AAMP!itude

fluxus - Higgins

Just saw much of the Intermedia exhibit at the Kuhn (main) library at UMBC. It's a fascinating documentation of the Fluxus art movement as manifested by the collection of the late Dick Higgins. (He was a member of the movement and published stuff on it (or rather, Fluxus art books).
I'd originally wanted to check out the Whiteness exhibit in the fine arts bldg., but the doors were locked.

Kurdish followup

from the WRN files:

Tuesday, November 25 and Wednesday, November 26 2003: Radio Netherlands

The week's new edition of EuroQuest with Jonathan Grubert: Kurdish Mothers Plead for War Amnesty in Turkey: Although hostilities between Kurds have officially come to an end, the tensions have not. So the mothers of former Kurdish fighters are leading efforts to declare for an amnesty for their sons. However, their opponents are also mothers - the mothers of Turkish soldiers killed in the conflict.

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So how will the series of bombings in Turkey this past week affect this debate?

chocolate - followup

re: dark chocolate bar from Poland

specs: 7 oz. or 200 g
brand: Sweet Obsessions /Global / Sorbee Int'l of Philadelphia
store: Klein's Supermarket (Harford county, MD)

chocolate

recent chocolate buys:

I picked up a double-size bar of semi-sweet that was made in Poland. (Globe brand?) Only about a buck! Very cheap in price, but better than Hershey (i.e., less grainy mouth feel), but still not as smooth as stuff from Western Europe.

Visited a Lindt store in New Hampshire last month. The NH stores differ from ones elsewhere in that they also carry defects. So you can pick up a bag of perfectly tasting chocolates (improperly formed or like conjoined twins) for much less than the well-formed ones.

new SUV? (old rattletrap?)

The NY Times notes today that a Cuban American businessman is trying to set up a dealership network in the States to sell a Romanian SUV, the Aro, renamed the Cross Lander.

It appears he's trying to market it as a small-size off-road vehicle (although bigger than compact crossover ones), for people who want something that looks like a older Jeep or Land Rover (i.e., 25 y.o. styling) and has few frills. Price is to be less than $20K.

I took a look at the video on the company website Cross Lander. It looked like the vehicle could go up and down short steep inclines on sandy soil, but the bobbling of the body/chassis as it went over deep ruts gave me the impression that it might be easily subsceptible to roll-over.

So far, I haven't found that many reviews posted on the web. A few brief ones, from a UK site, (going back to '89) have been favorable in terms of it's off-road capability. So maybe it handles better than it looks.

I must confess to being generally ignorant as to how off-road vehicles look as they're driving in the rough. This despite having spent weeks on end riding off-road in a HMMWV (known to consumers as the Hummer).

Meanwhile, the NY Times article ends with remarks by an automotive publication editor:

"I keep thinking the S.U.V. market is too saturated for whimsical new entrants but then something like this Romanian model comes along," said Karl Brauer, editor in chief of Edmunds.com, a company in Santa Monica, Calif., that publishes automobile pricing information. "It goes to show that comfort, mileage -- all of that is irrelevant. What matters most is image."

I also ran across another comment about the vehicle in an article I happened to recently read in the July/August 03 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. It's an article about the bear preserves or "farms" that were developed in Romania to cater to the hunting whims of dictator, Ceausescu:

"One district competed against another for his visits, offering big bears and rack-heavy stags as easy targets for his expensive imported rifles. For a typical hunt Ceausescu would fly in by helicopter, landing on a pad cleared within the hunting area. From there he'd be taken by rough-terrain vehicle (in earlier years he favored Jeeps; later a Russian make, the Gaz; and still later a rattletrap Romanian imitation, the Aro)..."

Hmmm. This raises some questions.
How far removed from the Gaz is the Cross Lander? (The drive train will be completely different.) What was the reputation of the Gaz? And how does the Aro compare to the Gaz?

whatever happened to this Kurdish leader?

Here's a pic I snapped in Berlin 4 years ago.
Who remembers Abdullah Öcalan?
Not on par with Osama and Saddam, and therefore, relegated to the dustbin of history.

road food

Here's something from a recent NY Times article about food trends, that convenient sizes and smaller portions are generating greater sales (well... not all the time):

But just making a product convenient and widely available does not guarantee success. A notable flop was IncrEdibles Push n' Eat eggs on a stick, which various food and packaging trade magazines hailed as one of the most innovative new products of the new century. Manufactured by Breakaway Foods, now defunct, of Columbus, Ohio, it looked like scrambled eggs stuffed into an empty toilet-paper roll. Consumers were supposed to push the eggs up from the bottom, using an attached stick.

"People want convenience, but they still eat with their eyes, and that just looked too weird," Mr. Podeschi said. [Podeschi is a senior vice president for merchandising for 7-11.]

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Anybody tried that item? What are your favorite food items you eat on the go? I'm partial to Nature Valley granola bars.

instead of silicone, how about tofu?

"Tofu As a Tissue-Mimicking Material," Junru Wu,
Ultrasound in Medicine and Biology, vol. 27, no. 9,
2001, pp. 1297-1300. The author, who is at the
University of Vermont, explains that:

"The acoustic properties of one kind of tofu (soft,
firm and extra-firm types) commercially available in
grocery markets were measured. It was found that
density, speed of sound and attenuation coefficient of
tofu were close to those of some soft tissues.

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Perhaps, in the not so far distant future, tofu will become the preferred substance for breast implants?