I’ve been too busy recently to regularly post to Current Config, and I’ve got a post on Half-Life 2: Episode 1 that’s still cooking, but in the meantime here are three random thoughts I had recently:

Thought 1 In a conversation yesterday with my man Steve, he told me a story about a friend of his who ordered a grape Icee, and was then informed that the flavor was, in fact, not ’grape’, but simply ’purple’. We talked about how great that is and how beautifully self-contained the concept is, etc. Then it occurred to me that we, as a society, have constructed a set of fruit archetypes, or maximally-charactered fruit-flavor types, that have informed our concept of what various fruits should taste like, in parallel to their actual flavor characteristics.

As a society, we’ve kind of encapsulated this concept in our candies, sodas, and artificial fruit beverages. For example, if someone tells us that we can choose between cherry, grape, and orange popsicles, we pretty much know what to expect. We’ve actually created a widely-accepted alternate concept of how cherry ’should’ taste. But the odd part is that we also know how cherries actually taste. This is the key distinction: we ask for cherry soda that tastes like cherry or we ask for a pie with actual fruit in it that tastes like cherries. You never get ’cherries’ Skittles or ’strawberries’ Starburst*. You get ’cherry’ or ’strawberry’. Therein lies the distinction. ’Cherry’ is the Group-Think Over-Flavor and ’cherries’ is the flavor of, well, actual cherries.

I imagine a group of future cultural anthropologists or culinary historians gathering at the Smithsonian in 3006 to discuss the possible reasons why strawberries no longer have the vibrant, sweet flavors remembered in the original recipe for Skittles. Possible explanations given would be pollution, ozone depletion, exposure to dirt and insects, cultural decay. Theories would abound to explain and memorialize the lost ’true’ flavors of fruits, now only captured in the astounding gastronomic wizardry of Hi-C and Fruit by the Foot (notice we still haven’t adopted the metric system).

Thought 2 Rye Bread is a bad loaf. Rye bread is the sucker punch of breads. Now, I’m no bread pansy. I eat an organic wheat loaf with seeds in it. This is the kind of bread made from smaller loaves that fell to it in battle. My wheat bread makes off-road sandwiches. None of that velvety-soft pillow-bread from Wonder Bread for us. But man, I’m tellin’ you, rye bread is some bad loaf. I just don’t get it.

Thought 3 ’Evenflow’ is a great name for a medication to relieve monthly bloating and cramps associated with menstruation. I even totally know what song to use in the ads.

*By the way, Mac OS X knows how to spell Skittles but not Starburst. Does this seem wrong to you, too?

I have a very hard time finding clothing. I’m a short and slight adult male, a market segment most clothing stores accord about as much attention as unicorns. Finding a suit is nearly impossible and generally finding clothing that doesn’t require tailoring takes a special kind of patience and a tolerance for indirect putdowns. In clothing terms, I’m not so much a man or a young man, as much as a child. In order to avoid shopping next to 10-year olds, I’ve been forced to put together a mental list of places with a decent percentage of appropriately cut adult-ish clothing (usually 1–10% of what’s on the racks): H&M, DKNY, Express, The Gap, Old Navy. There are others, but H&M is one of the most consistent for finding decent clothing that I can wear off the rack. The downside is that H&M’s aren’t that common and often they’re women’s-only. Fortunately, I live near the King of Prussia Mall, the largest “naturally grown” mall in the U.S.* So when I need to search for an item of uncertain properties (in this case, some kind of button-down shirt I could wear to a casual wedding in a hot climate) I go to the KoP Mall. I was forced to visit most of the stores on my list. And once I used up all of my usual choices, I was forced to go second-tier. In other words: stores I normally ignore or don’t consider: Aeropostale, Vans, American Eagle, etc. This is how I ended up in the hyper-branded, youth-optimized, teen hipness den Hollister.

*I believe it was our friend Julie who coined that phrase. KoP, unlike the Mall of America, was not built huge. It grew through a series of expansions. I’m not sure if this is good or bad, but there you go.

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Thank you for losing my luggage tonight. Having an arrival time after 10 PM makes luggage loss so much easier, so your timing was great. I guess by checking in early I gave you lots of time to screw up, which worked out well for you. You’ve now misplaced both my luggage and my wife’s in a three week span, in two totally different instances with completely different destinations. This has also strengthened my belief that the Philadelphia International Airport’s slogan should be: “If It Was Legal to Urinate On You, We Probably Would”.

Idiots.

Sincerely, Chris Rugen

The annual springtime daylight savings time (DST) adjustment kills me. It’s one of those things that shouldn’t make such a big difference in my day, as it’s merely one hour, but that’s the thing. It’s juuuust enough to screw with my head and put me off at senstive intervals and the effect compounds itself (particularly since I have to get up around 5 AM more than once a week).

For me, DST is worse than travelling to another country with a dramatically different time zone. The travel difference is usually great enough that I can make a dramatic change to my rhythm by staying up and just re-orienting. Plus, for me it’s often associated with vacation, rather than day-to-day, so there’s some wiggle room in my schedule. DST, on the other hand, is like waking up one morning to find that all of your furniture’s been moved over one foot. Instead of thinking “OK, it’s all different now, I need to reorient completely,” your mind is lulled by the lack of contrast from the expected and you end up banging your shins and stubbing your toes until you can’t walk. Your point of reference is just different enough at those corners and table legs that the repeated subtle jarring of your cycle adds up and you end up hobbling. For me, those corners and table legs are meals, bedtime, and waking up.

Damn you, Benjamin Franklin!

It’s been a very autumn winter thus far. Now things outside our window feel like they should.

A few days ago, after noticing that Gmail displays links to Spam-based recipes in the sponsored links bar when you’re in the ’Spam’ folder, I began to wonder: how does Hormel, the maker of Spam, feel about its food being associated with the insidious crud of the web and online communication? I also wondered whether Hormel employees are internally forbidden from referring to it as ’spam’. Well, apparently Hormel doesn’t object, for the most part though they stipulate that their product should be denoted as ’SPAM’ and the junk email as ’spam’.

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Here’s to a good one.

To manage the first transit strike in 25 years, they opened up a special line in New York City today, reserved for extraordinary situations like this:

I think the craziest part of the strike was not the extra 70 blocks I had to walk, but the complete lack of cars on Madison Ave. today. It was the most concrete evidence I’ve seen that the noise in NYC is largely attributable to cars and trucks. It was eerily but pleasantly quiet as I walked up Madison and watched rollerbladers and bicyclists ride down the center of Madison.

Last night at around ten ’til four in the a.m., I stumbled out of bed to assuage my body, which was resentful that I hadn’t pulled a blanket over myself and sent a ’constrict like crazy’ message to my bladder. I didn’t turn on any lights to avoid blinding myself and aggravating Alisa, who will threaten to kill you if you trifle too long in the wee hours. Unfortunately, I wasn’t alone outside of the warm shelter of my bed.

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