Monday, November 04, 2013

Bugged

Is my apartment bugged? The most-recommended-for-me NYT Online article this morning was the one about how imported spices are 12% vermin. And sure enough, last night's dinner preparations were cut short when I was adding red pepper flakes to a pan that already contained oil and meticulously chopped (OK, chopped) garlic cloves, for an arrabiata. And out came a bit of, as the more-blasé-than-I-am like to call it, extra protein, in the form of a whole, if desiccated, fly. No arrabiata was had. We'd been using these pepper flakes for how long? Which, yes, suggests there was no great health risk, but still. The interesting thing is, I hadn't Googled this phenomenon or otherwise told the internet about what had happened. It just knew.

Meanwhile it's unclear what one is supposed to do with this information. Buy local red pepper flakes harvested in the red-pepper fields of New Jersey?

*****

In other internet-age news, the insensitivity-and-public-shaming cycle continues, with the clueless fish-in-a-barrel of this news micro-cycle the 22-year-old (former; she was subsequently fired over this, "this" being either the costume or the ensuing scandal) office worker who dressed as a Boston Marathon bombing victim for Halloween. That's such obviously poor taste that you do wonder why she chose it, let alone went to work in it, posed at work in it, and posted it online. And, the response was - predictably enough - wildly out of proportion to the original offense, with random strangers threatening this woman's life, and because, in further wisdom, she'd apparently posted a non-blurred photo of her driver's license online as well, the mob knew where she lived, or at least where her parents did. And as everyone who's already remarked on the story has noted, two wrongs and all that, plus if you're so very sensitive to senseless deaths that this costume gets your blood boiling, is the answer really to threaten another?

As online shame-fests go, this is a less straightforward example of the problem than the other variant, which involves someone acting in a mildly unpleasant way and being surreptitiously recorded, that recording then posted online. And I'd include, in this category, parents posting hilarious photos of their own kids to fully public sites with the intention of encouraging strangers to laugh at your child. There's something uniquely unsettling about the capacity of the internet to make private or just small-scale and offline bad-day moments part of someone's permanent record, or really the defining thing they're known for forever. Everyday questionable behavior, even things that fall well short of dressing like a terrorism victim or wearing blackface, are potential fodder for an online mob. The proverbial fuss-made-at-a-coffee-shop-over-skim-vs.-low-fat-milk sort of not-one's-best-moment. I suspect that everyone from time to time behaves in ways that, out of context, would make them seem like terrible people. Shouldn't we, I don't know, be aware of that before joining in those sort of righteousness pile-ons?

3 comments:

Petey said...

"Is my apartment bugged?"

Of course. Didn't you carefully read the Blogger EULA?

"...to a pan that already contained oil and meticulously chopped (OK, chopped) garlic cloves..."

My two cents here is that coarsely chopped garlic is better for gravy. But opinions differ.

"And out came a bit of, as the more-blasé-than-I-am like to call it, extra protein, in the form of a whole, if desiccated, fly. No arrabiata was had."

Think of all the starving children in India who could've benefited from that extra protein. For shame, Phoebe. For shame.

(And, as always, while unbugged red pepper flakes are a good standby, I highly recommend substituting a small amount of fresh habanero for gravy. Half a pepper should be good for an arrabiata for two. Habaneros add an extra delicious flavor, which additionally highlights some of the other ingredients in the gravy.)

-----

Also, vote tomorrow. Top-line ballot results may be a done deal, but margins matter, and downballot matters a lot.

Nicholas said...

I had a professor in college who would, to horrify us all, read selected items from the Federal Register that specified how much food had to be in food (12% chicken to be a chicken pot pie, as I recall), and how much other stuff could be in food (like what's allowed to be in peanut butter, which I will not mention). He strongly advised us to never do any research on the matter if we wanted to eat.

Petey said...

"And, the response was - predictably enough - wildly out of proportion to the original offense, with random strangers threatening this woman's life, and because, in further wisdom, she'd apparently posted a non-blurred photo of her driver's license online as well, the mob knew where she lived, or at least where her parents did."

Just for fun, can we stipulate that this young woman was a previous victim of parental online overshare, and this is the first known instance of revenge child overshare?

So, say her parents posted extensively about her back in the GeoCities days. To gain her revenge, it only took two easy steps:

1) Post her driver's license with her parents' address after she'd moved out of the home.

2) Post a photo she knew ahead of time would go viral in an incredible bad way.

Immensely unlikely, I know, but it would be damn crafty...