AdamSmith

17 Horrifyingly Disgusting Retro Gelatin Recipes J-E-L-L-NOPE! posted on February 13, 2014 at 5:40pm EST Brian Galindo BuzzFeed Staff 1. Emerald Cantalope Via badanduglyofretrofood.com Because why would someone who is dieting eat a plain cantaloupe, when they can eat it with lime Jello and canned pineapple (sugar) chunks? 2. Ham In Aspic Via badanduglyofretrofood.com Because ham isn’t slimy enough! Also, is it supposed to be served on a bed of ham fat? 3. Cottage Cheese and Salmon Mold Via badanduglyofretrofood.com Salmon and cottage cheese really is an underrated combination. Also, those boiled eggs are a perfect garnish to balance out all those mushy textures. 4. Cucumber Relish Salad Via badanduglyofretrofood.com Cucumber, celery, and lime Jello; one of these things is not like the other. 5. Jellied Lamb Salad Via badanduglyofretrofood.com How do you improve upon a yummy piece of lamb? Apparently by over cooking it, setting it in gelatin, and garnishing with capers. CAPERS! 6. Lime Cheese Salad Via noteggsontoast.wordpress.com If a combination of lime Jello, mayo, and cheese wasn’t mouthwatering enough, then the addition of tuna fish should make it down right irresistible. 7. Sauerkraut Mold Via badanduglyofretrofood.com Have you ever eaten a hot dog and said, “wow, sauerkraut should be more than just a condiment!” If so then this is the dish for you; also don’t forget to serve with horseradish mayonnaise for that extra tang. 8. Glace Fish Mold Via brainpickings.org D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S: Canned tuna fish served with pimento stuffed olives and tomato gelatin. 9. Prune-Stuffed Roast Pork Via vintagerecipecards.com “Oh no, the roast is supposed to be weirdly oozing.” 10. Three layer salad Via badanduglyofretrofood.com Lemon gelatin, pimiento stuffed olives, sweet pickles, walnuts — this is basically a dish made up left over pantry ingredients that you have no idea what to do with. 11. Bean and Mushroom Salad Via badanduglyofretrofood.com Gelatin made an already gross combination even worse 12. Turkey In Aspic Via badanduglyofretrofood.com Is there even turkey in this?! 13. Lemony Salmon Tower Via noteggsontoast.wordpress.com Clearly you are eating salmon wrong if you are not eating it with lemon gelatin. 14. Pressed Brisket of Beef Via badanduglyofretrofood.com I think this has to be mislabeled, cause there is no way that isn’t made of tripe. 15. Jellied Beef Mold Via robertasrealities.com I’m convinced that someone must have been really high when they thought of this recipe. 16. Pressed Ox Tongue Via vintagerecipecards.com I’m sure the gelatin really brings out the ox tongue’s rubber texture. 17. Californian Jello Ring Via wordpress.com WTF?! I DON’T EVEN KNOW WHAT I’M LOOKING AT! http://www.buzzfeed.com/briangalindo/17-horrifyingly-disgusting-retro-gelatin-recipes

In any job I've ever had, the first thing I did was get control of the editorial function so I would not have to have reasons for anything beyond 'It reads better that way.' The pedants' revolt: lament for a golden age of grammar that never existedAs the grammar wars rumble on, can the prescriptivists and the descriptivists ever be friends? It seems unlikely A rose by any other name: Shakespeare was quite happy to sign his name Shakspere or Shakspeare. Photograph: Universal History Archive/Getty Images The great grammarian Otto Jespersen, writing in 1909, said English grammar was "not a set of stiff dogmatic precepts, according to which some things are correct and others absolutely wrong"; but was living and developing, "founded on the past" but preparing the way for the future, "something that is not always consistent or perfect, but progressing and perfectible – in one word, human". Language has been changing since the Tower of Babel and will continue to do so. The most conservative of traditionalists admit this, and claim to accept it, though they are oddly shy about putting forward examples of change they are happy with. Just think for a moment about technological change and how it drives language. Some of us can remember when spam was a sort of cheap ham they made into fritters for our school dinners. Happy days. A lot of people seem to think all change must be for the worse. Such fears, as relating to language, date from at least the 18th century. Usage, particularly spelling, had been fluid until then: a law passed in Elizabeth I's reign used the alternative spellings briberie and briberye in the same sentence and Shakespeare was, to say the least, relaxed about how to spell words (including his own name). Samuel Johnson and others sought to bring some order to the chaos. Johnson produced his dictionary (to replace the one, you may remember, burned by Blackadder and Baldrick) in 1755. The two most important grammar books of the period, by Lindley Murray in 1795 and Robert Lowth in 1862, had a huge influence until well into the 20th century. These are the men you can thank for such "rules" as not splitting infinitives. The OED, which started to appear in sections from 1888, was a big step towards settling things. The grammarians, notably HW Fowler with his Dictionary of Modern English Usage (1926), continued that process. By the time I started at school, in the 1950s, English teachers had a very firm idea of exactly what was and wasn't right. Even when they were wrong. This brings me to the descriptive v prescriptive argument. For at least 50 years almost all academic linguistics has been descriptive, concerning itself with how language is structured and used without passing judgment on what is right or wrong. Lexicographers, similarly, work by establishing that a word is in use with a particular meaning. If it does, they will put it in the dictionary and ignore the howls of protest from those who think this is providing respectable cover for the barbarians who want to wreck our beautiful language. Does this mean that things are getting worse? Lynne Truss, who wrote a book about punctuation, typified such fears when she referred to "the justifiable despair of the well educated in a dismally illiterate world". According to this argument, it all started to go wrong in the 1970s "when teachers upheld the view that grammar and spelling got in the way of self-expression". People have been wittering on like this for centuries. Conservatives long for a golden age, usually about 50 years in the past, when everyone knew their grammar and all was right with the world. "What is more, even Grammar, the basis of all education, baffles the brains of the younger generation today ... There is not a single modern schoolboy who can compose verses or write a decent letter" – not Michael Gove, but William Langland (born 1332!). Sadly, there never was a golden age. The privately educated actor Dirk Bogarde described his astonishment when he joined the army in the 1940s on finding that all the men in his platoon, who were state educated, were in effect illiterate. Yet this was the era when, according to Truss, most people did "know how to write". I attended a grammar school as one of the top 10% or so who passed the 11-plus. Even among this elite, many took little interest in English grammar and even those who did had forgotten most of it by the time they got to university. We had to take a Use of English exam in between O-level and A-level to address concerns over – you guessed it – declining standards. So much for the golden age. For their part, academics have a pretty poor record of explaining descriptive linguistics to the public and can come across as aloof and arrogant. (There are exceptions, such as the great David Crystal.) Can there ever be peace, when the two sides are so entrenched? Or must they for ever be in conflict, like the farmer and the cowman in Oklahoma!? I'd like to think there is a middle way that doesn't condemn but does help people to gain confidence in their use of language. I am not arguing that everything is perfect; far from it. But there's no sound evidence that standards are worse than when Lynne Truss and I were at school. And rather than blame it all on teachers and the national curriculum, the why-oh-why-are-things-so-awful-it-was-so-much-better-in-my-day lobby might wonder why it is that many of the worst language abuses come from people who have actually been well (often expensively) educated: politicians and business people, for example. It's not schoolchildren who spout drivel like "change that makes a difference for hardworking families" and "owning the strategic roadmap for the goods-buying platform". This is an edited extract from For Who the Bell Tolls: One Man's Quest for Grammatical Perfection, by David Marsh (Guardian Faber). David Marsh and NM Gwynne, author of Gwynne's Grammar, will debate "Questions of Grammar" at Kings Place, London, on Monday. Tickets available here. http://www.theguardian.com/media/mind-your-language/2014/feb/14/mind-your-language-grammar-wars

Americans surveyed: misunderstood, misrepresented or ignorant? Following the results of the poll suggesting a quarter of Americans do not know the Earth circles the Sun, we look at some other examples of surprising US survey results A National Geographic poll of over 500 young Americans, aged 18 to 24, showed that six per cent failed to locate their own country on a map of the world Photo: ALAMY By Harry Alsop telegraph.co.uk 2:45PM GMT 15 Feb 2014 When Newsweek set 1,000 Americans the challenge of completing their country’s citizenship test, 29 percent could not name the current vice president (Joe Biden), and almost three quarters could not correctly say why America fought the Cold War. Six per cent could not remember the date of Independence Day. A blind telephone survey of over 1,000 Americans, carried out by the McCormick Tribune Freedom Museum (a museum dedicated to the first amendment), found that more Americans could identify more members of the Simpsons cartoon family than first amendment rights. The first amendment rights guarantee freedom of religion, free speech, free press, association, and the ability to petition government. But only one in a thousand correctly identified all of these. Just one in four Americans could name more than one of their rights, while the same number could name all five members of the Simpson family. Americans fared even worse on international issues. A National Geographic poll of over 500 young Americans, aged 18 to 24, showed that six per cent failed to locate their own country on a map of the world. Among those with a high school education or less, the figure was one in ten. Only one in three could find Great Britain on a map. In the same group, two thirds of the respondents estimated the population of the US at between 750 million and two billion (actual figure: 298 million). Three quarters said English was the most commonly spoken native language in the world. It is actually third, behind Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. There is an old joke that war was invented to teach Americans geography, but that no longer seems to be true. In the same National Geographic poll, conducted three years after the Iraq War began, only 37 per cent of young Americans could find Iraq on a map of the Middle East. The same percentage could point out Saudi Arabia. Only one in four could locate Israel or Iran. Even among college students, only 23 per cent found all four countries. Two years after the Iraq War began, 70 per cent of Americans still believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the 9/11 attacks, according to a Washington Post survey. Eight out of ten believed he had already developed weapons of mass destruction. In a 2009 study by the European Journal of Communication, citizens from Britain, Denmark, Finland and the US answered questions on international affairs. The US respondents consistently finished last behind their European peers when asked to identify key words from recent news. Just 58 per cent of Americans could describe the Taliban, compared with 75 per cent of Britons. Of course, surveys with a low sample size are easy to manipulate, and can give wildly inaccurate claims about public opinion. However, the authorities are worried by the public’s lack of interest in key international events. In 2003, a US Strategic Task Force of Education Abroad report concluded that America’s ignorance of the outside world was so great as to constitute a threat to national security. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10640690/Americans-surveyed-misunderstood-misrepresented-or-ignorant.html

Not, distressingly, a piece from 'The Onion.' One in four Americans 'do not know the Earth circles the Sun' Over a quarter of Americans do not know the Earth circles the Sun, according to a new survey Copernican sun-centred (Heliocentric) system of universe Photo: ALAMY Barney Henderson telegraph.co.uk 10:30AM GMT 15 Feb 2014 One in four Americans are completely unfamiliar with Nicolaus Copernicus's 1543 theory that the Earth circles the Sun, according to a study by the National Science Foundation. The survey, released on Friday at an annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, asked 2,200 people nine factual questions about physical and biological science, with the average score being just 5.8 correct answers. The question - "Does the Earth go around the Sun, or does the Sun go around the Earth" - was answered incorrectly by 26 per cent of respondents. Fewer than half of the respondents - 48 per cent - are aware that humans evolved from earlier species of animals and just 39 percent answered correctly that "the universe began with a huge explosion". A total of 42 per cent of Americans said that astrology is either "very scientific" or "sort of scientific". Belief in astrology over science seems to be growing. In 2004, 66 per cent of Americans thought astrology was nonsense. "Fewer Americans rejected astrology in 2012 than in recent years," the 2014 Science and Engineering Indicators report said. "The comparable percentage has not been this low since 1983." In contrast, a study in China has shown that 92 per cent of people there believe horoscopes are unscientific. John Besley of Michigan State University, the lead author of the report's chapter on public attitudes toward science, said there is a need to wait "to see if it's a real change" before assessing the significance of the results, but that the data "popped out to me when I saw it". One in three respondents said science should get more funding from the government. On a more encouraging note, nearly 90 per cent said the benefits of science outweigh any dangers, and about the same number expressed interest in learning about medical discoveries. The study also asked people to state their primary sources of information. The results showed a decline in television and newspapers as a source for information on both current news events and science and technology since 2001 and an increase in the internet. In 2001, 53 per cent of people said television was their primary source for current news events, 30 per cent said newspapers and seven per cent said the internet. In 2012, that had changed to 44 per cent for television, 14 per cent for newspapers and 34 per cent the internet. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/10640518/One-in-four-Americans-do-not-know-the-Earth-circles-the-Sun.html

In fact when in Japan I've seen some dicks to equal those anywhere. Notably among people of Ainu descent, as well as others.

I like a Roy Rogers myself.

Man-on-Manicheism?

A whole tumblr devoted to him. http://fuckyeahyuzuruhanyu.tumblr.com Where is my digitalis.

My order for several spools already shipped.

When it snows here in NC as it just did, people seem to think it will cut their exposure to road danger if they drive faster.