Thursday Theory is Tuesday Theory this week

I shot the Serif, link here.


via Tom Gauld


Proud to be an "American," over at the "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks

I have familial obligations this Thursday, so here we go a little sooner!

• Tamara Nopper wrote over at Everyday Sociology about the Black/Non-Black divide that happens on Top Chef. Essentially, the (overwhelming number of) white chefs on the show are never asked to cook "their culture," Black chefs are physically absent from the show, and the Asian chefs are expected to "have soul" and Tom Colicchio expects to see something of the chef's racial identity in their cooking. I think that this still plays out in Top Chef Masters. I just watched the last one with Rick Bayless, and as much as I like Rick Bayless it's kind of creepy and racist that he can be an "expert" on Mexican street food and other regional cooking in Mexico as a white man who lived there for about ten years and then come home and turn that into his fancy restaurant in Chicago. Oh, and add the racist dynamic of the last episode that "ew, let's get Americans to eat OFFAL, which no sane person would touch." Something else I don't like about Top Chef AND Top Chef Masters is that anyone who speaks a non-American or non-British English is immediately subtitled.
• Whoa, the folks over at Serious Eats found out about this hotel room covered in SWISS CHEESE.
• Hooray--amandaw will be back at Feministe this summer.
• I am currently making some Oven-Roasted Tomato Jam.
• Ireland is federally recognizing civil partnership rights.
• For all of you college/graduate students who have trouble with your deadline, corrupted-files.com can send you a corrupted word file that you can pass along to your professor, buying you a few more hours on your thesis. They're usually 5.95 but they're on sale for 3.95 until the end of June.
• Derrida would be proud: Ben and Jerry's has deconstructed the sundae.
• Hopefully, Lenovo will introduce the death knell of the Caps Lock key...
• I forgot to link the discussion over at Questioning Transphobia in yesterday's post about cis being an inflammatory word, which to me on the part of folks calling for cis to be eradicated is still the most stultifying conversation ever held on the internet.