the ersatz vegetarian

Everyone knows the dropped R’s of the Boston accent. It’s accepted wisdom that it started with Boston Brahmins trying to ape an English accent back in the 17th century to sound more ”English”. In his book, “Speaking American: A History of English in the United States”, Linguist Richard Bailey’  suggests that the R’s dropped here first then the practice spread back to England.

 The most interesting of these seventeenth-century pronunciations involves the pronunciation of  r  in the middle and at the ends of words. While the omission (or vocalization) of  r  is a prestige feature in modern British English, it was very much a rustic feature in seventeenth-century England. In the evolution of  r -less pronunciations, Boston led the English-speaking world in the development of norms that would later become important among opinion leaders in southeast England

You can read the excerpt from the book about Boston here and listen to a conversation with a linguist about it here.

Using just a wood puck made of recycled scraps and a ventilation fan this $200 portable grill gets to 1,110ºF in five minutes. At least that’s what they promise.

The Cook-Air gains its power from a combination of a wood fire and a five-speed electric ventilator that literally fans the flames. Cata Marketing, Inc., the company that sells the grill, says that it only takes a small piece of wood to start a roaring grill fire.

Not too shabby. More info on their website.

Sixteen years on since the website was launched and there are still people who don’t realize that The Onion is a fake news site. This website, Literally Unbelievable, is proof positive.

For example:

Boston City Hall doesn’t have a ton of fans. It’s a hulking, brutalist building surrounded by a sea of bricks. It’s worth knowing the story of how it came to be, though. How you feel about it says a lot not only about your feelings on modernist architecture but also on how architecture can change the way a city is viewed. 

Yet it wasn’t aliens who brought it here. Surprisingly, it was a group of Boston politicians and businessmen, along with two young architects named Gerhard Kallmann and Michael McKinnell, who conceived of the building as a dramatic gesture intended to help usher in a new era in Boston history. This year marks the 50th anniversary of a decisive moment in that campaign: namely, an unusual design competition mounted by Mayor John F. Collins, in which architects were invited to imagine a brand-new, forward-looking home for Boston’s city government.

This guy in Canada has been digging out his basement using only scale model sized, radio controlled construction equipment for the last 15 years. This is totally astounding.

A Canadian guy named Joe has been digging out the basement of his house using nothing but radio-controlled scale model construction equipment… since 1997. Yes, you read that right — he’s been digging out his basement for 15 years — with nothing but little R/C tractors, diggers and even a miniature rock crusher! Amazing.

At an average rate of eight or nine cubic feet of earth moved each year, the process has been absolutely glacial. But what do you expect when every morning he drives his little excavator on its transport truck down to the basement, unloads it, and then uses it to dig out the basement walls.

Then Joe uses the excavators to load R/C trucks and they work their way up a spiral ramp to the basement window where the soil gets dumped outside.

Then, once it’s outside, he uses bulldozers to consolidate the pile of excavated dirt.

You can see more than a half dozen videos here.

With the news that NBC is officially bringing back one of my favorite recent shows, Community, NY Mag’s Vulture blog has posted a rundown of five episodes to get newbies as hooked as I am.

Slate’s Brow Beat culture blog has a post, too.

Analysis of an amino acid in the tissue of bowhead whales suggests that they could live to be over 200 years old…  making them one of the oldest animals on the planet.

Watch The Oldest Mammal on the Planet on PBS. See more from Nature.

It turns out the early reporting on Amazon selling whale meat (including some sourced from Japan’s Antarctic “research” expeditions) had real legs. The Guardian reports:

 Environmental groups are claiming a major victory after the online retailer Amazon removed whale meat products from its site in Japan.

Amazon was accused of hypocrisy by the UK-based environmental investigation agency (EIA) after investigators found 147 whale products for sale on the site, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Seattle-based company.

The products contravened the firm’s policy of refusing to advertise unlicensed or illegal wildlife products, including endangered species.

The Clean is touring. Tickets on sale at noon today for a 6/4 show at Brighton Music Hall. Yes!

This is a really interesting Kickstarter project… I’ve given $25 so I can get a copy of the book when it’s done.

“I Want to be METROPOLITAN” is a research on mini-metropolises, using Boston as a case study to provide a different reading of the city. The study focuses on showing the efforts that the city of Boston has made in order to grow with metropolitan characteristics while remaining at a much smaller scale than cities like New York, London, or Tokyo. The morphology of Boston has been achieved through different metropolitan interventions that occur at different scales. These are divided at an infrastructural scale, urban scale, and architectural scale. By means of analyzing these different aspects, we can compose a vision of a future Boston, or Fictitious Boston, derived from its metropolitan potential. 

This book intents to create a dialogue that addresses the missing topics in urbanism for smaller, slower, and much more stable cities around the world. 

It’s nearly completed, but we are in the process of working with local graphic designers to fine tune the visual aspect of the book.

We need to cover some of the production costs in order to publish it, and that’s where you come in! Help us finish the book!