Current Configuration

1) I went to WaWa this evening to get a sandwich and I remembered that they’re offering milkshakes now, so I ambled over to their shake-making device and decided to put the…the…I can’t believe they call it this…the “F’Real Shake”…to the test.

Now, I’m a fan of a good strawberry shake made with real ingredients and well-blended (no unpleasant strawberry gibs in my nicely-textured shake, thanks). So much so, that I even used to drink shakes at Burger King and McDonald’s (not anymore). My stand-by is the chocolate shake, but a good strawberry shake can really hit the spot. So I am always on the hunt for a good shake hit where I can get one. In spite of my doubts about WaWa, I had to know for sure.

The WaWa shake, unlike other frozen beverages, is stored in a separate freezer, to be blended in front of you in the body of the F’Real Shake machine. F’real. The beverage comes in a foil-topped plastic cup (also F’Real) which you open and fit into what I will now refer to as the F’Real Shake Seat of Ascendancy. Upon seating your cup in its steel chariot, you select your thickness as prompted by the little LCD display. Not wanting to tempt fate, I chose the regular thickness, fearing a syrupy goo or an unyielding mass of solid ice cream. The F’Real Frozen Shake Media in its F’Real Shake Cup is then carried aloft by the F’Real Shake Seat of Ascendancy into the Chamber of Shake Makin’ F’Real. The machine bumps and jostles a bit as it clearly uses some sort of terrible burr grinder to convert the F’Real Frozen Shake Media into a F’Real Shake full of urban cachet and dairy. The sound is uncannily like a dentist working in your mouth with powered dental instruments. The newly F’Real’ed F’Real Shake descends from the mouth of the machine, oddly only about 3/4 full, complete and remarkably smooth. In fact, I think I did remark to no one in particular that it was remarkably smooth, proving that to be true.

The shake was actually not that bad. It lacked the overpowering strawberry flavor of some shakes and didn’t have the disturbing texture that other fast food shakes have. It was, as I said, remarkably smooth. This, combined with the thickness, allowed one to drink the bottom of the shake out from under the top, which was a tad aggravating. But overall, a bearable shake. Though I don’t know that it’ll be a regular or even a repeat purchase, as the process still weirds me out F’Real. Plus, that’s the stupidest fucking name for anything, ever, anywhere (they don’t even use the name in the ads).

2) Last night, when I was in dire need of some sleep, around 10:00 PM, the power in our neighborhood went out. The whole area was dark, but that wasn’t really an issue for us, as we were a bit more focused on the lack of air conditioning. Philly was doing its best impression of an armpit and our bedroom was designed extremely well to restrict airflow as much as possible, particularly when one window is plugged with a large metal box that says “Cool” and “Fan” on the front. As I lay on the bed with successively fewer layers and progressively more water molecules gathering about me, I pondered the possible causes of the blackout and also the fact that I no longer had internet access. I concluded that we probably suffered a crippling initial strike by a functioning North Korean Nodong and was struck with fear that nobody would be able to post a warning blog entry about it, becuase the internet is meant to function during times of war, but only if your computer and router run on rubble and crying, rather than electricity. This progressed into making a laundry list of things that run on electricity and how screwed we’d all be if we all didn’t have any for a week. Then, around 2:00 AM, the power came back on and I was lulled to sleep by my conveniences.

3) Ze Frank’s the show is the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages and he does it every weekday. I’d like to thank my friend Adam for linking to this episode, as it set me on the path of Sports Racerhood. I’ve worked my way through the roughly 4 months of them he’s done so far. His delivery style is frenetic, with lots of fast cuts and quick, quirky humor. It’s sort of a DIY Daily Show with more in-jokes. Very, very worth it. I also recommend this one.

4) There’s a new Rocky movie coming out. Here are my thoughts on that:

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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