Archive for the ‘Video’ Category
Carl Sagan’s Warning of Climate Disasters
These warnings were made in the 1980s — 40 years ago. People in power did not listen then, and they’re not listening now as they continue to subsidize the burning of fossil fuels and the production of oil (e.g., oil-depletion allowance).
Fermented carrots
I am definitely going to make these. I’m stopping my current ferment this coming Thursday, which will make it a three-week fermentation, and then I’ll start the carrots. I’ll use Nantes carrots and I plan to make two 1-liter jars. Printed recipe here.
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Update: The Eldest suggested adding a few whole cloves to the ferment (for flavor) and that made me think of adding whole star anise — if not to the carrots, to the next ferment I make using cabbage.
Liquid smoke: good stuff
I’ve been a fan of Wright’s Liquid Smoke for a long time and not so much a fan of Colgin’s liquid smokes, which include other ingredients. Take the Hickory version:
Wright’s: Water, Natural Hickory Smoke Concentrate.
Colgin’s: Water, natural hickory smoke flavor, vinegar, molasses, caramel color, and salt.
Here’s Adam Ragusea explaining:
How those metal blocks get such precision fits
This is a very interesting video, and the end segment on Henson Shaving’s razors is also good.
How to Treat H. Pylori Naturally with Diet
The efficacy of broccoli sprouts in treating H. pylori — it wipes them out — is surprising (and gratifying, since I eat broccoli sprouts once or twice per week).
The Betty Crocker story
Full disclosure: Decades ago, I had a Betty Crocker cookbook, and as I recall, it was a reliable cookbook. I didn’t much think about Ms. Crocker’s reality, but perhaps I just assumed that she was a real person rather than a meme.
Bill Pope’s cinematography style
I find some videos interesting in how they show me how very much I do not know about some topic or another. Watching and have explained something that people routinely do as their daily job, and something of which my ignorance is vast, is humbling and also intriguing. Here’s an example — an example, I must keep in mind, is old-hat and obvious to many.
Pub Choir sings ‘If I Could Turn Back Time’ (Cher)
I had never heard of Pub Choir, which according to Wikipedia is an Australian thing:
Pub Choir is a musical act founded in Brisbane, Australia, directed by Astrid Jorgensen.[1][2][3]
At each Pub Choir event Jorgensen arranges a popular song and teaches it to the audience in three-part harmony, concluding with a performance which is filmed and shared on social media.[4][5] There is no formal recurring membership and participants purchase tickets to attend each show, which is usually held at a licensed venue
There’s more at the link, and they have their own YouTube channel.
In this performance I glimpsed a double-bell trumpet like the one at the right but in a brass finish. Most double-bell trumpets seem to have the second bell mounted at a 45º angle, à la Dizzy Gillespie. This one is more unusual. (A YouTube video explains more about two-bell trumpets.) The common use seems to put a mute in one bell so the player can switch quickly between muted and open sound without have to fumble with the mute.
Why Tipping Is So Out Of Control In The U.S.
Tipping is so out of control in the US because the US businesses operate on a hyper-capitalistic model in which the goal in clear: increase profit. Increasing sales is good, but there is a cost of sales: R&D, manufacturing, advertising, sales force, fulfillment. So a $1 increase in sales is far from a $1 increase in profit.
Cutting costs delivers more: if costs are cut by $1, that $1 is pure profit. Thus the extreme efforts capitalists make to cut costs — cf. the massive layoffs now underway in Big Tech: cost cutting. (Of course, costs can be stupidly cut so that product delivery and sales are hurt — cf. Elon Musk.)
Thus businesses and corporations constantly seek ways to externalize their costs — to arrange things so that others pay the costs the company incurs. One famous example is Bell Telephone. Way back in the 1940s, it became clear that, because more phones required more telephone operators, eventually the number of operators required would be close to the total population. So Bell developed technology so that the increasing number of operators would not be on the Bell payroll. Today, you and I and everyone using a phone is a telephone operator, and Bell is free of the payroll expense.
See also self-service supermarkets and other such businesses. But see also toxic waste dumps, through which the public, not the corporations, pay the costs of cleaning up waste by-products. And look at the environmental costs of strip-mining and clear-cutting timber: those corporations externalize their costs.
Tipping is how corporations externalize payroll costs. Rather than pay a fair wage, corporations low-ball the salaries and ask the public to pay the workers. The profit to a capitalist is to pay workers less than the value of what the workers produce. If the business can externalize payroll, then the profit is so much more.
So businesses pressure legislators to keep minimum wages low, based on the idea that the workers will be paid not by the business that profits from their labor but by the public, thus allowing the business to enjoy more profit.
What is needed is for the governments — municipal, county, state, and federal — to require businesses to pay the full expenses of the business. That would include not only fair wages, but also paying for environmental cleanup if that’s required, paying more in road and license fees for heavy trucks that damage roadways, and so on.
Keep that in mind as you watch this video: customers are being asked to cover the business’s payroll.
The Unhinged Miniature World of Bobby Fingers
In an earlier post I blogged a strange and absorbing video which started with making a diorama of the time Michael Jackson’s hair caught fire during the making of a Pepsi commercial. The video (and diorama) maker was Bobby Fingers, and Andy Baio has a good piece about him in Waxy:
The pseudonymous Irishman known as “Bobby Fingers” has only made three videos since launching on YouTube last August, but each one is an unhinged masterpiece.
If you haven’t seen them before, Bobby Fingers makes elaborate 1:9 scale dioramas depicting embarrassing moments in the lives of famous men, showing off his talents in model-making with a range of techniques from Bronze Age wax casting to modern 3D laser scanning.
But each video veers off wildly in different directions, interspersed with field trips, interviews, deadpan commentary, surrealist humor, and inevitably, a musical number.
Craft-wise, it’s on par with the best modelmakers on YouTube, but shares more in common with viral video phenomenon like Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared, Too Many Cooks, Nathan for You, and Unedited Footage of a Bear. Each one subverts the conventions of a familiar genre, whether it’s educational children’s shows, classic TV intros, business makeover reality shows, pharmaceutical ads, or in this case, crafty ASMR artisan YouTube channels. . .
Later On 