Searching for dinner

God bless those Googling hearts over in Mountain View: the search engine giant has an algorithm that intuits a search entry of “broccolini” might mean you’re looking for recipes & returns a whole mess ’o ways to cook the veg. They call it “recipe view”.

And once you have your initial results, you can sort by ingredients, cooking time or calorie count.

I just don’t even know where to start.

Nuts & oats

A columnist for the NY Times takes McDonald’s version of oatmeal to task for being, well, the McDonald’s version. Which is to say, without any redeeming social or nutritional value.

Okay, fair enough—who would really expect anything under the golden arches to be anything except high-fat/high-calorie? I mean, even the salads chalk up high totals of both—even before you pile on the dressing.

But what I’m wondering is how long will it take before some self-absorbed be-labeled Yuppie with more credulity than grey-matter decides to sue the chain for deceptive advertising.

& lest you wonder what I’m talking about, I refer you to the San Diego “concerned mother” who has sued the company that makes Nutella for exactly that.

Seems that she was shocked—shocked—when her friends informed her that the chocolate-hazelnut spread she’d been feeding her four-year-old daughter daily was “in fact not a 'healthy' 'nutritious' food but instead was the next best thing to a candy bar." (Quote from her complaint.)

Evidently Athena Hohenburg didn’t notice the jar’s nutrition label (mandated on all food products) where it said that each two-tablespoonful serving contains 21 grams of sugar & 200 calories (with 100 calories from fat).

Like many of her class she seems to be literate enough to file suit, but not enough to read a label.

& that’s why I expect to at some point see news of the suit (possibly class-action) against McDonald’s when someone becomes shocked to discover that their oatmeal has more calories than a hamburger.

Commercial break

Here are two examples of the better mousetrap precept. Or, perhaps, the “find the pain points and apply analgesics” precept.

In the UK a graphic designer has created barf bags for the consumer to express his/her opinion of the Royal Wedding. Although the concept is evidently new to many Britons, Lydia Leith has sold out her first batch and is rushing to print more.

And then back on our side of the Pond, a San Francisco company has built a smartphone app that enables drivers to find available metered parking spaces. Right now their coverage is limited to Hollywood, Calif., and Roosevelt Island in NY, and it’s only available on the iPhone, but they have plans for expansion.

Frankly, I think both products are boons to modern society.

The male of the species 2

In the interest of displaying the appearance of impartiality by way of showing both sides of the story, even when one side is pretty lame, & the story’s not much of one to begin with, I refer you to the follow-up the WSJ published to the article I discussed yesterday.

This one is even more replete with generalities & non-facts as the writer defends the 20-something American male. Seems that twelve of them or so have started Internet companies & made it big, so everyone should just get off all their cases.

Whatever.

The male of the species

The story in the WSJ is headlined “Where Have the Good Men Gone?” & claims that “[t]oday, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance.”

The writer refers to this as “pre-adulthood”, with the guys characterized as “frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers”.

I don’t find this particularly odd. What puzzles me is limiting the description to the immediate post-teen years. Seriously—at what point do guys grow out of it?