It’s been very nearly two years since the last time, and that’s way too long. So: it’s time for another caption hunt!
Leave your caption(s) in the comments. Who knows? There might even be a prize or two involved.
(Update: comments are now enabled. Oopsie.)
Kat and I were watching “Good Eats” the other night, and as Alton slid a dish into a nice toasty warm 350-degree oven, I suddenly sat bolt upright.
“Hey, that’s our oven!” I blurted out.
Kat and I (okay, mostly Kat) recently decided that enough was enough, and that our old oven had to go. It was a Jenn-Air that came with the house, and frankly, it was either not very good in the first place or else had just been beat all to hell. Cramped, dark, and uncalibrated—and with an unreadably worn set of control dials to boot—it was time for the warhorse to go.
After a good deal of research, Kat settled on a GE JK955 electric double oven, which we were relieved to find fit almost exactly into the space where the old oven was, once we removed a couple of drawers. It’s got all kinds of toys and features that would send any food-porn addict straight into overdrive, including a built-in probe thermometer. It even has a nice warm proofing function, which is one of the reasons Kat picked it.
There is one thing about it that cracks me right up, and that’s the Sabbath mode. Seriously. When you put it into Sabbath mode (the display reads “SAb bATh” when you do so), it will help you observe Orthodox Jewish law as regards the Sabbath. Really! See, you’re not allowed to do any work on the Sabbath, which includes things like turning lights on and off. Ovens fall under that restriction as well, which makes cooking dinner a bit tough. However—and here’s the funky part—you get off the hook if you don’t directly cause the work to occur. If the work happens indirectly, then you’re okay.
So when the oven is in Sabbath mode, you input the temperature and cook time you want. Then you press start, and for a random amount of time that ranges from 30 seconds to a minute, nothing happens. Then the oven kicks on. Ta-daaa! Indirect action! Sure, you pressed all those buttons, but the random time delay is enough to get around your religion’s restrictions on Sabbath work. It’s all, pardon the term, kosher. Check out the Wired article about the man responsible for Sabbath mode, if you don’t believe me.
I’m still trying to decide if this letter-of-the-law approach lessens my respect for Orthodox Jews’ conception of religion, or if I have more respect for their pragmatic willingness to hack the problem. I think it’s the latter. Apparently there’s still no progress on a molecular screen that will prevent the insertion of porcine products into the oven, so I guess some things are still up to the individual.
So not only do we have a frum oven, but without realizing it we had settled on the same model that A.B. himself uses, which is about as weighty an endorsement as we can imagine. (Of course, his is the larger unit, but that’s okay—ours fills its space very nicely, thank you.) The degree to which this makes us feel all smug and superior is probably cause for alarm. If you hear our friends are getting ready to stage an intervention, well, that’s probably why.
For whatever reason, I actually prefer Pringle’s “Right Crisps”, which is the lower-fat version of the chip, to the regulars. Still, Kat tries on occasion to introduce me to new things, and one recent attempt was a purchase of Pringles Prints.
Now, I think the idea of printing text on a potato chip is kind of cool, even if it’s in this kind of odd light Windex blue; I have to wonder what’s in the ‘ink’. Disappointingly, the facts printed on the chips were pretty basic, not to mention focused almost solely on dinosaurs and elephants for the first half of the can. I found this kind of funny, but admit it makes sense as I assume the target demographic for these chips is the kids, who love big animals. But I don’t know how the folks at Proctor & Gamble can live with themselves when they’re pushing facts like, “Did you know? Elephants do not live alone — they travel in herds.”
Maybe that’s a major revelation when you’re six, but I have to figure that if you know much of anything about elephants, you know that much. I smell filler text. Somebody was on a deadline to come up with a certain number of facts, and got desperate.
Anyway, I brought all this up because right near the middle of the can, I found out that even potato chip makers have to calibrate their printers.
You can see it in more detail on Flickr.
While in Chicago, we went for lunch at Navy Pier. What can I say? We were tourists. As we were lead to our table, one of the waiters stopped me and said, “I love your shirt!” It was my microformats icon shirt, and it turned out he had no idea what it was. He just liked it.
A couple of days later, as we were passing through security at the base of the Sears Tower— Carolyn’s pick for what to do that morning— one of the guards burst out laughing and, pointing to my shirt, said “That’s right on, man! I heard that!” The source of his mirth was my ALA “Please code responsibly” T-shirt, the one with the car-off-a-dock icon on the front.
It’s literally been years since I had a random stranger comment on a shirt I was wearing. Is there something about Chicagoans that they’re more conscious of other people’s shirts?
In keeping with Molly‘s recent conversations with comment spam, I present to you a back-handed compliment (or is it?) that I found in my moderation queue:
A great site where one can enjoy the thought of a great mind long departed. Cheers for the good work!
Wow. Harsh.
Thanks to The Wolf‘s pointer to The Other Wolf‘s post, I now bring you “Unfortunately Eric”.
It’ll be interesting to see how long it takes for this post to throw Google’s results out of whack. (Answer: three days.)
Excerpt from an IM session that just now concluded:
Molly Holzschlag: you seem to be a bit more organized than I do
Molly Holzschlag: although your office looks a lot like mine :)
Eric Meyer: My data is organized. My life is not.