What the Heck Is Crab Rangoon Anyway? - "Of all the wonders of the modern American Chinese menu, crab rangoon is one of the strangest. It consists of cream cheese, sometimes sweetened, plus, usually, very small bits of imitation crab, stuffed into a wonton wrapper and deep-fried, served with a syrupy, neon sweet-and-sour dipping sauce. It is, essentially, deep-fried cheesecake with fake crab in it—as sweet as any dessert, but served as an appetizer. It has a Burmese name, is served in a theoretically Chinese restaurant, and its main component was invented in New York in the late 19th century... One thing to get out of the way is that crab rangoon is not inauthentic, and you should not be embarrassed to order it. American Chinese food is its own cuisine, with its own staples and a reasonably long and fascinating history. There’s a fundamental problem with the concept of authenticity in food, because cuisine is constantly mutating and adapting to new ingredients, new people, new techniques, and new ideas. Mexican food would be completely different without the influence of the Spanish and Arab immigrants and colonists; the tomato is not native to Italy; the chili pepper is not native to Thailand. There are old dishes and there are newer dishes, and that can be an interesting distinction. And there is tasty food and lousy food, but using some concept of authenticity alone as a criterion is a flawed approach... Crab rangoon has its roots in another quintessentially American cuisine. Starting in the 1940s, thanks to returning World War II veterans, the country began a decades-long obsession with the aquamarine hues and tropical vibes of Polynesia, or at least a vague idea of what Polynesia might be. It manifested as what we know as tiki culture. Tiki bars and restaurants have even less in common with their ostensible international roots than American Chinese restaurants do. They were based instead on an American obsession with leisure, danger, and exoticism—along with what now reads as a racist stew of imagery: palm-thatched roofs, canned pineapple, ceramic Easter Island head mugs, white sand beaches... Cream cheese was a staple of 1940s and 1950s American cuisine. This is a bit of a generalization of hindsight, but mid-century cookbooks seem to offer no end of creamy, cheesy sauces. With celery, with Spam, formed into balls and rolled in nuts, baked into the ultimate decadent dessert: It was the age of cream cheese. Several people in my survey expressed embarrassment, or at least puzzlement, that crab rangoon violates the taboo against eating seafood with cheese. Though pervasive, this is a mild and inconsistent prohibition originating in Italy. But cream cheese has always somehow been exempt. Bagels with cream cheese and lox is a relevant, beloved example, and many famous dishes from the 1940s and 1950s use the combination as well. There’s clam and cream cheese dip or those cucumber rounds with cream cheese–based salmon mousse on top... There’s plenty of crab in Burmese food, but it’s pretty clear that Trader Vic didn’t name his dish after the city because there was any connection there. It is simply a place in a general Southeast Asia-Polynesia-South Pacific zone, suitably exotic-sounding but still easy for native English speakers to pronounce... The food served in tiki restaurants shared a lot with American Chinese food: vaguely Asian, very sweet, deep-fried. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the cuisines cross-pollinated."
LEE KUAN YEW'S VIEWS ON LIFE AND DEATH - "Those around me who may have tried to proselytise to me no longer do so because they know it is a hopeless case. My wife had a friend she knew from school who was very religious and kept trying to convert her. In the end, she stayed away from her friend, saying: "It is absurd. Every time we meet she wants to convert me into a Christian." She did not believe in the afterlife --- although, admittedly, it is comforting if you believe there is an afterlife even if there is none."
SightBringer on X - "⚡️Hollywood became an insurance product pretending to be a creative industry. The center of the collapse is executive career risk. Studios no longer ask which choice makes the movie most alive. They ask which choice can be defended if the movie fails. That single substitution destroys everything. A famous actor is defensible. Existing IP is defensible. A sequel is defensible. A massive marketing spend is defensible. A weird unknown comic who is perfect for the part is harder to defend in a boardroom. A new writer with no track record is harder to defend. A strange original tone is harder to defend. So the machine selects for explainable mediocrity over dangerous vitality. That is how culture dies inside institutions. Superbad came from a system that could still manufacture stars. Modern Hollywood wants stars before it permits the movie. That reverses the creative pipeline. Movies used to create fame. Now fame is required before movies get made. Once that happens, the system stops discovering people and starts recycling people. The actor becomes collateral. The script becomes inventory. The franchise becomes insurance. The audience becomes modeled demand. The executive becomes a risk manager. The result is dead art with perfect paperwork. The deeper mechanism is financialization. The studio stopped behaving like a taste institution and started behaving like a capital allocator under reputational, legal, platform, and marketing pressure. Every project now has to survive pre-validation before it is allowed to exist. That means the thing is judged before the thing has had a chance to become itself. Comedy suffers first because comedy needs oxygen. It needs unknown chemistry, surprise, bad taste, timing, loose discovery, and people who are funnier than they are famous. Risk controls crush that. A joke cannot be fully de-risked before it is performed. A comic actor cannot prove the exact energy of a role through fame metrics. Comedy has to be found in motion. That is why the loss is bigger than movies. Hollywood is a case study in what happens when institutions lose trust in judgment and replace it with proxies. Credentials replace talent. Fame replaces fit. IP replaces imagination. Data replaces taste. Consensus replaces courage. Process replaces belief. The cruel part is that every individual decision makes sense. No executive wants to be the person who backed the strange unknown thing that failed. No studio wants a $100 million embarrassment. No platform wants social backlash. No marketer wants a movie that is hard to explain. Every participant behaves rationally, and the whole system becomes sterile. The old Hollywood had plenty of corruption, stupidity, and gatekeeping, but it still contained people with authority who could say: make the movie, trust the funny people, the best version will make the most money. That sentence is almost gone now. Modern Hollywood does not trust the best version. It trusts the safest explanation. That is the rot."
Dozens of Australians diagnosed with rare tattoo-related vision loss - "The condition, known as tattoo-associated uveitis, can lead to permanent vision loss, glaucoma, and patients requiring immunosuppressants for the rest of their life... While tattoo-associated uveitis was thought to be extremely rare, research published in the journal Clinical and Experimental Ophthalmology has documented 40 new cases of the condition in Australia — doubling the number of published cases detected around the world since 2010... Of the people with tattoo-associated uveitis studied in the paper, it was mostly black ink tattoos that seemed to have caused the inflammation, but pink and red ink was also recorded in one case each. In most of the cases it was also long after the tattoo had been completed, on average around a year or two, but in one case up to 35 years after the tattoo was done. According to Dr Richards, some, but not all people, had their tattoos done overseas, including in Bali... Despite the increase in cases appearing over the past few years, Nicole Carnt, an optometrist at the University of New South Wales not involved with the research, noted that it was still a rare condition given about 20–30 per cent of Australians have at least one tattoo."
Thinking of getting a tattoo? This is what we know about health risks - "New studies have emerged that have suggested injecting coloured ink deep into your skin could lead to increased health risks down the track, like allergic reactions while getting them removed, and even an increased risk of cancer... some inks still contain lead and chromium... A 2016 report by the Australian Industrial Chemicals Introduction Scheme (AICIS) found one in five tattoo inks used in Australia contain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), a group of chemicals which is known to be carcinogenic at high-level exposure... Professor Lenehan and her PhD student Benjamin Boyle have shown in past research that benzene, which is a known carcinogen, can be formed in the skin when a tattoo is removed."
Sarah Fields on X - "Let me get this straight: A New York father rescues his 14-year-old daughter from sex traffickers on a yacht - only for the state to place her in not one, but TWO different state-run psychiatric facilities, where she was sexually as*aulted again by staff members? My God."
Oshawa Generals season ticket holders asked to shower before gametime
Meme - ""let people enjoy things" ok enjoy critical analysis and being a hater"
Meme - "r/Weird. My brother is in Berlin for a few days and this woman is on the wall in multiple rooms of his hotel."
Boy, 3, was 'attacked' by crocodile in pit after being 'thrown in by man with learning difficulties’ – as suspect bailed - "The suspect is a “mentally disabled” man who was on a day trip to Johnsons of Old Hurst zoo near Huntingdon, Cambridgeshire, and was not known to the boy, locals have said. He was reportedly with at least two carers but they weren’t watching him when the boy was thrown over the 4ft enclosure fence, according to a local."
Wowcher apologises for ‘disgusting’ crocodile attack email - "customers of Wowcher, an e-commerce site, opened an email headlined: “Snap up these deals quicker than a croc can catch a kid.”"
Roman Helmet Guy on X - "“Maybe there’s nothing wrong with me at all. Maybe I’m meant for something more.” The message of every kids movie today is: If you’re having trouble navigating the world, the world is the problem and actually you’re just too awesome and you should never ever work on yourself."
vittorio on X - "this is the literal opposite of the hero’s journey. but the hero’s journey is fascist now, it asks a kid to admit he isn’t good enough yet and then work to become someone who is, and a culture that considers every hierarchy as violence can’t let a child hear that. that’s why Disney sucks now and why kids are stunted beyond repair. symptom of a rotten culture"
‘Teddy bear assassins’ shoot Ecuador gang leader - "The suspected leader of one of Ecuador’s most feared gangs was shot dead in an ambush by gunmen holding teddy bears and flowers. Criminal kingpin Carlos Alberto Suastegui Villanueva was shot in the head at point-blank range on Wednesday as he left the airport of Ecuador’s largest city, Guayaquil. Footage shared online shows two gunmen waiting outside the building for Mr Villanueva, 39, holding a bouquet and a large stuffed Sonic the Hedgehog toy."
The battle to stop people using their cars as deadly weapons - "The changes have led one military historian to argue that Britain is reverting to a fortified age similar to medieval times, when castles and keeps dominated the landscape. David Betz, professor of war in the modern world in the Department of War Studies at London’s King’s College, sets out his case in his 2023 book The Guarded Age: Fortification in the Twenty-First Century. “Most people in urban environments today will have some example of defensive street furniture near their home,” he says. “The country has been investing in it for more than 20 years, but it’s really accelerated in the wake of the Nice attacks.” He points out, however, that while fortifications in the old days were imposing and overt, today’s defences are designed to blend in. For example, on historic buildings, high-strength bollards are often painted in “heritage” gold and black rather than in the usual hi-vis Day-Glo colours. This follows complaints that barriers introduced at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle immediately after the Westminster Bridge attack made them look like airport security gates. Today, bollards are concealed as everything from flower pots and seating areas to dustbins and sculpture works. At Arsenal’s Emirates Stadium, the 12ft-high concrete letters spelling out the club’s name outside the venue are part of the anti-terror defences – and now a popular place for selfies. Belfast’s Titanic Museum has bollards dressed up as deck seats at its forecourt."
RT on X - "Man faces 2 years in prison for cleaning up a river Paul Powlesland and a group of volunteers removed 200 bags of rubbish from London's River Roding The Environment Agency is prosecuting him for not having a permit"
Anarcho-tyranny strikes again!
Meme - "Note to oneself never read your sons birthday card from his girlfriend"
"I hope your birthday is as good as your dick"
"Today you came out of a vagina. Tonight you will be back in one"
Wisconsin man stole coworker's identity for 30 years, sent victim to mental hospital before DNA exonerated him: court ruling - "A federal appeals court has upheld a 12-year prison sentence for a Wisconsin man who stole another person's identity for decades and manipulated the criminal justice system to have his victim jailed and forcibly medicated. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit rejected Matthew David Keirans' challenge to his sentence... The case centers on the accusation that Keirans' theft of William Woods' identity began in the late 1980s, when the two men worked together at a hot dog cart in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Woods said Keirans stole his wallet in 1988, but returned it after Woods threatened to punch him. But while Keirans had possession of Woods' wallet, he used the information on Woods' social security card to apply for a driver's license as William Woods. Court records show Keirans used Woods' identity to build a new life — marrying, having a child, opening bank accounts, obtaining credit, and working at the University of Iowa Hospital, where he earned more than $100,000 a year as an IT administrator. Court documents indicate that, when Woods tried to reclaim his identity in 2019, Keirans convinced police that Woods was the imposter. Woods was arrested and charged with identity theft and false impersonation. Woods spent 428 days in jail and 147 days in a state mental hospital, where he received medication after a judge found him not competent to stand trial. He was convicted in March 2021 and ordered by the court to use what it believed was his true name: Matthew Keirans. After his release, Woods continued fighting to reclaim his identity. In January 2023, he contacted the University of Iowa Hospital, where Keirans worked. A detective investigating Woods' complaint used DNA evidence to prove Woods was telling the truth"
UI detective unravels identity theft scheme - "Mallory’s next move provided the first big breakthrough in the case. He tracked down the parents listed on the birth certificate that both men claimed was theirs. Woods’ mother had died, but Mallory found the father living in Kentucky. “He is a sweet old fella, and we had some nice long conversations over the phone about everything and anything,” Mallory says. “He told me he hadn’t seen his son in years but that he lived in California and talked to him regularly. “I admit I did wonder if California Bill could be so low as to talk to this guy and pretend to be his son.” Woods consented to a DNA swab, which the Santa Monica, California, Police Department helped obtain. They also took a new photo of Woods. The Covington, Kentucky, Police Department then visited Woods’ father and showed him several photos. He picked out Woods as his son. The officer also took a DNA swab from the father. The swabs were sent to the Iowa Division of Criminal Investigation. On June 19, 2023, Mallory received the results: William Woods in California was the son of the man in Kentucky... According to a 2021 Bureau of Justice Statistics report, 9% of the U.S. population had experienced identity theft in the past year, and 1 in 5 people had experienced it in their lifetime. That included 4% of people having their credit card misused, 3% having their bank account misused, and 1% having their personal information misused for fraudulent purposes, such as getting medical care or applying for a job or government benefits. It's not uncommon for the University of Iowa Police Department to investigate stolen credit cards. They also occasionally see cases of people falsifying résumés to get a job, using a false identity for health insurance purposes, or even misrepresenting themselves as a subject matter expert for financial gain. But the type of identity theft and identity fraud that Mallory was investigating is extremely rare. “I don’t think you could replicate this today,” says Mark Bullock, assistant vice president of Campus Safety at Iowa. “We have all these different systems that monitor people’s financials. I don’t even know how you would start. I think one of the only reasons this worked for so long was because the real William Woods was off the radar and not functioning in society like other people who had bank accounts and credit cards that they regularly use and check.” Mallory says he sometimes found himself having to convince authorities in other jurisdictions to help him dig up old documents. “Very few people have seen something comparable to this,” Mallory says. “I found that by saying they had the opportunity to help break a 30-year-old identity theft case often motivated people to help me.”
Operation Cat Drop - Wikipedia - "Operation Cat Drop is the name given to the delivery of cats, equipment and supplies by the United Kingdom's Royal Air Force to remote regions of the then-British colony of Sarawak (today part of Malaysia), on the island of Borneo in 1960. The cats were flown out of Singapore and delivered in crates dropped by parachutes as part of a broader program of supplying cats to curb an infestation of rats."
Pasta joke: restaurant’s mascot scooter gets a parking ticket - "Bosses at a pasta restaurant thought they were on to a winner using a classic Vespa scooter to advertise their menu. But parking wardens had other ideas and slapped a ticket on the mascot, which was parked on the pavement to display the restaurant’s menu... the scooter was “newly registered, with a number plate, tax and L-plates”, meaning it was classed as a vehicle under current parking rules."
Met police use Palantir AI to remove predatory officers in ranks - "Palantir AI technology has been used by the Metropolitan Police to identify predatory officers in its ranks. Scotland Yard has used the US tech firm’s software to flag up nude images on phones, find disturbing images and uncover changes in officers’ communication patterns with domestic abuse victims"
Time to ditch them!
Meme - "If the Globalists and Progressives are failing to influence your kids, then they're going to make damn sure no one else can."
"FOUR IN 10 AUSSIE TEENAGE BOYS SUPPORT 'RIGHT-WING VIOLENT EXTREMISM', RESEARCH SHOWS"
"Social media ban for children under 16 starts in Australia"
This looks like a misrepresentation of the finding that "roughly 40% of boys aged 13 to 17 agreed that women lie about domestic and sexual violence" (though that slippage is present in one of the more original sources by the researchers too). Clearly, women never lie about that and if you think so, you're a misogynist
Cornfield Bomber - Wikipedia - "The "Cornfield Bomber" is the nickname given to a Convair F-106 Delta Dart of the United States Air Force's 71st Fighter-Interceptor Squadron which made an unpiloted landing in a farmer's field in Montana in 1970. Suffering only minor damage after the pilot had ejected from the aircraft during a training mission gone awry, the aircraft was recovered, repaired, and returned to service. It is currently on display at the National Museum of the United States Air Force at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio."
Darlington: Child golfers confronted by huge 3-metre boa constrictor after shot lands perfectly on top of exotic snake - "Within a week of each other, two boa constrictors measuring six feet in length were found at the Blackwell Grange Golf Club thought to be illegally abandoned. Both South American serpents - nicknamed Mr and Mrs Snakey McSnake Face - were discovered within a week of each other, fuelling worries that more serpents could be lurking around the area... The golf club has since confirmed the pair of serpents have died due to being in an alien environment for an extended period of time. Chris Newman, director of the National Centre for Reptile Welfare, explained the presence of two snakes strongly suggests deliberate abandonment rather than an escape."
Bedford train crash: Council apologises after issuing parking fines to drivers who didn't move their cars following fatal train crash - "A council has apologised after drivers were hit with fines for not moving their vehicles from a station car park following last week's fatal Bedford train crash. The tragic crash impacted commuters on the East Midlands Railway (EMR) service after one train smashed into the back of another on the same line shortly after 5pm last Friday. Due to delays, some passengers were unable to return to their cars for hours while crews worked to clear the line. However, upon arriving back at the car park at Bedford railway station, they were shocked to find fixed penalty notices slapped on their windscreens. One motorist was quick to criticise the council for issuing fines, saying the car park at the station adjacent to the station in Ashburnham Road was owned and operated by local authority. He said: "Police were telling people NOT to go to the station! How were we supposed to collect our cars? Or extend parking?"
Meme - Kangmin Lee | 이강민 @kangminlee: ">sees an attractive woman
>immediately thinks of children
Every single time with leftists."
DeathMetalVikinges @D: "Of course you would appeal to a Republican, you look 12."
Tiffany Fong @TiffanyFo...: *photo of her with MAGA hat and Trump 2028 T-shirt*
"First Date and She wore this.."
When left wingers accuse Republicans of being "pedos", this is what they mean
Unlike the rest of the U.S., the South is growing its youth population - The Washington Post - "Population across the region grew across all age groups between 2020 and 2025. But it was the only region with growing numbers of people under 18."
Marc Thiessen on X - "“The South added roughly 7.6 million people between 2020 and 2025 — more than the rest of the country combined.” The 2030 census is going to be political Armageddon for Democrats. They are projected to lose 14 Congressional seats and 10 electoral votes"
Time to mock red states as hellholes no one would want to live in, least of all young people, again