Ramen, as many a starving academic or slum-dweller can attest, is life. It is also one of the most underrated foods. At its best, it can be a rather zen undertaking. I saw this video for the preparation of yakibuta ramen originally on a Washington City Paper blog, where the columnist had the same question I eventually did about the titular dog of what appears to be a series of Cooking With Dog shorts:

How does that poodle with the ’80s hair-metal ‘do sit there so still as the cook prepares the ramen? Seriously, the poor pooch’s nose must be going crazy from the smell of pork, sardines, seasoned soft-boiled eggs, soy sauce, and on and on. That dog deserves some sort of award for such forbearance.

I'm particularly wondering how that little poodle just stayed maybe an inch from the stove for what seemed like half the episode. It must be the most indifferent and/or well-trained dog in the world. This is a somewhat strange video, but mostly in little ways, from the dog itself to an interjection of the finished product in the precise middle of preparation, presumably in order to create a framing shot for the YouTube post.

The following is crossposted from Straßgefühl. Comment is free.



The Mammoth collective just linked to a blog this morning called Quiet Babylon, which claims to be about "cyborgs, architects, and our weird broken future". While (obviously) technology-focused, it seems to take after Donna Haraway's broader definition of "cyborg" as effectively anything that uses technoscientific means to augment its reality or experience.

What I already think is very interesting about this blog is that it extends that definition even further to conceive of contextualized, augmented environments that relate to people as much as people relate to them, creating a "cyborg urbanism", as it were. As a self-described social transhumanist, cyborg-feminist and postmodern urbanist, I kind of wish I'd come up with this first.

So yah, I dig it. And you know Bruce Sterling is right: nobody really likes lanyards.

A couple of weeks ago Uganda enacted an "anti-homosexuality law" expanding its pre-existing policy of executing suspected participants in gay sex, adding additional capital-offense categories such as "aggravated homosexuality".

The new law goes so far as to require health officials to report any suspected homosexuals to the police so that they can be tried and, if found guilty, sentenced to death. This law was written by Ugandan fundamentalist politicians in close contact with the C Street Family, a dominionist, theocratic cult of power (literally!) whose membership includes a surprisingly large number of members of Congress.

Rick Warren, writer of The Purpose-Driven Life and megachurch minister of which Barack Obama is so fond as to have him give the benediction at his inauguration, has no particular opinion on the matter, claiming, despite vast evidence to the contrary, that his "job is to encourage, to support. I never take sides."

I just want to say that - just as it was abundantly clear that Warren's book is designed to "encourage" millions of people to tolerate whatever miserable lot they have in life (and suppress any ideas they might have about social consciousness) with a sense of total resignation masquerading as acceptance of "God's purpose" - it is also clear that Warren appears to believe that the purpose of a gay African's life is to serve as a warning to others.

Update: Perhaps unsurprisingly, Obama is not disagreeing with Warren, even though the Ugandan death warrant appears to violate Bush-era PEPFAR agreements. When you're doing worse for queers and the third world than Shrub, you need to turn around and notice the line you've crossed receding into the distance.

The following is crossposted from Straßgefühl. Comment is free.

I know I love to hate on Dubai, but the spectacularity of its rise and fall - and its impacts on global markets, as demonstrated over the weekend in the 95% or so of the world where people did not eat turkey - as a thoroughly manufactured, yet distressingly real, simulated phenomenon is a completely fascinating subject to me.

imomus, the ever-fascinating but always hit-or-miss indie popster, makes some pointed, salient commentary:

"Was anywhere heading for a fall so obviously as Dubai?" asks Simon Jenkins in The Guardian. "Yet why did no one ever scream? Why did everyone just marvel?" The answer is partly that negative comment was actually a crime in Dubai; Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum told critics to "shut up" and media was closely controlled to exclude anything which might damage investments or stop the influx of rich foreigners and investors.

It's also undoubtedly true that a rising tide, even if it doesn't quite float all boats, brooks no opposition. Dubai's population of 1.37 million (2006) is comprised of a small conservative Muslim indigenous population, and 85% expatriates, most of whom are low-paid construction and service workers from India and the Philippines. The bling state rides -- I suppose we should say "rode" -- on the back of unorganised, unregulated labour.

The relationship between Emirati citizens, spectacularly wealthy and/or endebted expatriate betas (who will nonetheless never be citizens), and the massive disposable underclass of migrant workers (whose needs are ultimately immaterial) was apparent in microcosm during the opening of the Dubai Metro in September:

Built in just under four years, the first phase of ten stations opened bang on schedule on 09-09-09 - and at nine minutes past nine in the evening.... So many people turned out in their cars to watch the dazzling blue and silver trams, traffic jams lasted well past midnight in downtown Dubai, notorious for congestion, in the 40-degree heat.

("What do you mean, use the elevated? Don't be silly! That's for little people, dear.")

It is a place of great wealth, and in contrast low wages for the thousands of immigrant workers who live in bunk houses doing unskilled labour. You are either well off or poor. Nothing in between. For the low paid, the all-electric Metro will be much in demand. And Dubai is not immune to the credit crunch. Many of the luxury apartments near the famous Palm Island resorts lie unoccupied. Cars are regularly abandoned at the airport by those fleeing their debts.

Of course, the lines that are opening actually service the high-end neighborhoods and go nowhere near the labor camps, which are miles outside of the resort area. But the Dubai Metro wasn't built to satisfy the city's actual transportation problems (which are manifold, to be honest). It was built to prove to the sheikhs and football stars who own the entire city that they've got a real classy joint.

There are now two food nags in the house.

One, the one I'm used to, generally responds to my getting a can of curry sauce with "Don't get that! That sauce has dihydrous monoxide in it! Get the Upscale Name Brand Curry Puree instead. I know it costs three times more but you're getting twice the quality! Don't you know anything about anything?"

The new one goes "Don't get that! We can make it at home if we have a cast-iron dutch oven and ten hours to kill. Wait, why are you buying a cast-iron anything? We've got an anvil at home, we'll work it out. ...What, now you're getting iron ingots? There's a radiology clinic just down the street, we can just break in and take some cesium and a neutron gun and should have the necessary materials transmuted in no time. Don't you know anything about anything?"

And the crazy thing is I actually prefer both of these attitudes to the utter indifference I'm used to.

The following is crossposted from Straßgefühl. Comment is free.



Three of the new (well, now more like newish) Czech-built DC Streetcar trams shipped out yesterday, after years of testing and stasis. It'll apparently take them about a month to cross the pond.

What I've seen of them are really beautiful. On the other hand, Spencer Lepler immediately wondered why the trams appear to be in DDOT's "Circulator" livery and not in one of WMATA's liveries. The answer, albeit incompletely, is that DDOT provides the Circulator service as a District-specific transportation brand, more or less independently of WMATA. Whether this justifies expanding the brand to cover a number of different non-Metro services DC could provide is another question entirely, but it does suggest some things about the significance of livery and branding when trying to develop an integrated transit network out of disparate modes.



To that end, the East LA Gold Line opened for service this week, and while there have been a number of criticisms about the roads not taken, one of the benefits of the occasionally scandal-ridden new Breda cars is LACMTA's use of a new integrated rail livery. This car is LRT and will run on an LRT line, much of it on the surface, into the forseeable future; but the metallic silver and fender accents refer importantly to Los Angeles' heavy-rail lines, as does the BRT Orange Line. While there are important technological distinctions between the three, it is important that riders see the continuity between these services as an integrated and relevant system.

At this juncture I'm not sure whether it would be wise or necessary to brand the DC Streetcar as some kind of "Metrotram" service. But this could and perhaps should be done with Maryland's interjurisdictional Purple Line. The current MTA livery is strongly identified with Baltimore, and both the color scheme and level of investment (closer to the "pre-metro" end of the LRT spectrum than the MTA Blue Line) indicate that it will have a strong component of functional integration into the Metrorail network.

To enhance that, perhaps some sort of livery can be developed that will provide strong aesthetic reference to the (nearly iconic) pre-existing Metro livery on the exterior of the heavy-rail trains. Given the possibility that WMATA is considering moving away from that livery with an "America's Metro" theme on the Silver Line (demonstrating good intentions but Nu-Rave Ugly pretensions), it would be important to find a reason to instead increase the continuity of a regional system that is now expanding, and which will (and must) do so even further as 21st-century realities about land use and energy intensity continue to unfold.

From: [ich]
To: hous-cwp8a-1469811265@craigslist.org
Re: $1280 / 3br - 3ba Dazzling, Cottage Comfort, Gorgeous Lighting Schemes, Full Kitchen (District of Columbia)

Hey, I have a couple questions about your ad:

1) What part of the greater Los Angeles area is located in the District of Columbia?

2) How many people commute 6,000 miles a day between Los Angeles and Washington, DC to justify your posting this ad in DC Craigslist whatsoever, much less every day?

Thanks!