I ain't sayin' we ain't got to clean up greenhouse damage and all that, but please can we do it with some cars that do not look like a Reebok. I mean a man cannot drive a Prius, it is like exactly the shape of the mouse that is under your hand, and has about the same horsepower.
[Thx: Achewood]
2- Cheeseburger, with a fried egg on top, with french fries and a milkshake. I mean, a cheeseburger is great right? But then they put an egg on it. A freakin' fried egg. So wrong. So right. Enjoy responsibly. You can get this at Red Robin; yeah, it's a chain. I think there might be something about this meal that requires a certain economy of scale to achieve. (Honestly, in this case the fries are just there to cleanse the palate between waves of juicy burger and milkshake.)
3- Hudson Bay bread and peanut butter, washed down with kool-aid. This is one of those situational entries that wouldn't taste nearly as good if you hadn't just spent the morning paddling across bright clean lakes and carrying a canoe on your shoulders through knee-deep mud. (Also, after lunch it's your turn to ride in the middle of the canoe, where your only responsibilities are to contemplate the dragonflies and not get your fingertips bitten off by pike.)
4- Steak and hashbrowns. Set out on the counter to come up to room temperature an hour before grilling, liberally coated with freshly ground pepper and kosher salt. Somewhere in the neighborhood of medium, on the rare side of the street -- it shouldn't need a tourniquet, but will require first aid. Only a couplefew minutes each side on the hottest grill you can light. I'm too lazy to grate my own potatoes, so I use the dried kind that you reconstitute with hot water in the little milk carton. Cooked slow; browned of course, but not super-crispy. Salt only. This is the Food of Men. Served with a tall Velvet Crush (that's kool-aid and gin). (You may think that the drink detracts from the manitude of the meal. You would be wrong. It is the presence of that incongruity, that paradoxical imperfection, that allows this meal to ascend to Capital Letters of masculinity. That's my story, and I'm sticking to it.)
5- Homemade ice cream, fresh out of the maker. It's never quite as awesome the second day -- presuming it lasts. If I was Stan Lee, I would say "'Nuff Said" here; but I'm not. Inter the extra ingredients of your choice to the churning, icy tomb and prepare your mouth for a dollop of heaven. (Or something like that.)
In the late 1960s, lest we forget, most experts were speaking of imminent global famines in which billions of people would perish. "The battle to feed all of humanity is over," biologist Paul Ehrlich famously wrote in "The Population Bomb," his 1968 best seller. "In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now."
As Mr. Ehrlich was making his dark predictions, Mr. Borlaug was embarking on just such a crash program. Working with scientists and administrators in India and Pakistan, he succeeded in getting his highly productive dwarf wheat varieties to hundreds of thousands of South Asian peasant farmers. These varieties resisted a wide spectrum of plant pests and diseases and produced two to three times more grain than traditional varieties.
And I like this last bit too:
[Borlaug] also laments the unnecessary suspicion with which biotech is treated these days. "Activists have resisted research," he notes, "and governments have overregulated it." They both miss the point. "Responsible biotechnology is not the enemy: starvation is."
[Thx: Hit and Run]
The emo band Panic! At the Disco, its members attired with all the ridiculousness of fops but none of the panache...
