Category Archives: Popular Culture

Popular Culture

A New Talent

7 Comments

I just discovered this young woman yesterday. This was recorded nine years ago, when she was fourteen years old, and had only been playing for two years.

Here’s something more recent.

Her technique is amazing, using lots of harmonics, and hitting the strings with both hands. She doesn’t look it, and you wouldn’t know by her name, but she’s Swedish.

[Update a few minutes later]

Here’s another very nice piece. Note the percussive effect of hitting the string with the backs of her fingers. It’s nice to see a young woman playing songs written decades before she was born.

[Update late afternoon]

OK, one more. This is the one that I discovered her with. Just amazing guitar work, recorded a couple months ago. The strength and precision of her fingers is incredible.

Culinary, Health, Media Criticism, Popular Culture, Science And Society, Social Commentary

McDonald’s Fries

5 Comments

A history, and a recipe. I disagree with this, though:

His cholesterol was over 300, comfortably in the danger zone for heart attacks. Lack of self-control aside, it was fatty foods that nearly killed him. Thus, when he emerged from the hospital, he did so on a one-man mission to fight Big Fat.

It was not the fat that nearly killed him. We now have abundant evidence that the problem with McDonald’s fries was not the tallow, but the potatoes themselves. I’ve long advocated that, given that the company is the largest cattle rancher in the world, it should go back to tallow, and get rid of the unhealthy seed oils.

What I don’t understand about the recipe is why it uses Crisco, with just a little tallow added, presumably for flavor. It would probably be much better, and certainly healthier, to simply fry them in pure tallow.