Shit can only get stranger. The diet guarantees it.

Lilac Chaser from xty on Vimeo.

THE HASHEESH EATER (1857): I haven’t read this book since I was a teenager and I haven’t thought about it since the last time I was hiding under my blankets thinking through the various meanings of “I must”, “you must”, “one must” and so forth but they’re but they’re giving it away.

Cult figure Terence McKenna would describe Ludlow as beginning “a tradition of pharmo-picaresque literature that would find later practitioners in William Burroughs and Hunter S. Thompson.… Part genius, part madman, Ludlow lies halfway between Captain Ahab and P.T. Barnum, a kind of Mark Twain on hashish. There is a wonderful charm to his free-spirited, pseudoscientific openness as he makes his way into the shifting dunescapes of the world of hashish.”

Enlightenment: It’s What’s For Dinner: Before we ate data, people were known to ingest food. Around the time of the enlightenment, when that food started getting processed, there were all sorts of reactions -both for and against– that, to our eyes, appear comical but are telling.

Philosophes, physicians, and the honnêtes hommes of 18th-century polite society could claim that coffee was good for the mind. Chemical experts testified that it gave the “brain a new resource of esprits, sustain[ed] the body during great application & long wakefulness,” replacing the animal spirits which were at risk of being used up in intellectual work. Its “oily, saline, [and] volatile principles,” and the particular way in which its “volatile salts” were bound, remedy “all the bad effects of mental labor.” Voltaire endorsed the causal link between coffee’s volatile salts and the replenishment of spirits and was said to take an astounding 40 cups a day. Rousseau adored the stuff, and commentators ascribed the clearness of Buffon’s thought and prose style to his coffee habit. There were experts for the opposition too. Coffee was a powerful drug: its bitterness allied it with nature’s poisons and its blackness with the diabolical. In the 1780s, a Parisian critic condemned “the black water” that is consumed at the café as “more harmful than the generous wine on which our fathers got drunk,” making men depressed and sarcastic. Coffee might cause weight loss and dysentery; what was beneficial wakefulness to some was pathological overstimulation to others, raising the risk of nervous disease. Voltaire’s physician tried in vain to wean him from the 40-cup habit: the spread of hot drinks in general, the doctor claimed, was causing physical and mental degeneracy. Of all people, those living the life of the mind had the most reason to avoid coffee.

Real world, fake world, irl fetish and so forth.

Back when I first started this blog, hammering away on a stone tablet like Fred Flintstone, I read a badly translated article on or advertisement for sex dolls that read something like: “NO SUCH THING AS WITH RAW GIRL WHEN THERE IS NO AFFINITY.” RAW obviously meant real but was much better than real because it implied no moral judgement. Since then, it’s been a raw world and cooked world to me.

NATHAN FAKE – SENSE HEAD from AVD78 on Vimeo.

Neither is better or more real than the other. Sometimes things are overcooked and you can’t even taste them through the carbon. Other times, raw things are dirty and covered in slugs. Some stuff, fresh off the grill is too hot. Other stuff, straight out of the ground, is too cold. It’s a matter of taste and I have a crush on cast iron. Highly recommend it.

The Flavor Network: Computers are not just engaged with food on a metaphorical level but also on a . . . Errr . . . Computer level. Scientists have mapped out different chemicals to find what flavors should work together.

These unexpected findings fundamentally question our previous notion of flavor pairing. Although the food pairing hypothesis still holds for some cuisines, it appears there are many more desirable flavor combinations available than previously imagined. As researchers continue to examine a wider variety of ingredients and cuisines, we will be able to build even larger, more robust flavor networks to gain insight into the fundamental principles behind our ingredient pairing preferences.

Such flavor networks will also benefit the next generation of “creative” computers. By combining our current knowledge of flavor networks with computer learning, scientists at IBM are now creating adaptive computer systems that will “learn” to create desirable and innovative food combinations. One day, these computers could help create better school lunches or design menus that meet strict dietary restrictions without sacrificing great flavor.

Of course, there’s more to cooking than lists of flavor compounds and networks of ingredients. Factors like color and texture can have play equally important roles in the palatability of a dish. It therefore seems unlikely that a computer will ever be able to replace the creativity and aesthetic prowess of human chefs. But then again, did anyone expect a computer to win Jeopardy?

Although color and texture are, doubtless, really fucking important, this has the taste of something that may be a little overcooked. Also lacking is that eating is not just a function of taste but of being social. I even think that a simple meal, shared with friends, probably tops a perfectly constructed one eaten in front of some glowing screen.

Nightengale: Beer taps after ballgame facing last call: And this isn’t the only effect glowing screens are having on our consumptive social lives. In that weird laboratory of human reactions –pro-sports– baseball players have started finding life in the panoptican a little less friendly than before.

The old-timers say they didn’t linger to get drunk but rather to talk shop, learn about the game and bring together an otherwise disparate group. Yount’s favorite memories growing up in the Milwaukee Brewers clubhouse were listening to Hank Aaron hold court late after games. Arizona manager Kirk Gibson reminisces about the days with Alan Trammell in Detroit and George Brett in Kansas City.

It wasn’t just the beer taps that kept teams together, but the lack of technology. There were no iPhones, iPads, Facebook or Twitter.

“Social media,” veteran third baseman Eric Chavez said, “changed everything. The trust factor went away.”

Just ask Beckett, part of the 2011 Red Sox team lambasted with news reports that pitchers drank beer and ate chicken during games they weren’t scheduled to pitch. This wasn’t a matter of reporters seeing the incidents but someone inside the clubhouse leaking the information.

These days, the clubhouse often is a ghost town by 11 p.m.

We gain less drunk drivers but lose the pleasant circumstances that they emerge from –tottering from the happy clubhouse like a comic strip character burping bubbles until they get in their car and kill a family of children. Who knows if we even gain that much? Just as likely, they drink alone.