist friend told me once.
I know it’s hard to resist: I read the wall text too. Occasionally it’s helpful, and for years I thought it was downright rude when museums and galleries didn’t offer an explanation of each work. But now, more often than not, I wanted to tear all the labels down. The wall text hovers just to the side of art, like the answer key at the bottom of a word search, its definitive tone sending the message that there’s only one right answer to the art.
Guarding at the Guggenheim made me see that art historians could be unreliable narrators. The Richard Serra sculpture “Tearing Lead,” which consists of a wrinkled rectangle of lead surrounded by four piles of squiggly lead strips, got confused for trash so often that guards were given a Touch Tally -- a clipboard with a photo of the sculpture and instructions to “Please indicate where the piece was touched with an X,” so a conservator could reposition the little tangles of lead to match the picture.
Richard Serra, ‘Tearing Lead’ (1968).
But a conservator I talked with told me that the sculpture was meant to have the metal pieces arranged haphazardly. When the current show came down those lead ribbons would get tossed into a big box, and whoever installed “Tearing Lead” next time would throw them randomly on the ground. The work looks different every time it’s shown -- not that you’d know it from the wall text.
Paintings are constantly shape-shifting too. The blue splotch that an art critic obsessed over in the 1970s might look green to you, and not only because the light is different in the gallery. Van Gogh painted his famous sunflowers with a yellow paint made from then-brand-new lead chromate pigments, which were later discovered to be “fugitive colors” that caused his bright yellow petals to fade to brown, just like real flowers rotting in a vase. In the 1960s, Frank Stella painted geometric abstract canvases featuring jittery stripes of fluorescent colors, like Day-Glo orange and caution-tape yellow, which are already starting to fade. Left un-restored, one conservator warns, they’ll wind up “milky-colored ruins.”
That’s tragic. And magnificent. It’s another reminder to have faith in your own eyes. These works are not immutable. They spoil, rot and sag. You know the work better than the wall text does, because you’re looking at it right now -- in this moment, in this light, in this day and age, on this tour.
Which isn’t to say your eyes don’t need practice. As you follow me up the ramp and into the gallery, I just want you to keep in mind that we’re less-than-objective judges. Research has found that our fondness for certain Monet, Manet and Degas works can be explained by the exposure effect -- a scientific term for our tendency to like things just because we’ve interacted with them more. We’ve seen these works over and over and thus are convinced they’re good. Research also shows that we like a painting less when it’s hung below eye level, prefer the bigger version of two identical paintings, and have a weird fetish for originals. In one study, 80% of participants said that if the “Mona Lisa” was destroyed in a fire, they would rather see the painting’s ashes than a perfect replica.
Constantin Brancusi, ‘Miracle (Seal )’ (ca. 1930-32).
For all these reasons and more, I’m going to insist that you don’t look at the little label beside each artwork. That label -- officially called a “tombstone“ -- includes the artist’s name, the work’s title, the date it was made, what materials it was made with and who gave it to the museum. When I guarded a Brancusi sculpture, I tried to stand in front of the wall label so people couldn’t see it, and I heard their interpretations go wild. They saw a middle finger, a woman giving birth, a graph, a Kurosawa character, a cannon, a dolphin, a nose, a fish. But when their eyes darted to the wall label and scanned the title -- I’ll come clean: the piece is called “Miracle (Seal )” -- they gave up. “Yes! I KNEW it was a seal!” one visitor said, then walked on.
If I learned one thing as a guard, it’s that sometimes being forced to look at an artwork, even when you don’t want to, is life-changing. I’m going to leave you alone with a piece. Challenge yourself to notice five things. If you get stuck, move: Get closer, walk backward or go around it. Notice the most obvious things, the most surprising things, the things that grab your eyeballs despite yourself. Fight the urge to see what you expect to be there; focus instead on what is there. Maybe ask yourself how you’d describe the piece. Or let yourself wonder what it was made with. I’m not concerned with whether you think it’s good. Just watch the thing in front of you.
This essay is adapted from Bianca Bosker’s new book “Get the Picture: A Mind-Bending Journey Among the Inspired Artists and Obsessive Art Fiends Who Taught Me How to See,” which will be published Feb. 6 by Viking.
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| From: John david | 2/26/2024 8:21:50 AM | | | | | | | Cisco's Laptop Memory solutions play a crucial role in optimizing the performance and reliability of mobile computing devices, ensuring seamless operation and productivity on the go. Engineered to meet the diverse needs of modern professionals, Cisco's memory modules offer exceptional speed, efficiency, and capacity, enabling users to tackle demanding tasks with ease. By leveraging cutting-edge memory technologies and robust data management features, Cisco Laptop Memory empowers individuals to maximize their productivity, whether it's multitasking, running resource-intensive applications, or accessing large datasets. With Cisco's commitment to excellence in memory solutions, users can trust in the reliability and performance of their laptops, unlocking new levels of efficiency and mobility in their work and personal endeavors |
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| From: Jon Koplik | 2/27/2024 12:18:50 AM | | | | | | WSJ -- John Hermida skipped stocks and bonds to buy a 1931 Ford Model A ............................
Feb. 25, 2024
Worried About a Market Crash, He Invested in a Depression-Era Car.
John Hermida skipped stocks and bonds to buy a 1931 Ford Model A
By A.J. Baime
John Hermida, 26, a structural engineer living in Miami, on his 1931 Ford Model A, as told to A.J. Baime.
I have always liked classic cars because they’re so mechanical. I was obsessed with Model Ts even when I was a teenager. I had some assets, but with inflation the way it was, I thought the stock market was going to crash. So, instead of the usual stocks and bonds, I looked at classic cars. If you look at the market, classic cars can be good investments, if you take care of them.
I was on Bring a Trailer all the time, and I started watching “Jay Leno’s Garage” videos, trying to learn as much as I could. Then, I found a guy named Paul Shinn on YouTube. He makes videos about the Ford Model A that make this model so accessible. He talks about finding parts and how to fix the cars when they break. I wanted a prewar Packard, but parts are so hard to find. For a guy my age with my resources, a prewar Packard just wasn’t reasonable. But a Model A was.
Unlike the Model T, the Ford Model A offers a mostly modern manual-transmission driving experience, Hermida says.
I found a listing for a Model A that had air conditioning in Oklahoma. A lot of purists hate any modern modification on a classic, but I have lived my entire life in Miami and it’s super hot. I wanted a car I could actually use. The owner and I agreed on a number -- $23,500 -- and so four years ago, this Model A became the first car I ever bought. I was still a college student, studying engineering at Florida International University.
The day the car arrived on a truck, I was blown away. The first thing the truck driver said to me after we had unloaded it was, “You have to drive this thing.” I had not driven a stick shift in a couple years. I had never driven a manual car that did not have a synchronized transmission. So, off I go driving around the block. I must have stalled three times.
The Model A drives ‘like a tractor,’ says Hermida. ‘The brakes are as hard as rocks.’
One of the things I love about the Model A is that it is a highly important car, historically. When it came out, it revolutionized the industry, just as the Model T did before it.
[ Ford introduced the Model A in December of 1927 and, according to the company, Ford reached a capacity of 9,000 Model As per day in 1929.]
Unlike the Model T, the Model A drives like a modern car. Anyone who knows how to drive a stick shift can get in this car and drive it. Although it does have some archaic idiosyncrasies, such as the aforementioned non-synchronized transmission, which means you double clutch when you shift gears.
I live in the house where I grew up, and I keep the car in an air-conditioned garage. Like all decent engineers, I love to tinker, and I have taken apart the brake assemblies and rebuilt them. I replaced the alternator and I learned how a carburetor works, so I could take mine apart, clean it and put it back together.
The 1931 Model A packs a 201-cubic-inch, four-cylinder engine and can cruise over 50 mph.
I drive the car every weekend, doing all the normal weekend activities. I take it to see my brother, who lives in Coconut Grove. I get groceries and take it to restaurants. It drives like a tractor. The brakes are as hard as rocks. The steering is heavy at low speeds and light at higher speeds. The car can be a little intimidating because you’re going 50 mph with very little of the protection you would have in a modern car.
The classic-car community has been amazing. Miami is not the most welcoming place, but if you tell someone you have a classic car, you have instant friends. I have met younger people who know how to work on these cars, and people in their 80s and 90s who grew up driving them.
Hermida calls his 1931 Ford Model A ‘Aggie’ for Agatha. ‘What could be a more 1930s name than Agatha?’ he says.
Every car should have a name, I think. With this car, I needed a name that felt really 1930s and that began with an A. So I call it “Aggie” for Agatha. What could be a more 1930s name than Agatha? So if you see me driving this car, you can say hello on a first-name basis.
Write to A.J. Baime at myride@wsj.com.
Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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| To: Jon Koplik who wrote (134) | 2/27/2024 6:53:32 AM | | From: SirWalterRalegh | | | | Jon-
In 1953, at age 16, I bought my first car. It was a 1931 Ford Model A roadster. A convertible
with a rumble seat. Purchase price $50.
Sold a year later for $95. in order to buy 1939 Pontiac. |
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| From: Jon Koplik | 4/18/2024 2:35:41 PM | | | | | | WSJ / Americans throw away millions in coins. Here's where it ends up ...................................
WSJ
April 17, 2024
Americans Throw Away Up to $68 Million in Coins a Year. Here Is Where It All Ends Up.
So much change ends up in the trash that one company is digging them up for profit
In 2017, Reworld started its operation to recover the millions of dollars worth of coins that are thrown away every year.
By Oyin Adedoyin
At a waste-management facility in Morrisville, Pa., workers load incinerated trash into industrial machinery that separates and sorts metals, then sends them to get hosed down. The reward: buckets of quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.
Americans toss as much as $68 million worth of change each year, according to Reworld. The sustainable-waste processing company is on a treasure-hunt to find it. The company says that in the seven years since it started the effort, it has collected at least $10 million worth of coins.
Coins and other metals are filtered through multiple machines.
Coins are as good as junk for many Americans. Buses, laundromats, toll booths and parking meters now take credit and debit cards and mobile payments. Using any form of physical currency has become more of an annoyance, but change is often more trouble than it is worth to carry around. The U.S. quarter had roughly the buying power in 1980 that a dollar has today.
“If you lost a $100 bill you’d look for it. If you lost a $20 bill you’d look for it. If you lost a book you’d look for it,” said Robert Whaples, an economics professor at Wake Forest University. “But a penny, you’re just not going to look for it.”
Whaples has encouraged the government to kill the penny, which costs about three times its value to make. The U.S. Mint spent $707 million making coins last year. Canada, New Zealand and Australia have removed their 1 cent pieces from circulation.
Because coins can be hard to spend, they circulate slowly through the economy -- or don’t circulate at all. More than half of the coins in the U.S. are sitting in people’s homes, according to the Federal Reserve.
Spotting change in the trash
Many coins are also getting left behind. At airport checkpoints, the Transportation Security Administration collects hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of them each year. Coins are left in couch cushions or cars, then sucked into vacuums and sent to landfills, said Dominic Rossi, Reworld’s director of finance and business support.
Reworld started collecting change in 2017 after noticing more of it in the trash. The company recovers 550,000 tons of metals annually, including soda cans, old pipes, keys and silverware.
On a recent Monday, a bucket loader lifted trash from its waste facilities into various sorting machines. A rattling gray one separated out anything that was the color of a coin. Another one separated anything round and flat, like a coin. And another machine separated heavier metals like coins from lighter metals like aluminum.
Unwashed coins are mixed among rusted pipes, used soda cans and old Chuck E. Cheese tokens.
It took 35 minutes to clean what the machines spat out. Then, squeaky clean coins were spread out on an iron rack to dry. They were still mixed in with euro cents, coins from Kuwait and D.C. metro tokens.
In a trailer, human checkers wearing gloves sorted through buckets of this material, separating the good coins from everything else.
U.S. coins are often mixed together with old metro tokens and foreign currency coins.
Because the trash was incinerated before it reached the facility, some coins were mangled beyond recognition. Of the $10 million in coins the company has recovered, some $6 million has been in good enough condition to use.
Reworld gathers anywhere from $500,000 to $1 million in coins a year, which it turns over to a third party to count and deposit to local banks.
Checkout counter annoyances
Most coins don’t end up in the trash. But that doesn’t mean they are wanted, either.
When Cassandra Raposo worked as a Dollar Store cashier, customers would often come to the register to pay for $5 to $10 purchases entirely with bags of change.
Out of the roughly $10 million worth of coins that Reworld has recovered, about $4 million of them are too damaged to use.
On busy days, Raposo helped them count every coin. Sometimes, they counted twice to double check, while she looked apologetically at the other waiting customers.
“I could feel the annoyance and almost even rage,” said Raposo, now a copy editor in Rhode Island.
People tend to bring their extra change to the bank to trade in, but it is getting harder to do even that. Capital One and PNC removed their coin-counting machines about a decade ago due to low customer use. In 2016, TD Bank pulled the plug on its coin-counting machines after an investigation found that it was giving customers less money than they were putting in.
Over the years, coins have gone from an essential payment method to a nuisance.
Today many people cash in their coins at Coinstar kiosks in grocery stores and gas stations. The company has said it operates over 24,000 kiosks across the country and has processed more than 800 billion coins.
Another person’s treasure
This year, Sara and Justin Ilse finished building a floor for their home’s 230-square-foot entryway out of 65,507 pennies.
“It was a way to encase something that doesn’t get viewed with much value in daily life,” Justin said.
It took Sara and Justin Ilse about a year to finish their penny floor.
More than 20,000 of the pennies came from jars that Sara’s father and brother-in-law kept in their closets. They bought the rest of the pennies they needed in 2,500 increments through their local bank. In addition to the $655 they spent on pennies, they also spent $1,195 on supplies such as glue and epoxy.
In one social-media video where they posted about the yearlong process of building the floor, they tossed a handful of pennies onto the finished product and watched them practically vanish.
Reworld employees also have a soft spot for hard currency. They set aside the buffalo nickels they find. These coins were only made between 1913 and 1938, and they can be worth thousands of dollars.
“As a child I used to get excited about buffalo nickels, I thought they were rare,” said Angelo Geraci, the facility’s operations supervisor. “Here we have jars and jars of buffalo nickels.”
Most of the coins recovered are in good condition (foreground) but others are damaged from the incinerator (background).
The coin recovery program is just a small part of Reworld’s revenue. The company makes most of its money from operating incineration facilities that burn trash to generate fuel.
Employees believe that one day coin usage will cease altogether, and so will the collection operation. But they’ll always have the buffalo nickels.
Write to Oyin Adedoyin at oyin.adedoyin@wsj.com
Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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| From: Jon Koplik | 5/5/2024 4:34:48 PM | | | | | | WSJ -- Insomniacs swear by dull narrators who put them to sleep .............................................
LIFESTYLE
A-HED
May 4, 2024
Is This the Most Boring Man in the World?
Insomniacs swear by dull narrators who put them to sleep, whether on purpose or not
By Spencer Jakab
Late last year Randy Smith got a text from a complete stranger. She thanked him for putting her to sleep.
Smith was shocked to discover that he was a YouTube star. The Ormond Beach, Fla., retiree was even more surprised about why: A tutorial he recorded and sold as a VHS tape in 1989 on how to use Microsoft Word had resurfaced as “THE MOST BORING VIDEO EVER MADE” with 3.1 million views and close to 11,000 comments so far.
“I can’t remember the number of times that this Video has helped me sleep,” one gushes. “I want this played at my funeral, so people don’t forget how interesting I was,” says another.
Smith, a former motivational speaker who taught presentation skills, has a voice that isn’t so much boring as comforting. It turns out, his silky-smooth delivery, combined with the now-irrelevant subject matter, makes his video perfect -- for hitting the sack.
And he has lots of competition. From footage of late TV painting instructor Bob Ross to five-hour loops of the BBC shipping forecast, dull recordings are all the rage as slumber hacks in a sleep-deprived nation. Smith is puzzled.
“Why somebody who has no interest in Microsoft Word would be watching it -- especially such an old version, I have no idea,” he says.
The answer: While white noise like rainshowers or ocean waves help some people, others find it easier to nod off to human yammering, such as the play-by-play of a baseball game.
If a live game isn’t available -- or sounds too exciting -- insomniacs these days can turn to a Chicago entrepreneur who calls himself “Mr. King” and runs Northwoods Baseball Sleep Radio, a podcast of full-length but fake baseball games on the fictional WSLP AM. He calls the matches as sportscaster “Wally McCarthy,” complete with made-up players and teams, and a friend from Minneapolis writes and narrates the ads for fictional products.
King, who will only say about his background that he “isn’t a complete novice,” hasn’t turned fake radio announcing into a full-time career yet.
But Benjamin Boster of Pleasant Grove, Utah, is literally living the dream. The 43-year-old trained vocal performer’s boss once told him he had a boring voice. Now he has made a side hustle, his “I Can’t Sleep -- A Boring Podcast,” into his family’s livelihood since being laid off in January.
A sleeper hit
Boster’s episodes have been downloaded about 10 million times across various platforms, and he doesn’t even have to write his own material. He slowly reads entire Wikipedia entries. Recent gripping subjects include Seahorse, Utility Pole, Beard, Pasta and Automated Teller Machine.
“Often for listeners,” he says, “the challenge is: Can I stay awake for a whole episode?”
Boster has 54 episode requests pending, some of which -- reading about skeletons, for example -- are a hard pass.
That is probably wise. Boster says his majority-female audience uses the podcasts as much for stress management as for sleep.
Shelly Cox, a retired magazine editor from Virginia, has restless legs syndrome and often wakes up in the middle of the night during her travels around North America with her husband in their Airstream recreational vehicle. Finding herself in a strange campsite is a very lonely feeling, she says, and she turns to the podcast “Sleep With Me,” which bills itself as “bedtime stories to help grownups fall asleep.”
“It is like being next to a very good friend at a time of need,” she says.
Adult bedtime stories, the most common technique for putting people at ease, require the right reader, such as Tom Jones, a 30-year-old Englishman who has long been told he has a distinctive voice.
“People would say, ‘You have quite the monotone.’ Now I take it as a compliment.”
‘Audio Ambien’
Known to listeners as “Thomas,” he is the soporific star of the “Get Sleepy” podcast with around 140 million downloads to date. Jones writes some stories himself, while his employer, Slumber Studios, employs freelancers and produces other sleep podcasts.
Appropriately, Jones, who struggles with sleep issues himself, records episodes from his bedroom outside Cambridge, England.
The business of sending listeners to la-la land is no sleepy corner of commerce. Executives at Audible, an Amazon subsidiary and leading U.S. audiobook platform, noticed many customers were listening to its books with a sleep timer and launched its “Sleep Collection” four years ago, featuring bedtime tales read by stars including Brian Cox, Eva Longoria and Keke Palmer.
But for dozing off, many listeners find audiobooks originally intended to entertain do the trick just fine.
According to a Reddit audiobook forum, actor Peter Ganim’s reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 novel “Rendezvous With Rama” is “audio ambien.” Customer reviews, mostly five stars, include one that says the narrator sounds like the voice on an automated phone menu.
Droning American narrators apparently face tough competition from the Brits, especially posh-accented men, when it comes to bringing on shut-eye. Jones, who grew up in Essex, calls it his “special sauce.”
Shelly Cox often wakes up to the hypnotic voice of a British narrator emanating from the headphones worn to bed by her husband, who also has trouble sleeping. SleepPhones, a maker of bluetooth-enabled audio headbands for listening to recordings in bed, recommends books narrated by actor and author Stephen Fry:
“The British timbre of Fry’s voice is modulated, plummy, yet silvery; a perfect concoction for a peaceful night’s sleep.”
Sometimes the subject matter alone is enough to induce slumber. One insomniac endorses the translated version of Marcel Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time.” And listening to the classic, 4,000-plus-page French novel comes with a bonus:
“Other people love Proust and you will be able to say you’ve read it, even if you slept through enormous chunks of it.”
Write to Spencer Jakab at Spencer.Jakab@wsj.com
Copyright © 2024 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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