lehmanade

tim — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:20:09 +0000

Grant Achatz, a chef on the cutting-edge of molecular gastronomy, combines a gin and tonic with bubble tea. He mixes together two of my favorite summer drinks.

tim — Wed, 25 Aug 2010 15:12:10 +0000

Wells Tower spent a week working at an Amsterdam coffee shop then wrote about it for GQ. “‘Paranoia’ doesn’t adequately get at what I suffer while I’m high. It’s more like Ebola of the superego, a self-loathing catatonia of uncertainty and dread. When I’m stoned, Homo sapiens and its customs become terrifying and obscure. Shortly after the first good toke, I can almost hear a delicate shardwork of baffling human etiquette crystallizing in the air around me, making it impossible to so much as reach for a Cheeto without causing an apocalypse.”

tim — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 17:21:46 +0000

David Winner on how the Dutch are playing German football and the Germans are playing Dutch football. “The current tournament is making the Dutch both happy and troubled. They are euphoric that Oranje is winning, but uncomfortable about the “ugly” fotball and loss of attacking elan. Meanwhile, seeing the once-hated Germans is getting Dutch fans even more confused. They look in the mirror and see the face of the old enemy. They see the beautiful, creative, new multi-ethnic Germans and realize, with a flush of potentially healing recognition, that they remind them of the best of themselves.”

tim — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 16:03:09 +0000

“This is a story of two great cities emerging from isolation – and of western Europe beating the world – thanks partly to a train.” Simon Kuper on how the Eurostar is transforming both Paris and London.

tim — Mon, 28 Jun 2010 18:48:17 +0000

Farhad Manjoo on what makes Apple great. “When Martin Lindstrom, a brand consultant and author of Buyology: The Truth and Lies About Why We Buy, examined [the brains of Apple fans] under a functional magnetic-resonance-imaging scanner, he discovered that Apple devotees are indistinguishable from those committed to Jesus.”

tim — Thu, 24 Jun 2010 19:42:25 +0000

Wonderful write-up in the Times of the US’s victory over Algeria in the World Cup: “Now it was the old pro football drill of everybody go long. How American was that? Only instead of Joe Montana sending everybody deep, it was Howard, the American keeper who plays in England, half-Hungarian, half-African-American… After a few wide-open steps, Donovan flicked the ball to the right to Jozy Altidore, the Haitian-American, who banged it into the center to Clint Dempsey, who grew up playing with his Mexican friends in the dusty fields near the border in Texas. Dempsey tapped the ball at the keeper, who could not hold on to it, and there was Donovan to bang it home at 90:45.”

tim — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 20:35:09 +0000

In the Netherlands, promising soccer prodigies as young as seven join soccer academies sponsored by the country’s top clubs, such as the Amsterdam Ajax. After ten years of training, the best players are sold to premier teams across Europe. Teams in the United States are beginning to experiment with this method, hoping to replicate its success.

Délano van der Heyden, age 5, already has the attention of Dutch scouts.

tim — Wed, 09 Jun 2010 19:38:35 +0000

Apparently the entire music industry is going to collapse in the next few months. At least, that’s what Thom Yorke thinks.

tim — Wed, 26 May 2010 21:16:07 +0000

iPad + Velcro = Love.

Delightful.

The Problem with Joe Soucheray

tim — Wed, 26 May 2010 16:39:08 +0000

Nothing gets me riled up like a good Joe Soucheray column. This time, he chooses to focus his ire on the planned installation of bike lanes along one St. Paul street.

What this means is that hypocrites who have a car or two in the driveway at home will now put on the Italian racing suits with jerseys that look like the labels on olive jars and turn Jefferson into a slogfest of starts, stops, bump-outs, speed humps and something at Jefferson and Cleveland called a pedestrian refuge, where, if you are a pedestrian, it sounds like you are stranded or given some sort of green card status until you can be rescued and brought safely to one side of Cleveland or the other.

He’s an asshole, obviously, but does he actually not understand that installing bike lanes will get cyclists out of the way of cars? Clearly not:

Kelly had her eyes opened to the project around Christmas. There was some event at church, and the traffic was all gummed up around Prior and Jefferson. Kelly discovered that the slowdown was caused by a bicyclist. She saw his small twinkling light as he struggled through the slush.

This, to me, sounds like an argument for adding bike lanes. But not for Joe—his argument is that the only reason people choose to travel by bicycles is so they can feel morally superior.

The logistics and demands of motherhood were not taken into consideration by the planners. The Colleen Kellys of the city, for whom Jefferson is a critical artery on their daily rounds, travel by automobile or SUV because you can’t get five kids, groceries and the stuff from Target onto a bicycle unless you live in maybe Thailand and are practiced at the art of balancing plywood on your head.

Right, because adding one bike lane means that Ms. Kelly will no longer be able to drive her SUV to Target.

I think Soucheray makes one decent point, though I’m sure he doesn’t realize it. I don’t think anything else in American cycling culture does more to dissuade the population at large from viewing the bicycle as a viable mode of transportation than the prevalence of riders in ridiculous, expensive lycra racing suits. See The Problem with Biking in America and Cycle Chic for more.

The original link is to a Google cache since the Pioneer Press has removed the article from their website. I don’t know why.

(via Hindsight 20/20)