7 Things You Didn’t Know About the McRib

Posted on November 10, 2007

Ah, every year McDonalds unleashes the McRib upon the country, and it is our duty to eat one as remembrance of how disappointing it is. And thus, I present to you a list of facts about the beloved ribwich.

1. The original boneless rib sandwich was invented in Sweden in 1547 when King Gustav Vasa’s castle was besieged by rebels from the town of Småland. All that was left to feed his troops were loaves of bread, twelve boars, and a smoked sauce made from honey called rydbojölk. King Gustav I ordered the sidemeats peeled from the boars and placed directly from the boar onto the sandwich, raw and drizzled with the rydbojölk. Onions, pickles, and cooking were added in later generations.
2. The modern McRib was developed in a laboratory at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. Scientists were working towards creating a stronger caulking compound when a careless lab technician spilled some of his McNugget BBQ sauce onto the drying compound. The slotted shape of the sandwich was originally due to planks of wood laid across the compound to see how well it would bond to the wood. Soy paste and a small percentage of sawdust from the wood were added to give the sandwich/caulk a more palatable mouthfeel.
3. The world record for the most McRibs eaten goes to the late Olaf Gustafson, a Swedish immigrant who, upon emigrating to the United States in 1982, was so excited to discover his favorite food from his homeland was featured on the menu at a New York McDonalds, he swore to eat one every day. He consumed 796 McRibs before his death in early 1985 of advanced heart disease.
4. The worled record for most McRibs eaten in a single sitting belongs to Japanese salaryman Takahashi Matsuzaka, who in 1998 consumed 23 of the sandwiches in a thirty minute span of time. Immediately upon completing this astonishing feat, doctors pumped two pints of BBQ sauce from his stomach.
5. Pop musician Joe Jackson’s song “Steppin’ Out” was inspired by a girlfriend who took him on a date to McDonald’s. They were “steppin’ out” for a McRib. The lyric “But nothing hides the colour of the lights that shine” refers to the red and yellow arched sign about the fast food restaurant.
6. A very rare, but incredibly popular, phenomenon is when McDonald’s corporate release calendars align in such a manner that the McRib sandwich and the Shamrock Shake are available in the same time period. Called the “Black ‘n’ Irish” by some, many locations offer this combination as a special combo meal. The sweet sauce of the McRib and the minty flavor of the Shamrock Shake are perfect compliments to each other. This phenomenon occurs approximately thrice every decade.
7. Former Prime Minister of Estonia Mart Laar was so fond of the sandwich that he requested a McRib plate, complete with french fries and a McNugget appetizer, as the official meal for his inauguration dinner in 1992. Twenty-two McDonald’s cooks were flown in from Germany to prepare 150 McRibs, 900 McNuggets, and 125 pounds of french fries, for various heads of state, visiting dignitaries, and national celebrities. It is unknown whether they had apple pies for dessert.

I hope you enjoyed these facts about the history of a popular sandwich, and remember, every time you eat a McRib, you’re eating caulk.

In the Name of Science

Posted on April 3, 2007

After talking with a fellow at my favorite alcohol emporium about something he found in his dead grandfather’s basement, I thought I would follow suit. What he found was jar after jar of whiskey with various fruits inside. It sounded like a neat idea so I thought I’d follow suit. So today, I headed into The Still (best selection in town) to pick my poison.

Originally, I was going to go with this cheap corn whiskey that sells for cheap (even comes in a jar), but then, nearby, I saw the Old Grand Dad. Who could resist a bourbon named for the man who taught you to love the stuff? And there’s more. After the Old Grand Dad name, there’s a little 114. The 114 stands for 114 proof, as in 57% alcohol content. I’m pretty sure that qualifies for low-grade rocket fuel. Mmmm. From Kindred Spirits;

OLD GRAND DAD 114-Barrel Proof Kentucky Straight Bourbon 57% Alcohol

Beautiful, deep topaz/bronze/orange hue, with very attractive amber highlights; as expected, potent and heady in the nose, but also astringent, pepperminty, and zesty – not what I’d term a deep complex bouquet – just straight on, fists cocked, and ready; on palate, it shows much more grace and gentility than in the pugnacious aroma, as well-defined, tightly focused sweet flavors of oak, pears, apricots, and dark caramel lead the taste buds to a moderately hot, though hardly unpleasant finish, where in the very tail end, the warm, rich flavor of oak-influenced vanilla completes the sensory impression.

Rating *** Recommended $ $

Copyright 1997 F. Pacult – Published by Hyperion, New York

I picked up the Old Grand Dad, stopped by the grocery store for some peaches and some mason jars (they make you buy them in packs of 12, even though I only need three), and brought it all home. There isn’t much info on the interwebs about infusion; the only info I could find was a post at Allrecipes and an archived story from the Cincinnati Enquirer. But it wasn’t too tricky. I sliced up the peaches (and for one jar, I went with half peach slices and half apple slices, to mix it up), popped ‘em in a jar, and filled it with bourbon. Now, we wait. A long time. Like a year. I’m going to open a jar up next March for my 25th birthday. That gives me time to design labels for the jars. And find sticker paper so I can print them off. It shall be awesome. Check back here in a year for the tasty results.

A List of things DB Needs for His New Mac

Posted on April 1, 2007

So DB bought a Mac. Which I think signals the end times or Ragnarok or something, but anyways. He posted a few things he needs for his Mac. I have answers. Answers that may help other folks too. Plus I don’t feel like typing a long-ass comment on his post that will probably be blasted by comment spam checkers ‘cuz it’ll be full of links.

• DB needs a code editor. For that, I recommend Smultron. I know BBEdit is the old stalwart, and TextMate is the new hottness, but Smultron is P.D.G. (Pretty Damn Good), and, as a bonus, it doesn’t cost 120 USD (BBEdit) or 40 euro (TextMate).
• DB needs to video chat with Windows users. iChat can do it with AIM users. Unfortunately, Adium can’t do video chat. It’s a LibGAIM limitation. However, Yahoo for Mac can do video with Windows Yahoo users (with the standard shitty Yahoo video chat quality) and Skype can do cross video chats I believe, as well. I am unsure about MSN for Mac. Anyone know?
• DB misses his key command for the Run shell. Fortunately, those fine motherbitches at Blacktree developed Quicksilver. Quicksilver, with the punch of a two-key-combo, lets you launch apps, open web pages, send emails, do UNIX commands, make text files, do math, and so much more. Check it out.
• DB knows about Flip4Mac, but does he know Perian? Perian is the shit for video codecs, giving you all you need.
• DB would like an AMP stack. If only someone made a self contained development environment, complete with it’s own little Apache, PHP, and SQL… Oh wait, they do! MAMP gives you all you need for developing websites in an Apache environment, with no fuss. It’s so good, I use it my self.

That’s it for now. Anyone else got any questions, you just go on ahead and ask, li’l chilluns.

Interesting Wikipedia Pages

Posted on February 22, 2007

Wikipedia is a great place for free learnin’. Even though it’s all a bunch of made up stuff by people on the internet, it’s still generally a reliable source for information, just don’t make life-threatening decisions based upon it. Anyways, there is a breadth of information there, on stuff you might not think to look for, or maybe even never would want to look for. Here are some of my favorites:

• The Buttered Cat Paradox – Everybody knows a cat, when dropped, will land on its feet. And toast, properly buttered, will land on the buttered side. So what happens when you butter a cat? I’m entrenched firmly in the levitating-cat-theory camp.
• Telluric Currents – Electric currents that move through the Earth.
• Ass-to-Mouth – You never go ass to mouth.
• The Interesting Number Paradox – The first sequential number that is declared to have no interesting properties, becomes interesting by virture of the fact that it is the first non-interesting number.
• 0.99… = 1 – Math, bitches!
• Numbers Stations – These things will never cease to fascinate and spook me.
• Markovian Parallax Denigrate – Like numbers stations, but on the internet!
• Colors of Noise – I wonder who decides these things.
• Aldus Manutius – A famous 15th century publisher.

Thanks BeerorKid for the post inspiration.

Shut Up… T.C.’s Doing…. Something.

Posted on February 13, 2006

Watching Magnum P.I., and I find it to be very odd that for a show set on the island of Hawaii, there are never any Hawaiians. Anywhere. Shelby and I were watching today. She though she saw one. It was just a chubby white guy squinting into the sun. Another guy turned out to be Mexican (he looked like Luis Guzman in a navy uniform. I don’t know how she picked up on that one.) A Japanese fellow might pop up every now and then, but still not in the ratio you would expect. It’s a very unusual island.

As a sidenote, there are four Magnum P.I. cars for sale on eBay.

More Random Tech Junk

Posted on January 21, 2006

An Apple Update | If you remember I’ve been trying to get a new battery for my laptop. I placed the order on 12/23, received the (wrong) package on the 28th, placed a request for a return, didn’t get a shipping label until 1/4, and Apple received the package on the 9th. At that point, it takes four to five days for them to process the return. It’s now the 19th and I haven’t gotten a refund credited to my account yet. I called them today to see what’s up, and they told me to wait a week and call again if I still haven’t got it. Which is what they told me last week. And what they told me when it took a week and a half to get the mailing label to send it back. If all goes well, I should get my new battery about a month and a half after I ordered it. I’ll keep you updated.

iLife ‘06 | The new application suite from Apple is out now, and I’ve got it. The improvements to iPhoto are pretty great, including the expansion of the library size (iLife ‘05 could only handle 25,000 photos, the new version can support up to 250,000) and the way the photos are arranged in Finder. And it’s zippier. iMovie I haven’t tried out yet, because I don’t work with video too much, but I’m going to give it a spin soon. (I’ve got a little project stewing.) iWeb, in a word, sucks. It’s supposed to be an easy webpage creation app. And it is easy, but if you want a blog, you’re better off with Blogger or Wordpress.com, if you want to share photos, go with Flickr. The pages do look slick, but don’t really look like webpages; they look more like print pages. Very graphics intensive. And to my knowledge, automatic syncing only works with .Mac; otherwise you have to ftp your pages to a server manually. iTunes is updated to 6.0.2, mostly a minimal dot release. So far the big changes are the Mini-store, which has had its own little brouhaha which turned out to be pretty pointless, and the fact that you can now share video over a network. Which lends new credence to the rumour that you’ll soon be able to plug Airport Express into a tv, (again, not as exciting as people make it out to be, as your tv is 640×480, most internet video is not that big and video bought through the iTMS is a fourth of that at 320×240). The biggest change is the new Garage Band, which has added a podcast recording studio, which is actually pretty sweet. Included tools are bumper music, sound effects, and radio effects, and iChat integration to record voice chat (hopefully someone will make a 3rd-party plugin to integrate Skype, which is a little more common, and cross-platform, than iChat.) Also new is a studio to score video, a baby version of Apple’s Soundtrack Pro which is now only available as a part of Final Cut Studio. I don’t have a dvd burner, so I’ve never used (nor installed) iDVD.

Wifi at Work | I’ve finally been given the go-ahead to set up a wireless network at the country club I work at. This is pretty sweet for me, because with all the stuff I’ll be doing, I prefer (and in some cases have to) do on my iBook, and I’ll need an internet connection. I picked up a Linksys router for fifty bucks at Wal-Mart, and needless to say, hooking it up has been a pain in the ass. We’ve got a big ass router that the whole club is hooked into via Cat-5 cable (actually three routers) as well as a dodgy Windows server that feeds the workstations. I can create a network with the wireless router that my iBook can connect to, however I can’t get the wireless router to connect to the big router, and therefore the internets. I can connect my iBook to the internets by plugging directly into the big router via the same cable that I was plugging the wireless router into. But the wireless router just won’t connect. DB is going to provide a little over-the-phone tech support so hopefully it’ll all work out. Another issue that is plaguing me is range; I can only get 1/3rd the coverage that I need, so hopefully I’ll be able to convince the boss to spring for another wireless router at a later date.

Random Tech Junk, pt 2

Posted on January 2, 2006

My Theories on Web 2.0 | Web 2.0 is the latest buzzword on the internets. There are all sorts of ways to describe it, but no real definition. It’s a way of using the internet to thread into your life, it’s a way of being a platform on the internet, instead of on your computer’s desktop, it’s the second internet bubble (can’t wait ’til this one collapses), it’s the idea of “user-created content” (i.e. the users put up the content, and we collect the money from the ad revenue), and mostly it’s a bunch of hype and bullshit. Some good examples (sites that are actually useful) are Flickr and del.icio.us. There are lots of bad examples too. Tons of crap. I came across one called Goowy. It’s a replacement for your desktop, in your web browser. Why anyone would want to use a fake flash-based mini OS in a browser is beyond me. I’ve got a much more powerful, much better integrated, proper OS in OSX. But I digress. It seems to me that the whole point of Web 2.0 is to hope that you get enough users that one of the big companies (AOL, Yahoo!, Google, so forth) notices and decides to buy you. It’s really stupid, and I can’t wait for it to be over so we can all move on with our lives. For more, check out Flock Sucks.

Why I Hate Digg.com | I like Digg. I like Alex and Kevin, I enjoyed them on The Screensavers/Attack of the Show; they put together a good show for the Digg podcast. Digg could be Web 2.0, but I don’t know. Mostly because no one does. It’s a collection of links, a la del.icio.us or Fark, but with rankings and a podcast. But reading the comments there just drive me nuts. It’s the biggest collection of flamers and dumbasses you can find. I’ve heard that the most comments a post on a site like that can have is 9, after that magic number it devolves into drivel, Windows vs Mac flamewars, and accusations of Nazism. I literally feel dumber every time I read them. And I try not to read them, but I can’t help it. These idiots call to me. And so that’s why I stopped reading Digg. Because they ruined it for me.

My New Apple

Posted on December 17, 2005

While surfing the local Craigslist I found an ad in the free section offering a tricked out Apple II-GS. Well, I got all excited of course and called right away, worried that someone might have already grabbed it. Fortunately, I was the first to call, so they said I could come pick it up the next day. The guy said it had a few extra things, and some disks as well. I show up to pick it up, and what I find is four large boxes of floppy disks (both 5.25″ and 3.5″), two external hard drives, two floppy drives (for both sizes), mouse, keyboard, and joystick, a system saver (combination fan/power strip that sits between your computer and your monitor), and a remote control for an old hitachi vcr. The disks took up the backseat of my car, the hardware all filled my trunk. I lugged it all home and it sat on my couch for a few days, bothering Shelby, until finally I had a table to put it all on. I’ve got it all set up, and I went through the boxes of disks, throwing away most of them. I saved a lot of games, including Oregon Trail, Shuffle Puck, Number Munchers, King’s Quest, Bard’s Tale, Lode Runner, and a strip poker game wherein you play poker against the computer to get a chick with big 80’s hair to remove items of clothing, in a 320×200 gif format. I’ve also got Apple’s System 6.0.1 running, as well as Appleworks, but I have yet to access the hard drives. I might have them daisy-chained wrong, or I don’t know what. It’s still a lot of fun to play with though, and of course it brings back memories of the second grade.

An Apple Triptych

1st picture: The Apple II-GS in all its glory. 2nd picture: Shelby playing Oregon Trail. 3rd picture, from l to r: iMac G3, Apple II-GS, and iBook G4 14″.)

Mp3of music from “Oregon Trail”.

Have You Ever Wondered?

Posted on June 28, 2005

And I know you want to know: What happened to the cast of Step By Step? I intend to find out….

For those of you who don’t remember, Step By Step was a Brady Bunch-esque show about contractor Frank Lambert, single father to 3 kids, who gets married to Beautician Carol Foster, a single mother to 3 kids of her own. The kids all hate each other, but they have to learn to get along, step by step… Day by day…

Patrick Duffy played Frank Lambert, the swarthy construction worker with a penchant for Suzanne Somers. He hasn’t done much lately, other than a few “Hey, I was on Dallas, remember me?” appearances every now and then.

Suzanne Somers played mother Carol. She doesn’t do much anymore, but for some reason she keeps popping up on various talk shows, according to IMDB. She still hates Joyce DeWitt. She no longer sells exercise tapes, to my knowledge.

Brandon Call portrayed Frank’s son J.T., who I personally thought was kind of a douchebag. He was the scheming smooth-talker type that never quite seemed to get it together. He hasn’t acted since Step By Step. Instead, according to facts gathered from the internet, he runs a couple of businesses, drives a green ‘96 Honda Civic, and was shot in both arms during a robbery in 1996. But he’s better now.

Frank’s daughter Al was played by Alicia Lambert. Al was the tomboy, and played baseball. I remember her often wearing a green baseball shirt, possibly with a yellow hat. She’s really hot now. She still works, althought gazing at her filmography, she only does shitty movies that are possibly ‘erotic thrillers’ and direct-to-video comedies. She is apparently very popular in Italy.

Josh Byrne played the youngest brother, Brendan. I have absolutely no recollection of this character, apparently because he was written out. How you write a child out of a family, I have no idea. He hasn’t acted since. Rumour is he is a bouncer at a crappy karoake bar in Burbank, possibly saying “Don’t you know who I was, man? I was fucking Brendan Lambert! From Step by Step? You’re out of here!”

Staci Keanan played the daughter who I thought was hottest, and I forget her name right now. She was the smart one that was always sarcastic, and sometimes a bitch. She doesn’t do much any more either. Oh yea, she was the little girl on My Two Dads, too. That show that isn’t as gay as it sounds, but may as well be. After all, it was Paul Reiser and Greg Evigan living together. She has a fan page.

Angela Watson was Karen on the show. She was the stupid vain daughter. She’s appeared in one show since Step By Step, apparently a children’s program. Apparently she’s naked somewhere on the internet, but an exhaustive search yielded no results.

Christopher Castile played Mark, the nerdy, slightly effete son of Carol. He was on Hey Arnold, which was a kinda awesome cartoon, I guess. You can find a review of his autobiography, “Being You Is Most Definitely Cool”, here. Apparently, he regularly attends asthma conferences in Aspen.

Finally, Sasha Mitchell was the “cool uncle” of the show, Cody. Aside from having a girly name, he was kicked from the show, mostly because he drank, was a drug addict, and hit his wife. Amazingly, he’s managed to pop up in the occasional movie or tv show, so good on him, I guess. Also, if you go to Charlie’s Cafe in the L.A. Farmer’s Market, he makes awesome eggs and hash. ‘Cuz that’s where he’s presently working, as a short order cook. No word on whether or not he’s “researching a role”.

And that’s it. I hoped you enjoyed. And if you’re a d-list celebrity googling your own name, and you happened upon this page, go ahead and leave a comment to keep us updated.

I can’t believe I wasted a whole afternoon researching this.

Robot Research Vol. 1

Posted on February 8, 2005

That words such as “thingamajig” and “whatchamacallit” have a gramatical name? That name is “kadigan”. The origin of the term kadigan is itself unclear, leading to the theory that “kadigan” is itself most likely a kadigan. And knowing is half the battle.

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