Cultrface – a blog dedicated to culture and how it enriches our lives.

Have you been to Margie's Meatloaf Mecca?

It’s only 5th January and I’ve already fallen down the weirdest rabbit hole of the year. On Tumblr, I found this Twitter screenshot:

Tweet that says "put your shoes on I'm taking you somewhere special" with an image of a billboard that says "we only serve meatloaf and strawberry milk" for Margie's Meatloaf Mecca
via @getrawmilk

I thought the tweet was funny and then kept reading. Only meatloaf and strawberry milk? There were further screenshots of the actual website and Google reviews. Given the wacky nature of the establishment and its location, I thought “yep, that sounds like America alright.” Except I dug a little further and found out even more…

It was all a prank.

Sixth City Marketing had set the whole thing up as a practical joke.

For years, we have gone to great lengths to ensure that our team members and close friends are being celebrated properly – for birthdays, weddings, and sometimes for no occasion at all.

This, of course, means going to extreme lengths to prank them online. We’ve crafted fake businesses, fake conventions, fake awards, and just about everything in-between, meaning we’ve dedicated a lot of time and effort over the years to making our pranks possible.

When our friend Margie’s wedding was approaching, and we knew she’d planned a trip to Athens, Ohio in the late fall, we just knew we couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go big or go home.

They bought a domain—succulentmeatloaf.com—made the graphics, rented the billboard, created a site and Facebook page, and built up both online and offline buzz via word of mouth and social media. My day job is SEO so I respect the work they put in to make this happen but from a general Internet person perspective, this is hilarious.

Milk and prank related: Chris Morris pranked a McDonald’s employee during a pilot for The Day Today and pea milk is apparently a thing

The world's 10 oldest cities with people still living in them

From Web Urbanist, a list of the world’s 10 oldest still-inhabited cities. You’ll recognise a few, such as Jerusalem, Jericho, and Damascus, but a few others might not have entered your head, like Lisbon:

Due to its exceptional harbor situated where the Tagus river empties into the Atlantic Ocean, Lisbon has always been an ideal military and commercial location – incidentally attracting settlers to serve the soldiers and traders. Archaeologists have uncovered Phoenician objects at Lisbon dating back to 1200 BC; remnants of what was likely a Phoenician supply base for ships voyaging to and from the British Isles, an ancient source of tin.

Disaster struck Lisbon in 1755 when one of the most destructive earthquakes ever to strike Europe, accompanied by a massive tsunami and wildfires, leveled much of Lisbon and killed tens of thousands of residents.

Lisbon quickly bounced back from the disaster to regain her rank as one of Europe’s leading cities, a distinction she still holds today.

Old LEGOs sets could be more valuable than gold, large stocks, and bonds

Researchers from the HSE University in Russia studied the prices of LEGO sets from 1987–2015 and found average returns on those sets of “at least 11%” annually:

We study financial returns on alternative collectible investment assets, such as toys, using LEGO sets as an example. Such iconic toys with diminishing over time supply and high collectible values appear to yield high returns on the secondary market. We find that LEGO investments outperform large stocks, bonds, gold, and alternative investments, yielding an average return of at least 11% (8% in real terms) in the sample period 1987–2015. LEGO returns are not exposed to market, value, momentum, and volatility risk factors but have an almost unit exposure to the size factor. A positive multifactor alpha of 4%–5%, a Sharpe ratio of 0.4, a positive return skewness, and low exposure to standard risk factors make the LEGO toy and other similar collectibles an attractive alternative investment with good diversification potential.

Abstract from LEGO: THE TOY OF SMART INVESTORS

That doesn’t mean you can necessarily buy LEGO sets and hold onto them, expecting their value to buy you a house. But if you happen to have some old mint condition Star Wars sets, it’s worth getting them valued.

(via designboom)

Related to the pricelessness (heh) of gold: 12 objects unnecessarily covered in gold

And more on LEGO: Arndt Schlaudraff, the LEGO® brutalist and Ekow Nimako’s Afrofuturistic LEGO® universes

Digg's best movies of 2021 via everyone else

A picture of a woman with her hands on her sides and a man in the distance leaning on a blue convertible car

Digg has done the hard work for us and collated lots of “best movies of 2021” lists to make an omnilist of their own (see their methodology). In case you were wondering, I’ve seen precisely zero (0) of them and I even went as far as thinking I saw The French Dispatch until I realised it wasn’t French Exit (starring Michelle Pfeiffer).

That said, there are some objectively brilliant movies in this list so check it out and get cultr’d!

Marijn van Hoorn's predictions for 2022

I’ve been following Marijn’s site for some time and they made a list of predictions for this year covering a range of topics including the UK, the US, tech, and entertainment. Some are quite bold but make sense, others less so but still make sense. A few of my “favourites”/ones I can see happening:

– There will be no mask or distancing mandate in England by the autumn equinox. The “plan B” measures will likely be relaxed at some point in March — perhaps earlier if Tory backbenchers get too fed up.

– The booster jab rollout will proceed unremarkably, as we all silently accept that we’re just going to have to treat covid like the ’flu now.

– The “metaverse” will neither be a gigantic flop nor as big as its proponents hope. Some people will quietly adopt virtual office spaces, teenagers will get VR headsets for their birthday, and furries will continue being furries, but there will be no great revolution.

– The NFT bubble will burst. Sorry, i mean, uh… the token that represents your claim of ownership to a jpeg of the NFT bubble will burst?

Please let that NFT bubble burst. I hate them. As for the boldest prediction? Queen Elizabeth II’s death (but after the Platinum Jubilee celebrations):

Queen Elizabeth will die. I say this every year, but i genuinely do think this will be the year — it’s not uncommon for widows to pass shortly after their spouses, and she’s been attending notably fewer public events recently.

I’ll come back to these as I’m sure they will too.

A little less information

In The Convivial Society: Vol. 2, No. 8, L. M. Sacasas explored the idea of doomscrolling and the constant pursuit of more information which isn’t helping us get through whatever the hell is going on right now:

My point turns out to be relatively straightforward: maybe you and I don’t need more information. And, if we think that the key to navigating uncertainty and mitigating anxiety is simply more information, then we may very well make matters worse for ourselves.

Believing that everything will be better if only we gather more information commits us to endless searching and casting about, to one more swipe of the screen in the hope that the elusive bit of data, which will make everything clear, will suddenly present itself. From one angle, this is just another symptom of reducing our experience of the world to the mode of consumption. In this mode, all that can be done is to consume more, in this case more information, and what we need seems always to lie just beyond the realm of the actual, hidden beyond the horizon of the possible.

I did a lot of doomscrolling last year and it messed me up big time. So I eventually stopped. It didn’t happen overnight and I still slip up from time to time but it was necessary to try and navigate through this pandemic because, as Sacasas said, it’s not more information we need. I need specific details and not hysteria and hearsay fueled by popular media outlets. And if I can’t get it, I have to leave it there until I either find it or make peace with that uncertainty (I’ll let you know when I get to the latter!)

Copyrighted works from 1926 enter the public domain today

Happy new year to you all. This time last year, I hoped for a better 2021 compared to 2020 but that never happened. So I’m just gonna take whatever comes in 2022 and wish you all love, warmth, guidance, and strength.

Today is Public Domain Day again and that means copyrighted works from the US from 1926 are open to all. (For more information on it, we wrote about it in 2019 and 2021.) The official Public Domain Day 2022 page explains why this year is so good:

In 2022, the public domain will welcome a lot of “firsts”: the first Winnie-the-Pooh book from A. A. Milne, the first published novels from Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner, the first books of poems from Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker. What’s more, for the first time ever, thanks to a 2018 law called the Music Modernization Act, a special category of works—sound recordings—will finally begin to join other works in the public domain. On January 1 2022, the gates will open for all of the recordings that have been waiting in the wings. Decades of recordings made from the advent of sound recording technology through the end of 1922—estimated at some 400,000 works—will be open for legal reuse.

The most notable inclusions are the original Winnie the Pooh by A.A. Milne (which might be subject to Disney extending the copyright), the works of Louis Armstrong, Ivor Novello, Jim Morrison, and Arnold Schoenberg, and the film Faust (directed by F. W. Murnau). Note that the works of the aforementioned creatives are only part of the public domain in countries with copyrights of “life plus 50 years” or “life plus 70 years” (see the last link in the list below for more info)

Below you will find a list of applicable works from 1926. Always remember to check works from any years prior to 1926 to make absolutely sure you follow any licence requirements (if there are any).

Lists of public domain work from 1926

Winnie the Pooh related: Jim Cummings tells stories behind 4 fan-favorite characters he’s voiced

An interview with 'Women of Colour in Japan' director, Amarachi Nwosu

Women of Color in Japan Documentary | Women Navigating Life and Culture in Tokyo through Creativity

For Tokyo Weekender, Cezary Jan Strusiewicz interviewed Amarachi Nwosu, the director of ‘Women of Colour in Japan’ and two of the documentary’s co-stars, Uzochi Okoronkwo and Ameya:

Women of Color in Japan focuses on three people. There’s Ameya, a Japan-born filmmaker, photographer, writer and co-founder of the visual media collective Ikix Studio. Uzochi Okoronkwo is a Nigerian-American stylist and owner of the vintage online boutique KO Vintage. And then, there’s Tiffany Cadillac, a Tokyo-born DJ, singer and producer of Japanese and Jamaican descent. We talked with Ameya, Nwosu and Okoronkwo about their lives in Japan as women of color and about how their work, vision and their very existence can help to spread awareness of the ever changing fabric of Japanese society.

It’s a good interview with interesting insights from all three covering everything from the treatment of women of colour in Japan to the collective struggles of WoC and Japanese women within the country:

9. Do you think non-Japanese WOC should be involved in the struggles of Japanese women?

Ameya: I think WOC in general should be allies to other minorities in this country. Whether that is Japanese women, LGBT, or less-able-bodied people, etc. None of us are free until we are all free. If we work to support each other, then we can create changes on a national and perhaps international level.

Related to Japanese women and PoCs in Japan: A blog post about Japanese geishas and kimonos, Seitō – a 1911 Japanese magazine exclusively for women, and Living While Black, in Japan

Language Log discovers the word 'yeet' (and so do I, kinda)

No shade on Mark Liberman at all; I just thought his discovery of the word ‘yeet’ was funny:

Today I learned that yeet means (among other things) “To discard an item at a high velocity”. I didn’t learn this from the not-very-reliable Urban Dictionary, but from Umar Shakir, “Tom Brady says the next sideline Surface he yeets will cost him: Microsoft’s star tablet may finally be safe on the sideline“, The Verge 12/29/2021

I’d love to know more about its etymological origins, beyond Wiktionary’s entry:

Originating and coined in the mid-2000s, but popularized by a 2014 video uploaded on Vine.

A deeper dive takes you to Know Your Meme’s explanation:

Yeet is a choreographed dance stylized by dipping one’s shoulder in rhythmic steps with both hands out in front and knees bent as if the performer is riding a bicycle. It became popular in February 2014 after footage of people performing the dance were uploaded to the video-sharing sites Vine and YouTube. In recent years, the term “yeet” has adopted a meaning of launching or throwing something at a high velocity or exclamation of doing so.

[…]

While little is known as of yet about the story behind the dance, Houston, Texas-based producer and video blogger Marquis Trill has credited five individuals @1ballout_ @Thefuhkinmann @KronicCaviar @AXXXXJXY @JollyceM @SmashBro_KB as the creators of the Yeet. The earliest known video of someone performing the yeet dance was uploaded by YouTuber Milik Fullilove on February 12th, 2014 (shown below).

Yeet!!!! New dance

In the few years I’ve heard the word “yeet”, it’s come from white people so I’m not surprised the term has Black origins, given how African-American Vernacular English (AAVE) is routinely appropriated into “internet slang”. Hmm, looks like I discovered more about “yeet” too.

Monsters ain't that bad

Cody Delistraty wrote about monsters and their “more nuanced” nature. Are they misunderstood and capable of teaching us more than their evil existence lets on?

Though Freud posited that Medusa’s hair represented sexual repression, a symbol of castrated genitalia and the madness to which that might lead a person, the poet Ann Stanford, in her “Women of Perseus,” unpacks the more nuanced psychological effects of Medusa’s rape and the complications it adds to understanding her. Commenting on Stanford’s work, the poet and scholar Alicia Ostriker notes in her article “The Thieves of Language” that “the trauma ‘imprisons’ Medusa in a self-dividing anger and a will to revenge that she can never escape, though she yearns to.”

Consumed by this vengeful desire, Medusa might be not so much a monster as a tragic figure. Given the way her story as a “monster” has been told over the last few centuries, however, you’d be hard-pressed to know it.

When depicted as wholly and unchangeably evil, the classic monsters of literature and myth help make sense of a complex world, often with Biblical clarity and simplicity. The existence of pure evil implies the existence of pure good. Heaven or Hell. The Light Side of the Force or the Dark Side. Mount Olympus or Hades. The idea is that though we must choose a direction, it’s a straight and clear path.

While the article centres on monsters and evil entities as a whole, I believe this argument is acutely accurate for female monsters such as Medusa. And it’s always men who write about them in this way. I’ve never really seen Medusa as a monster really; if anything, I’ve quietly cheered her on whenever she’s turned a dude into stone. We could do with more of that in the modern world.

Monster-related: Venom, the symbiotic supervillain – good or evil?

A directory of Black designers from around the world

Blacks Who Design is a directory of Black designers that aims to “inspire new designers, encourage people to diversify their feeds, and discover amazing individuals to join your team.” While the designers are mainly concentrated in North America (USA + Canada), there are designers from places like the UK, Poland, Nigeria, Kenya, and Germany to name a few. What’s more, it’s not just for Black designers as the site explains:

If you’re not a Black designer, this site’s for you too :)

Reply to a recruiter: Tired of recruiting emails? Instead of hitting archive, reply with a link to this site.

Target your mentoring: Dedicate your lunch breaks towards mentoring people that might not normally get access to you.

Volunteer: Consider blocking off some time to teach design to younger students.

It was also nice to see a few of my friends in there so definitely check it out.

Directory-related: Rememory: a creative directory for Black women and non-binary people and FlyGirl: a community and safe space for womxn

The top 10 posts of 2021

I know the numbers are arbitrary on their own, but I can’t help looking at page views. It lets me know that someone has taken the time to investigate what I’ve written and, if they stick around, great. If not, fair enough (but I always hope they come back). So I decided to look up the top 10 posts published this year. I published a helluva lot in 2021 and judging by the engagement, they’ve done better than I expected.

In no particular order:

  1. I’m obsessed with Michael Keaton’s Easter Candy SNL skit
  2. What kind of salt does Salt Bae use?
  3. Did Danny DeVito eat a real fish in Batman Returns?
  4. The evolution of Pinhead
  5. An oral history of the weird Folgers “incest” commercial
  6. Sophia Tassew’s Khula jewellery brand is dope
  7. Fraunces is an ‘Old Style’ font similar to Cooper Black
  8. It’s vichyssoise, sir. It’s supposed to be cold.
  9. How to make Jamaican rum punch with Wray and Nephew (recipe)
  10. Create your own Simpsons title screen memes with this generator

Doug Bradley reading A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore

Doug reads A Visit From St Nicholas (aka The Night Before Christmas) by Clement Clarke Moore

Merry Christmas to everyone! No matter what you’re doing, I hope you’re safe and well. To get you into the Christmas spirit, Doug Bradley (better known as Pinhead from the Hellraiser series) read A Visit from St. Nicholas by Clement Clarke Moore last night. Having a model of Pinhead wearing a Santa hat in the background just adds to the macabre charm.

Santa related: The oldest Santa Claus movie in the world from 1898

30 days, 30 maps

Visionscarto spent the 30 days of November publishing daily map data visualisations for a variety of areas both geographically and mathematically. Here he explained why he is so fascinated by mapping algorithms:

Why am I so fascinated by the early computer mapping algorithms? Maybe another way of framing that question is to ask, what have we lost when geographic information systems (GIS) became dominant? Looking back at the research from the 1970’s and 80’s, it’s obvious that maps were not just the layering of tons of data on top of one another (if I can caricature what GIS does). Cartography was meant to be transformative, to show relations, movements, networks, structures of power. With the access we have now to fantastic new classes of algorithms, easy to plug in with data in notebooks that run instantly, there is a lot to invent, and we can iterate quickly, mix and match, try things out. We just need to do a bit of homework to learn and rediscover (and sometimes resuscitate) what the previous generation explored.

Some of the maps include guessing a map of Czechoslavakia, a bi-hexagonal projection of Earth, and oceans represented by dots. I couldn’t choose one to screenshot for this blog post so fill your boots with all 30 by visiting the Observable link.

MSG (monosodium glutamate) as the 'sixth taste'

Daniel Soar wrote about the origins and racist vilification of monosodium glutamate (MSG), an umami-rich flavour additive created by Ajinomoto Co., Japan’s biggest producer of condiments and seasonings. It grew in popularity for the first half of the 20th century but that success came crashing down thanks to a medical journal article:

In 1968 the New England Journal of Medicine published a letter from Robert Ho Man Kwok of the US National Biomedical Research Foundation. ‘For several years since I have been in this country,’ he wrote, ‘I have experienced a strange syndrome whenever I have eaten out in a Chinese restaurant.’ Fifteen minutes or so after finishing a meal he would experience a range of unpleasant symptoms: ‘numbness in the back of the neck, gradually radiating to both arms and the back, general weakness, and palpitation’. Kwok narrowed down the cause to the MSG so popular in the Chinese eateries now spreading across America. The journal began referring to the effect as Chinese Restaurant Syndrome, and reports from sufferers abounded. The following year John Olney of Washington University set out to confirm these findings under laboratory conditions. His experiment involved injecting newborn mice with monosodium glutamate, and the results were alarming: the effects on the mice culminated in acute neural necrosis – aka brain damage. A few biochemists questioned Olney’s methodology and conclusions: unlike his mice, people tended to eat glutamate rather than inject themselves with it; human infants, unlike infant mice, have an effective blood-brain barrier that prevents ingested glutamate from reaching the brain; and the doses Olney applied were big enough to floor a horse. But amid the roar of noise about the dangers of eating Chinese food these dissenting voices were barely heard.

Classic case of culinary racism, right? Well, yes but that wasn’t where the story ended. I won’t spoil the plot twist—and it’s a doozy—but I will say it doesn’t detract from how powerful the West can be when it comes to tearing down cultures outside their own.

Anyway, enjoy your MSG unless it has been absolutely proven to make you ill (somehow), in which case that has nothing to do with Far East Asian cuisine. Speaking of which, here are some articles about food and drink from Japan, China, and beyond you might be interested in: