Burritos, Homogeneity of Bites, Marketing and Capitalism

Also on my FB feed…

 

Burrito thought. is there some sort of Burrito aesthetic I don’t know about? That dictates the ingredients be like in strata inside the burrito? Because I’d rather have more mixing. Why not put all ingredients in a bowl (at like an eatery), THEN nix them and then into burrito. More bite similarity across the eating experience.

Very Sporkful question.

 

Comment thread from FB:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, several important  themes are here.

1) Why have no burrito joints created this innovation?  are there costs to bowls and cleaning that make it not viable?

2) If people want it, why have the markets not provided what we want?

3) Are there proper aesthetics or culinary philosophies guiding burrito creation and consumption?

 

Greener than paper towels for drying hands

End Applause at SOTU Speech

Through BeyondPod, I can get the official White House feed of speeches.  That is more political geek than CSPAN.  Still, I wish that someone could pass a law banning applause during the SOTU until the very end.  It is SO tedious to listen to.

Brad Tuttle, in this 2010 blog post, counted 18 minutes (!) of applause in that SOTU.

Maybe the White House could start an online petition center to allow this kind of pressing issue to be aired.

Shades of Grey meaning subtlety not sex

I can’t say “shades of grey” anymore thanks to that annoying book.  I’m looking at you EL James.

Can we sue her for changing the language and the connotations of an idiom?

Plunging Rules (Life Observation Series)

Being a minor or XX chromosome-d seems to impede developing the life skill of plunging.

A low flush toilet (Gerber Toilets, I’m looking at you), that requires five flushes for every #2 is a pile of shit.

Junior Faculty Jitters

Subject lines from a senior colleague that are likely to make a junior colleague hit the ceiling.

- “Bad news for you.”
- “There is no such thing as too much teaching.”
- “How about chairing the X committee?”
- “PUSHED THE WRONG BUTTON!”

 

Which one did I get today?

Click to see.

Uncensored Thoughts on Living in SusqueValley

Someone posted on a bulletin  board for academics how to balance a great job and a yuck location.  Here is what I wrote back:

Some people would say I have a yuck location: small town in mid Atlantic state. Not a great college town (no indy bookstore), but some college town qualities. I TAKE recycling to Saturday recycling and it is this totally social time. I will see 15 people I know, 2/3rds of them university people. I have been here ten years, raised my kids so far here, and it is a good place for me. Three-four hours to big cities, lots of natural beauty, etc.

But we loose people all the time, younger, gay, needing more cosmopolitan atmosphere, people of color who are not welcomed enough OR who just don’t feel at ease.

For people who complain ‘there is nothing to do” I am kind of dismissive. Between this university and others, you can go to SOMETHING almost every night.

BUT, I grew up in a lilly white suburb of a sunbelt city. “Pinko commie” was how my HS classmates often taunted me. I went to college in the mid west. I’ve lived in European cities too. But, when we got the offer to come here, I sort of made peace that it is my destiny to be a bright light of minority thinking and being in a sea of Sarah Palin’s “real America.” But that is a fantasy too, the “real America.” There are interesting folks and quriks and interstitial moments everywhere.

But the life of the missionary of enlightnement and tolerance among the savages of wonderbread cuisine, unproblematic flag-waving, and we-don-t-like-furgners squints is not the life for everyone.

What I Don’t Like About Theory Writing I

Inspired in part by the idea of an on-going series at org theory.net, (grad skol rulz), and my own desire to blog more frequently, I would like to launch a semi-recurring series of what I don’t like in theory writing.

I am reviewing conference submissions for a conference, and I have come across an example of the kind of figure or image I don’t like.

The Curse of the Everything-Is-Connected Figure.

This type of figure is usually used in a conceptual article.  And, to make matters worse, it is usually in the kind of article I am quite sympathetic to.  The author wants to get past static or overly-reified depictions of organizations.  They talk about the need for multi-level analyses which means looking at process, and, more often than not, mixed types of data.  They probably cite Gareth Morgan’s Image sof organizaions of book, or Mar Jo Hatch’s Organization Theory or Joel Baum (and others?) use of the metaphor of a fish scale to discuss org studies as a multiscience.

But, when you look at the figure, you realize that it explains everything and hence nothing.

Full disclosure: I am probably guilty of this kind of figure and when I find one, I will poke fun at myself too.  Here is mock-up I made of the type of figure.

Mock-up of the Everything-Is-Connected Figure. Are You Guilty of Producing One?

One problem with these is that they don’t specify what is moving between cells/circles/whatever-other-shape-tickled-one’s-fancy-in-insert-shape-in-MS word..

A second problem is they don’t deal with time.  Does sequencing matter?  How do changes agglutinate or accumulate?

So, throwing caution to the wind, have you seen one of these in published work?  Do they drive you a little nuts too?

Bicing, Casual Sociology

I also posted this on our family blog, but as it has a dose of casual sociology, here goes also.  You can never turn off your social science brain once you have spent enough time reading theory.

Bicing is Barcelona’s bike sharing program and network. You get a card.

I keep my card in my wallet, but I have to remember to take my wallet out of my back pocket.

Now you can go to a station and grab a utilitarian bike.

Bicing is run by the city government, the ajuntament.

You pay 30Euros a year (about $42) a year for the card, and then 0.5E per thirty minutes of use up to three hours. You get to swipe your card on the little screen at the station.

Now, of course, Barcelona, as a transportation network, has a long history of technological changes layered on top of prior technology and intersecting with growth, redesign, and social trends. The old quarter, with its narrow, byzantine streets had to adapt from foot and hoof traffic to cars, the 19th century, the “expansion” or “Eixample” in Catalan (clever name there), was built for trams and trolleys, many of which disappeared to be replaced by the metro, buses and gas cars. Although, the trams have sort of made a comeback with these newly installed beauties.

They are often installed on the old lines on the broad avenues, like that other exemplar of functional industrial nomenclature asethetics, “Avenida Diagonal” The Diagonal cuts, naturally, diagonally across the city.

So, on to this infrastructure palimpsest comes the new wave of cycling. I have always wanted to use palimpsest! Of course, the city was never really built with tri-use through ways- car, ped, cycle. So, cycling is always a hit or miss affair (ha ha) in terms of finding a route and surviving with your skin and/or life.

My Day with Delta in the Snow-pocalypse

It is 8:30 pm.

My day, in short.

Up at 5:00.  Shower and pack.

5:40.  Drive to airport and communicate with Jeff and Laura about how to get Frank’s Car.

8:40- Arrive Detroit.
Noon Flight is canceled.

I am put on a 2 pm flight.

It is delayed.
Once.
Twice.
It has a gate change.
It has another gate change.

I check in to get my boarding pass.  Ticket agent swipes me twice.  Then says “You are already on the plane.”  I think this an odd comment, buy hey, everyone is frazzled.   More on this later.

Another delay.

We board just as I am reading the news about how all Interstates in East and southern PA are closed. I-80 (mine) is almost impassable.

As it turns out, my boarding pass says I am Jenny Warren.  She is a nice horse trainer from Wisconsin.  Her boarding pass says Jenny Warren.  The ticket agent took my old boarding pass when she gave me this one.  I never checked to see if it had my name on it.

Ticket agent comes on board and says we are over critical weight and we have to fly with 49/50 passengers.  He has to kick off someone.  WTF?  Shouldn’t a commercial plane be over-engineered to carry the weight of 50 really, really fat or dense people???  He asks where “Jodii Cromaz” is.  I realize it is me.  He is thinking about kicking me off but I point out I had a confirmed boarding pass which the other ticketing agent took when she performed a technical though not anatomical sex change and made me the very nice Jenny Warren.  Who is sitting next to me.  His swift weight-conscious judgment falls on the last stand-by passenger.  He gets booted.  The stewardess starts complaining about how she is on the 7th day of her rotation.

We fly.  All seems fine.

We start descending into AVP airport.  It is very bumpy.  No visibility out the side windows.  Swirling wind and snow.  Plane feels like it is accelerating and decelerating several times.  Woman across the aisle says she can see the ground at 300 ft.  I can too, but in patches.  Stewardess looks like she is trying to look calm.

Pilot comes on and says he cannot land.

We are going to Syracuse, NY- 20 minutes away.

We land.  A huddle between stewardess, pilot, and local gate agent.  We will call him John.  John comes on the PA and says that they are looking into things.

I start texting frantically.

John comes back on and says we can not go back to AVP.  The conditions will not improve in short term.  So, since there are fewer hotel rooms than us, and Syracuse is smaller than Knoxville’s airport, our best option is to fly back to DETROIT.  Ugh.  He says it is too dangerous to take ground transport to AVP.  He says if any of us do anything that makes the plane stay in Syracuse for more than 60 minutes the flight crew will be beyond it’s legal maximum for working hours and something vague and menacing will happen.

We deplane so we can pee and they bring us sandwiches.

I call a hotel and car company thanks to some quick texting and googling on Mike and Virginia’s part.

I ask the other gate agent (not John) if I can get my carry on bag.  I explain to her that I am not Jenny Warner, but that I am Jordi and I am getting off the plane.

I’ll crash here and drive down to Scranton tomorrow, get my car (Bernie), and then Bernie and I will put out our hands in the fine people of PennDOT and their big snow plows to go home on I-80.

Which is how I ended up writing you this email from a Holiday Inn in Syracuse while I wait for some steak tacos to be delivered.