The official site of Kelly Sedinger: Reader, writer, photographer, and dreamer
I know you don’t think you need to watch a foul-mouthed Australian guy do a tutorial and how to make a burger with pineapple on it, but really, how good are you at assessing your needs, actually? That’s what I thought.
Here’s the foul-mouthed Australian guy cooking a burger with pineapple on it.
In my old hometown of Olean, NY, there is a small tourist attraction called “Rock City”. It’s a park at the top of one of the highest hills south of the city, where a region of gigantic rocks sits. I’m not sure how the rocks got there–many think that glaciers pushed or pulled them to the top of the hill, but there are similar (but smaller) areas of gigantic rocks in New York’s Southern Tier that are actually sedimentary remnants of an ancient seabed, believe it or not, so I’m not sure if Olean’s Rock City is one of those as well.
From the Rock City vantage point, the view of the valley below is honestly a stunning one. That part of New York is deeply beautiful to my eyes, particularly when I could go atop one of the hills and look into the distance.
I found this video yesterday of drone footage in, around, and above the Rock City park, and I found myself just a bit homesick for the Southern Tier. A bit, anyway.
(The fact that the Rock City Park entrance is flying a flag for our 45th President goes a long way to explaining why I don’t live down there anymore, if I’m being honest.)
When I was a kid and my mother’s family still lived in the Pittsburgh area, we would obviously go to visit on occasion, which meant a lot of driving through that city. If you’ve never been to Pittsburgh, it’s a very hilly place, and when it came time to build expressways through the region, this involved the construction of tunnels, some of which are quite long indeed. There are two very well-known tunnels around Pittsburgh, one through the Fort Pitt hill and another through Squirrel Hill. The video below takes you from the Fort Pitt Tunnel all the way to the Squirrel Hill one.
We made this drive a lot when I was young. My grandmother and my uncle lived in one of the eastern suburbs, which made this stretch of road a necessary jaunt when we went downtown and back again. Later, when my sister was in college in Pittsburgh, we’d still make this drive occasionally. Those tunnels were always very exciting. We drove through the Squirrel Hill tunnel a lot more often than we did the Fort Pitt one, but that Fort Pitt Tunnel is very exciting if you’re northbound, because as soon as you emerge from the tunnel and into the light, there before you is the entire city of Pittsburgh, just across the Monongahela River. Then, if you’re on your way to Monroeville and points east, you cross the river and turn right, following the Monongahela a bit longer before the river turns away to the south. Eventually you get to the tunnel under Squirrel Hill.
Pittsburgh is an exciting town to drive through, as this video shows. I like that there are videos like this! I’ve no idea when I’ll get to Pittsburgh again, but for now, this video brings up some happy memories.
The Internet, for all its annoyances and horrors, is also a place of fun and wonderment, and it’s always nice to see a reminder of that. One example is a person on Twitter who has made it his job to post the same thing, each and every Friday.
It’s a video clip of actor Daniel Craig, from an episode of Saturday Night Live that he hosted. It came time for him to introduce the episode’s musical guest, a Canadian singer named Abel Makkonen Tesfaye. Tesfaye’s stage name, however, is “The Weeknd” (spelling intentional), so what Daniel Craig says is: “Ladies and gentlemen, The Weeknd.”
When saying that, Craig does this little shake of his head and a spreading of his arms as if to say that he can’t believe he’s lucky enough to be introducing this artist…and as the clip has been repurposed, it sounds like Craig is amazed that we made it, that we survived another week: “Oh wow, we got there. We’re here, folks. It’s OK.”
“Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend.” Spelling intentional.
It’s Friday night. Ladies and gentlemen, the weekend!
So, like many others in this COVID hellscape, the search for entertainment of a more cheerful kind, to take our minds off the dystopian virus-afflicted nightmare world in which we live, has led us to The Great British Baking Show. (Yes, I know that the BBC’s actual title for the show is The Great British Bake Off, but I live in America where Pillsbury has a trademark on the term “Bake Off” so the show has to be called something else, because heaven forbid we get in the way of somebody’s ability to make a buck while doing nothing at all, so Great British Baking Show it is for capitalism-addicted America.) I can, and might, wax poetic about the show at some point in the future, as we’ve now watched five seasons of it on Netflix, but for right now, I’m just going to talk about one item.
If you haven’t watched the show, it’s a cooking competition of the “Start with a dozen folks, make them cook stuff, judge them and eliminate one each week until you’ve got a champion” variety. It’s a lot more cheerful and kind-hearted than, say, Hell’s Kitchen, which is nice. The format each week is the same: the bakers are given three challenges, the second of which is a “technical” challenge in which they are instructed to bake something they may or may not have made before, which tests specific technical skills, and for which they are given a recipe with many key details left out. They are given the ingredients they need, and the first step might be “Make a dough with the ingredients.” That sort of thing.
One week, the technical challenge was to make Stroopwafel cookies (“biscuits” in British lingo). These are some of my favorite cookies (“biscuits” in British lingo). They’re a thin sandwich cookie (“biscuit” in British lingo), consisting of two waffles with some caramel syrup in the middle. I always figured they were made using two separate waffle cookies (“biscuits” in British lingo), but when the GBBO folks made them, it turned out that they only make one waffle for each Stroopwafel, and then they actually have to cut it laterally into two waffles, which are then used to make the sandwich! This takes some knife skills that I will admit that I do not have, and neither did some of the GBBO bakers, which is what made the Stroopwafel a good challenge.
Of course, the process for making Stroopwafels has been mechanized for scale, as it would have to be, since you can buy Stroopwafels in just about any grocery store these days. I found a video of the process, from the bakery attendant scooping dough into the machine to its final emergence as a complete cookie (“biscuit” in British lingo). I had to watch this video five or six times before I finally spotted the point at which the waffles are sliced laterally across their width. Let me know if you figure it out sooner! (Actually, don’t let me know, because then I’ll feel dumb.)
By the way, Stroopwafels go wonderfully with coffee (and, likely, tea). They make small ones, about the size of a silver dollar, but if you get the full-size ones, about four inches across, you can actually sit them atop your mug so they absorb some of the radiant heat energy from your hot beverage. The caramel gets all soft and the waffle takes on the heat and…well, that’s just a great cookie (“biscuit” in British lingo).
And also by the way, what do British people call the thing that Americans call biscuits, the salty buttery glob of wondrous flakeyness that pairs so beautifully with fried chicken? Just wondering….
A while back I shared a fascinating video of a guy doing his job, which I labeled “Competence Porn”. I found another such example the other day, and since this new guy’s videos are mostly shorter than that first one, I’ve watched more of these. I’ve “gone down the rabbit hole”, as the kids say (in an allusion to Alice’s Adventures In Wonderland), and this is something that interests me in itself. During our COVID-19 isolation times, I’ve seen a lot of people discover new things and delve into them a lot more deeply than they might have otherwise. Baking is one I’ve seen a lot (especially sourdough starters!). Ditto knitting, and other hobbies. Gaming. Cooking. Home brewing. And in my case, going deeply into music again, and hitting the books hard.
And…”competence porn” videos!
In my earlier example, that’s a guy doing his job. This one is a hobbyist…with a very interesting, strange, and useful hobby. This fellow likes driving around on very rainy days, finding flooding streets, and unclogging the storm drains. And that’s it! So why would I find this fascinating?
Well, these videos are pleasant sonically. I have always responded quite happily to the sounds of rain, rushing water, splashing, and all the things that water does. I just like listening to this guy’s videos. But he also says interesting things along the way, pointing out the physics as to how this stuff works, why the water does what it does, what the design flaws are sometimes in the drains he encounters, why the drain pipe runs this way and not that, and sometimes how dumb and inconsiderate people can be (a couple videos have cars deciding they don’t want to drive through the flood so they go around it…on the sidewalk).
Anyway, here’s a guy unclogging a street drain. What rabbit holes have you gone down lately?
Recently, one of the hosts of a writing-related podcast that I enjoy (Functional Nerds, if you must know!) referred to “competence porn”, meaning stories wherein the characters are actually, well, competent. They know what they’re doing, they know their jobs, and they work to get the job done. Which isn’t to say that there aren’t complications! Not at all. But none of the major plot developments arise from someone being dumb or inept or not having a clue what they’re doing. That is refreshing.
Competence Porn can also refer, I think, to instructional videos or documentary-type videos in which people who know what they are doing simply go about doing their job. This particular video is an outstanding case in point. The YouTube algorithm served this up for me, and I have no idea why–maybe it’s because I’ve watched railroading videos, or occasional construction videos, but not many of those at all. The concept is incredibly simple: a contractor was using an excavator (the modern version of what I learned as a kid was a “steam shovel”) to dig out a pond someplace. Unfortunately, the ground appears to have been too saturated and the operator appears to have not used proper equipment in moving the excavator, resulting in the excavator sinking into the mud all the way up to the cab.
In steps Our Hero, the fellow making this video. This is nothing but 41 minutes of this guy doing the job of digging out this excavator, but it’s just amazing to watch. It starts with his laconic attitude. The sight of the excavator buried in mud is disconcerting, and at first glance I thought, “I have zero idea how they’re going to get that thing out of there.” But Our Hero just says in a gentle drawl, “Well, there’s the problem,” and next thing we know, he’s in an excavator of his own, working on digging out that one. This involves moving a whole lot of mud so that the water won’t flood the hole as they dig into it; it involves delicate placement of mats that will provide support for these giant tools. The ‘mats’ consist of half a dozen railroad ties all bolted together and laid out side by side so that the excavators can drive over them, and the most fascinating part of this video is Our Hero’s manipulation of the mats. He moves them quickly and precisely with his excavator, and he taps them into position to line them up, and at one point (about halfway through the video) he even picks one up and moves it while he looking at and taking to someone else!
There’s never any questioning it here, never a shown moment of “Oh wow, let me call somebody, I don’t even know where to start.” Just a cursory “Well, there’s the problem,” followed by the work to get the job done. Apparently the whole job only took an hour and a half from their arrival to the end, and it just seemed like a day at the office for these folks.
Competence porn, indeed!
(This video is so even-keeled that the droning sounds of the excavator engine as it digs and dumps, digs and dumps, digs and dumps has a kind of ASMR effect, I noticed. This was actually relaxing to watch!)
…but the latter part of last week got really busy for me. Nothing bad, but wow, did the schedule ever pack itself full of stuff. (Like seeing The Avengers…review post forthcoming….)
I should be able to get some blogging mojo going again, but for now, here’s a cute Persian kitten being fed with chopsticks.
There are people in the world who don’t think Persian kittens are cute. These people lead sad, lonely, desperate lives from which they have no escape.