Tomorrow Museum » Archive » What’s the Food like in Kuwait?

This is an aside titled 'What’s the Food like in Kuwait?' dated 4/28/08

What’s the food like in Kuwait? Army JAG Capt. Kevin Adams tells Crispy on the Outside about the weird dining rituals at Camp Arifjan, including a Starbucks simulacrum built inside a trailer.

Posted by Joanne on Apr. 28, 2008 Tagged: army, crispy on the outside, food, kuwait, simulacrum, starbucks

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Asides
- Melissa Gira Grant on why a rape survivor might take her case to YouTube rather than the authorities, "when less than 5 percent of rape cases ever make it to prosecution in Crystal's home state, including her own, a girl might want a broader audience for her outrage."
- Those weird-looking but delicious vegetables fiddleheads are back in season. They are to New England what truffles are to Provence. You have only about three weeks to enjoy them.
- "[A study] claims the visual system has evolved to compensate for neural delays, allowing it to generate perceptions of what will occur one-tenth of a second into the future, so that when an observer actually perceives something, it is the present rather than what happened one-tenth of a second ago." - EurekAlert
- "What people today feel about their iPhones, I felt about my Brannock Device." - Michael Bierut on the Brannock Device (that foot measuring thing) on Design Observer.
- Biomimicry is design based on "nature’s best ideas." Inhabitat gives the example of a Zimbabwean building with no conventional air-conditioning or heating, "inspired by indigenous Zimbabwean masonry and the self-cooling mounds of African termites." And this ocean power system that mimics the motion of underwater plants in ocean currents. Last month, National Geographic had a feature about the design movement. Here are several related TED talks.
- "Let's say many designers are creating many simulations. Will the good or the evil designers be more productive in terms of numbers of simulations created? If we define 'good' as subject to some ethical constraints, I believe the good designers work under a competitive disadvantage. It's harder to produce cheap apples, for instance, if you pledge to do so only in a 'green' way. And so on. Oddly the evil designers may be under a competitive disadvantage as well. Intention has a cost and so in competitive settings it tends to fall out. In our current world most things are made by indifferent machines. I believe the rational inference about the simulation is that at least the demi-urge -- and possibly the Master Creator as well -- is indifferent to our plight." - Marginal Revolution remarking on Stanislaw Lem's A Perfect Vacuum.
- Samuel L. Jackson is producing and staring in a movie based on JG Ballard's "Running Wild." There's something in "development hell" for nearly everything he's written, but this is only the third Hollywood-produced JG Ballard adaptation. Full list at Ballardian. (A shame Five Easy Pieces-era Jack Nicholson never played Vaughn, although, as the author said of that script, "This version was set in Los Angeles ...It was a genuine translation, not just of language but of everything. I didn’t really like it. It was almost Disneyfied — 'Walt Disney Productions presents Crash!'")
- Bill Kauffman reviews "Inventing Niagara" by Ginger Strand for WSJ: "The last crippling blow to the city was leveled in the 1970s by the demolition-happy Niagara Falls Urban Renewal agency ..The shops and diners that had been the lifeblood of a funky downtown were stolen and then razed; a sterile Philip Johnson-designed convention center was the memento mori...It's hard not to draw a lesson from the fall of Niagara: If government had never lifted a finger, either to 'improve' or 'preserve,' the waterfalls and the city would be in far better shape than they are now." (via.)
- Give Rachel Maddow her own TV show.
- NPR just aired the first of a two-part series on American Indian boarding schools. They were sometimes taken forcibly, by armed police. Their names were changed, their braids were shaved off and they were forced into Western clothes. They could only speak English and practice Christianity, and education focused on trades like carpentry and cooking. "Saturday night we had a movie," says Lucy Toledo, a Navajo who went to Sherman Institute in the 1950s. "Do you know what the movie was about? Cowboys and Indians. Cowboys and Indians. Here we're getting all our people killed, and that's the kind of stuff they showed us." Seattle Times has more. Archive photos here.
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