Gluten free! It must be healthy!
I made fruit dip for a Mother’s Day treat (recipe below). While shopping for ingredients, I encountered this label on the shelf holding the Marshmallow Fluff: "Gluten Free!". Figuring such a hearty endorsement makes it healthy, I’ve been eating fluff for lunch over the past week; just fluff, because I read elsewhere on the internet that one ought to eat single ingredient foods. I feel great!
I heard cocaine is gluten free. I’ll begin consuming this wonder-product next week.
Some people really need to know if a product has gluten, but most of us aren’t seeking out Marshmallow fluff for health reasons. Can you imagine thinking, "Well I was just walking by here, but look, the fluff is gluten free. Wonder if it pairs well with kale?"
What if an alien saw this marketing ploy? "Despite having the same appearance as our home orb’s top comestible, Antiseptic Nutrient Paste, this large white bucket of earth substance called Marshmallow Fluff has a molecular signature more similar to the goo in our tooth-rotting tar pits on the barren wastelands of our home planet, Ziltoidea 9. But, it’s gluten free! I was previously unaware that gluten was detrimental to my intestinal wellbeing, but suddenly my fermentation cavity is becoming tumultuous just thinking about the hateful little protein. Pardon me Mr. Humanoid Store-Worker, may I expel my solid-ish waste products into a suitable receptacle?"
If you were wondering how the dip turned out, I succeeded in making the fruit less healthy and incredibly tasty. And I didn’t eat gluten!
Mother’s Day fruit dip: From a site called Iowa Girl eats because why reinvent the wheel? Use about half of a large jar of fluff (7-8 oz., don’t worry, it’s gluten free). You could buy a smaller container and not have leftover fluff, but you know you want the bigger one. Microwave the fluff for something less than 30 seconds to warm and soften it (be careful, it becomes sentient when exposed to microwaves for any longer than that). Then drop in an entire package of softened cream cheese (original recipist suggests low fat but we always have about a yard of the good, full-fat stuff in the fridge so we just use that–we shop at BJs). Add 2 tsp. of orange juice concentrate. Fruit is optional.
What do you think is the most amusing thing about the gluten-free craze?
San Francisco Got Something Right
I was in San Francisco a couple years ago. I saw a lunch-park wizzer (I just made up that term). I was eating lunch at a place where lots of soft-handed, business-casual people eat lunch, out in a nice little city park, when a dude (probably homeless) walked through on the sidewalk, equipment hanging out, peeing as he walked. And my lunch wasn’t even good enough to remember.
But San Fran has it right on this one, banning facial recognition technology.
But farmer, won’t it be easier to catch terrorists and dangerous criminals (and maybe even lunch-park wizzers) if we give law enforcement the ability to use facial recognition? Yeah, probably.
Some people think we shouldn’t use it because it’s unreliable and will give false positives. I reject that argument. I’m much more worried that it is indeed effective and only getting better.
But farmer, don’t you work in tech? Yes. Don’t you like tech solutions to problems? Meh, depends. Not when they infringe on people’s liberty.
We’re talking here about real-time scanning of crowds of people, recording and running their facial images through an AI system to find matches to faces populating some database. I believe it’s a very conservative thing to want to put the brakes on this policy.
I think this is related: we are becoming too risk averse. It’s what got us the Patriot Act, and it will probably get us going down the path towards giving up our freedom to real-time facial recognition technology, too. At least San Fran put the brakes on it though.
I’d rather live with the small risk of being blown out of the sky while flying to San Francisco than the 100% certainty that I’m being surveilled by big brother while I’m walking down its otherwise safe streets.
Cut it out already with your risk-averse, panicky decision-making, America. Giving up your liberties to become marginally safer isn’t worth it.
What do you think? Is Real-time facial recognition an acceptable safety-liberty trade-off? Or are you with me, San Fran, and the lunch-park wizzer, saying No to big brother?
No you’re awful! No, you are!
It only takes one person to start a fire, but it takes a Twitter mob to really stoke that baby!
Picture that you’re taking the DC Metro subway, and you always take the subway, and things are going downhill at the subway. It’s not as clean as it used to be, and it’s poorly run. You see a DC Metro employee eating on the job, against posted regulations. You recognize this as poor form. Since the subway is pretty terrible, it’d be easy to see that employee as The Problem. But really, you recognize it’s nothing more than someone eating while working. What’s the right thing to do? You might do nothing, figuring they had a tough start to the day and didn’t get to eat before their shift. You might ask to speak to their manager. You might just contact the DC Metro and report the employee. But that’s not thinking petty enough. This is the age of wonders! This is the age of Twitter!
Photo that scumbag and put her on twitter. Sick the twitter mob on the subway employee for eating food on the job. It’s the only reasonable thing to do in these modern United States, right?
From there we just go up the escalator: offending employee insults her petty accuser, calling her all kinds of names and accusing her of racism.
Lots of nasty people post lots of nasty thing on Twitter.
Petty person’s publisher (turns out she’s an author) then cancels the petty person’s book over the melee. Of course they did. Because the best response to petty behavior is stamping out someone’s livelihood.
I’m not on Twitter myself, so educate me: is public shaming the primary function of Twitter?
Oh, before I continue, please take a moment to hit one or all of the social media buttons (Twitter included) below to tell people about the Afternoon Farmer!
Are there examples of grace being extended on Twitter, or is it always an angry mob looking for their next victim, always overreacting in righteous anger, for fear that they’ll be the next victim if they don’t signal their virtue more loudly than the rest?
Please, if you know of any, share examples of positivity on Twitter, especially if it involves someone asking forgiveness, or extending grace in some way to another person. My suspicion is that the platform is largely as toxic as a tire-fire, a worthless place for human beings to interact, even if only virtually.