three star homeless food

So I first saw this article--or at least a version of it--over at the NY Times, but they have required registration and I have no idea if you can see it without a Times Select account. Basically, a professionally trained chef is making haute-ish cuisine for a soup kitchen --the kicker is, it's across the street from where I live. I wish I could link you the NY Times article: it's full of unintentionally hilarious lines. My personal favorite:

"He disguised some of the octopus in a soup and used the rest in a salad for the women’s shelter."

How bad can it be when the bread basket is filled with Le Bernardin's leftovers?

PS3 prices are dropping like Britney's underwear at the sight of a camera--maybe by the time school starts up again and we really need the distraction, my roommate and I can be the proud custodians of a family of next-gen consoles. Especially if I can find a goddamned Wii. I want to play Super Mario, damnit!

I had a long-ish discussion with my friend Dean today about the overlap between celebrity and academia--figures like Slavoj Zizek and Bernard Henri-Levy that seem to be a dime a dozen across the Atlantic yet strangely wanting over here. True, we have Jeffery Sachs, but is he married to a famous actress like those two? Didn't think so. Plus, I'd imagine he'd poll slightly ahead of Zbigniew Brzezinski in a national name-recognition contest. I've been trying to read Zizek for a while, but to be honest, I haven't been able to get through it without feeling like I need to read Lacan in order to not be wasting my time. Funny given how often he's cited as a scholar whose work references popular culture and flows well. This is the only article of his I've ever found that seems to fit that description well, and it's an interesting one.

Watch as the power of the Internet and its hundreds of thousands of nerds take their wrath on a local Washington town. To make a long story short, a ROTC cadet almost got his leg blown off when the cannon used to celebrate the local football team's touchdowns exploded. After the event, rather than the crush of support you'd expect from such an all-American scenario, the kid received something much different. Threats to break his other leg, proposals to ban him from town--all because apparently, people are scared that their football tradition might be taken from them. The story is pretty interesting, but what's even more interesting are the Fark and Digg threads about it. Snohomish has brought down upon its head the full fledged wrath of the Internet, and frankly, it isn't a pretty sight.

From the raging front of the war on drugs: Mexico is now prey to an unstoppable strain of la hierba de diablo that's ready for harvest after two months and can survive having its roots doused in pesticide. I shudder to think of the potential consequences for chip and pretzel stocks in the Southwest. We could be talking a serious famine here.

On the note of food, let it hereby be announced that the route to my heart lies in pho. Warm, steaming, bowls of pho. Don't say I didn't tell you.



EDIT: This almost made me shoot water out my nose. Just thought I should mention that.