quiddities and agonies of the ruling class - a rolling new york times thread

Oh god, it's not even in the same League of Grossness as potted meat.

corned beef hash > spam

I love corned beef hash.

Last night after reading the are you a foodie? thread I just had to have DUMPLINGS!, and tonight I might have to have some corned beef hash and/or Spam fried rice.

Corned beef hash is > than about 9/10ths of the other foods in the world.

Plate lunches are fascinating - there are enough Hawaiian students around here in WA that there are a couple of plate lunch places. I'd never heard of them as a thing until I moved to the NW.

but... what is it?

you eat a plate for lunch

General rule seems to be rice, stir fried noodles, or macaroni salad, and some sort of meat - teriyaki, hamburger with gravy, chicken or pork katsu, kalbi, etc.

I think my friend said something about there always being macaroni salad and meat but it's a special kind of macaroni salad that's diff because it's Hawaiian. Or something.

no--its a plate. you eat it. at lunch

GIS of "macaroni salad" just makes me v sad. So much wasted potential.

iirc it usually has tuna in it

We call that "tuna salad." It also has shredded carrots, shredded cheddar cheese, and halved grapes in it iirc.

base is rice+macsalad+meat. i dunno if the macsalad is special cuz plate lunches are the only context i've had it in. sometimes there's tuna or crab in it but usually not.

whenever I've had it it's been just a v lil bit of tuna xp

that's funny because it all sounds like what my grandma would make if you asked her to make asian food in 1955

http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51XKD3a-oVL._SL500_AA300_.jpg

the real hawaiian jackpot is the loco moco, which for some reason always goes for like $8 on the mainland instead of the $1.99 it should be. (admittedly even hilo, hawaii's venerable cafe 100 has broken the $2 barrier in recent years, but i'm just gonna pretend everything is always as it was when i was putting away one of these every day in high school.)

Perhaps already noted upthread and more of a general vent than a quiddity report but worst paranthetical ever:

(Remember them? Remember albums?)

I don't know whether that belongs in this thread or not, but I'm happy to talk about anything besides hawaiian spam delicacies right now

Risks for G.O.P. in Attacks With Racial Themes
By JIM RUTENBERG
Recent comments by Newt Gingrich lay bare the risks for his party when it comes to invoking arguments perceived to carry value-laden attack lines.

this is such a weird perspective to occupy, writing about dog whistling

"invoking arguments perceived to carry"

would prompt an expletive thought to convey "for fuck's sake"

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/14/education/early-admission-applications-rise-as-do-rejections.html

You do not need a perfect score on the math SAT to know that if more people are applying — many top-tier colleges say the number has doubled or tripled over the last five years — competition is stiffer. So in certain precincts of Manhattan, parents of those who were deferred or rejected in December have been swapping stories ever since about the seemingly perfect senior at the Spence School who did not make the cut (“If not her, who?” lamented one parent) and the six Brearley School girls who were deferred from Yale (“I thought Yale loved Brearley,” cried another, pointing out that 20 Brearley graduates have gone to Yale in the last five years, more than any other university).

Was it the international students who pay full freight? The public schools who do more for diversity? Occupy Wall Street fomenting anger at the 1 percent?

“Maybe it’s that they are tired of New York City private school kids,” worried the mother of a senior who was deferred from Yale, echoing a common refrain. “The juniors,” she added, “are flipping out.”

http://nobodyputsbabyinahorner.files.wordpress.com/2009/06/heidi-montag-schadenfreude.jpg?w=426

news flash everyone in the entire world is tired of nyc private school kids

feel like that last Rudd movie "Our Idiot Brother" belongs here tbh

That entire movie rides on the fact that Paul Rudd is immensely likable and all of his character's sisters were kind of quiddities material

"Early admission to top colleges, once the almost exclusive preserve of the East Coast elite, is now being pursued by a much broader and more diverse group of students, including foreigners and minorities."

OK, WHO TOLD THEM???

I mean it's not like it costs more to apply ED/EA, you just have to get done a lot faster and thus be on top of your shit/be supported by parents/guidance counselors who can get you to be on top of your shit. Never really quite understood the point of applying early; I guess if you are Generically Strong Applicant A and you want Prestigious University B to know that you really really like them best and won't ditch them for Equally Prestigious University C there might be some benefit there? But I bet the conditional probabilities on admission don't really work out that way.

well I believe it exists primarily so schools can lower their overall admissions %, and the tradeoff is that they do accept more people during that process

early action is silly - early decision makes more sense imo

I mean considering the forecasting/arbitrage that goes into college admissions on the school side it makes sense to offer the ED option since for each person you admit ED, that's anywhere from like 1+epsilon to maybe several people you don't have to admit in the regular pool; if the only reason ED was advantageous for certain kinds of students was that it was generally underutilized, then I guess that'll be less the case going forward (duh and/or hello). Really though ED is way more useful to the schools than to people who are applying ED unless they really really value those extra 4 months of senior slump.

it is more useful to the schools no doubt, but they can basically do whatever they want in this market

ha - my worst freshman roommate was a graduate of the Spence School!

nabisco summed up the premise of this thread several years before it was started:

But yeah, I mean, anyone who posits (e.g.) nanny-hiring as a significant symptomatic thing in the American mainstream is talking about a pretty particular reality that not everyone (to put it mildly) actually shares; good news for her, I guess, that the actual brown-skinned domestics, who may secretly be much closer to defining an American mainstream, probably go home to households a lot more like the ones she praises.
Inevitable result of having a chattering media class = some portion of the conversation that comes from inside it will be the conversation of that class, its own status issues, assumed as representative of Everything and symbolic/symptomatic of What's Happening in America

...

― nabisco (nabisco), Friday, April 21, 2006 3:49 PM (5 years ago) Bookmark Suggest Ban Permalink

i thought the premise of this thread was 'look at these douchebags and assholes'

that's the premise of ILX

j. you are correct

dayo too

http://www.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,2094921_2094923,00.html

Via Whiney

That's some terrible accounting.

Feel like this might be a *controversial* Q&A post, but:

http://www.salon.com/2012/01/27/joining_the_food_stamp_nation/singleton/#comments

Sorry
http://www.salon.com/2012/01/27/joining_the_food_stamp_nation/singleton/

why does that belong itt? seems like a fine article.

b/c he lives in an expensive city, just traveled to India, smokes, shops at Whole Foods, etc.

and also I don't know how many hours a day he "hustles for stories" or whatever but it seems like he could at least get a part-time job to supplement income.

yeah well I consider home mortgage interest deductions, capital gains tax rates etc. etc. a much more dangerous form of welfare than 'poor journalist gets $200 for food'. you're buying into a right-wing narrative about how people should and shouldn't be allowed to consume. food stamps are a form of government spending w/ an incredibly high keynesian multiplier - the highest iirc - so if anything we should be aiming to get more people on food stamps. even ~people who smoke~ ffs.

I don't really have a problem with this guy getting food stamps so much as I have a problem with him pitying himself as a person who seems more poor by lifestyle choice than by economic reality.

well you're not a millionaire by lifestyle choice, you could have studied harder and become an investment banker

Public assistance has always carried the puritanical stink of stigma and guilt. As Francis Fox Piven and Richard Cloward explained in their classic book ”Regulating the Poor,” guilt and shame have long been intentional features of public aid — along with various forms of coerced labor and invasive monitoring — dating back to England’s poor laws of the 16th century, through to today’s much demonized welfare capitalism in America, where Republicans goad and bait our nation’s first black chief executive as “the food stamp president.”

this is the paragraph you need to read again and again

jesus was "the bread loaf prophet" and see how far that got us