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Less Miserable Airlines (Les Misérables Parody)

I think “Les Misérables on a modern airline” is really all I need to say about this. Though I’ll add that it’s absolutely fantastic.

For example, I Dreamed a Dream begins:

I dreamed a dream that I could fly non-stop from Baltimore to Phoenix. And I’d be smiling in the sky, not down here crying in a kleenex. When I was young, flights weren’t delayed. And better in-flight food was tasted. There were no bag fees to be paid. No frequent flyer miles were wasted.

But the fees now come in spades. And you fear you’ll be blacklisted. Airlines tear your hope apart. And they turn your dreams to shame.

I kept a carry-on by my side. They made me check it in as baggage. A hefty fee was then applied! And it was gone at baggage claim.

 

Today’s Athletes

The New York Times looked at every athlete who’s won an Olympic medal in the 100-meter sprint since 1896, drew them all on the same track, and studied the wonderful history of sprinting. You can see just how much faster athletes are today than even a few years ago — and how often records are broken. You’ll leave for new respect for today’s athletes, and a profound sense that you will never compete anywhere near that level.

The Times also took on the 100-meter freestyle and the long jump, with each yielding a different and fascinating view of athletic history.

Hour Physics

Surely the exact opposite of Minute Physics is the Richard Feynman’s hours-long (and entirely engaging) talks given for the Messenger Lectures at Cornell. Here’s the first hour:

The whole series isn’t available from a single source, but it all seems to be available (following YouTube’s “related videos”, or just searching for “The Character of Physical Law”).

Possibly my favorite thing anybody’s ever said comes in the seventh part, Seeking New Laws:

Now I’m going to discuss how we would look for a new law. In general, we look for a new law by the following process:

First, we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what (if this law that we guessed is right) it would imply. Then we compare the computation results to nature — or we say compare to experiment or experience.

If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong.

In that simple statement is the key to science. It doesn’t make a difference how beautiful your guess is, how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is. If it disagrees with experiment, it’s wrong. That’s all there is to it.

He goes on to talk about how once we had confidence in the law of gravitation we were able to derive new laws (and calculate for the first time the speed of light), and in that way describes how each new discovery in science leads to exponentially more new discoveries in turn. Another gem: “We’re trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible because only in that way do we find progress.”

The Treble Makers

I’ve always been particularly drawn to excellent student performances, like this one from The Treble Makers (later called Kaleidoscope):

When expectations for a student concert necessarily start lower than for a professional performer, it’s all the more impressive to see a group so entirely excel. I also like Mr. Sandman by the same quartet. I sang in my high school’s choir, and I’m absolutely certain I never attained anywhere near this level of musicality.

Minute Physics

YouTube not only brings us pirated music and the stream of consciousness narratives of teenagers around the world; it also brings us MinutePhysics!

Each video tackles a big Physics topic in just a few minutes using drawings, basic animations, and occasionally more elaborate multimedia. Here’s one of my favorites: “Why the solar system can exist” (i.e., why the planets don’t simply crash into the sun:

I also particularly like Why is it dark at night? — the answer to that simple question gets intensely elaborate over the course of three minutes.

The only trouble is that the videos are so short you really can’t watch just one. As with a good bag of potato chips, you’ll find yourself saying “just one more…” for a good hour.

Reel Mowers are Real Mowers

Reel Mower

Reel Mower

It’s our first full summer since moving into this house, and time to buy a lawn mower. I envisioned spending $300 on a gas mower, but in the end spent less than half that for a good old fashioned reel mower. (The cheapest ones were $70, but we splurged for a fancy $130 model.)

This is full of advantages and has no discernible disadvantages.

First, it uses no gas. There’s a cost savings, an environmental savings, and a noise savings. I can mow the lawn whenever I want and bother nobody, and I don’t spew pollution into the atmosphere every time I do it. This is what got me looking in the first place and it’s a big selling point.

Second, it’s inherently a “mulching mower”. It doesn’t leave ugly rows of grass clippings or require disposing of bagged clippings. It conveniently leaves the clipped grass right where it started, where it serves as fertilizer for the lawn.

Third, it’s faster and easier to use. For straight rows of grass it’s no easier or harder than a gas mower; you just push it down the row. (And no, it’s not even a tiny bit hard to push.) But it corners more easily and can handle edges that might be dangerous for a gas mower. For example, I can push it more slowly over rocks, so if one does get kicked it up won’t do any harm — a gas mower would kick the thing right up.

I can mow our entire yard, front and back, in about 10 minutes. That’s about as much time as our neighbors spend yanking fruitlessly on the starting cord for their gas mowers.

Kitchen Nightmares

We stumbled onto Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America entirely by chance, and now we can’t stop watching. The show introduced us to Chef Gordon Ramsay, who has quite the television lineup including MasterChef (teaching amateurs to cook like professional chefs), Hell’s Kitchen (a competition to choose a head chef for a prominent restaurant each season from among 16 hopefuls), and others.

In Kitchen Nightmares, Ramsay visits failing restaurants (with good backstories) and helps them turn their business around. He tastes the food, observes lunch and dinner services, and inspects the kitchen from top to bottom. Then he creates a new menu, has his team remodel the restaurant (literally overnight), and sometimes brings in a consulting chef to bring a mediocre kitchen staff up to speed.

The man is brutally honest, especially in the kitchen. There’s a lot of shouting, with more than a little of it censored out. And in all the episodes we’ve watched, he’s only ever complimented two dishes. This in some ways reduces the show to expected “reality television” standards, but in practice it’s refreshing to see some brutal honesty here.

When Ramsay calls food bland, it’s with the same experience that earned him 12 Michelin stars (once 13). When he accuses chefs of uncleanliness it’s when he’s found moldy food. And when he hints that a dish tastes like it was made with frozen ingredients, he’s been right every time.

Ramsay’s formula is pretty easy to follow. First, get the kitchen clean. He’s a stickler for cleanliness and food safety, and it’s wonderful to see. Second, reduce the size of the menu. More dishes means more preparation, less consistency, and ultimately lower quality. Finally, use only fresh ingredients. Nobody wants to pay for frozen food they could have made at home, and with a smaller menu it’s easy to keep fresh ingredients flowing through the kitchen without wasting them.

This show has completely changed our attitudes on dining out and on cooking at home. We’ve stopped patronizing some questionable restaurants in town, one of which we now know earned an “Unacceptable” rating in its last health inspection. At home, we’ve stopped buying pounds of meat at a time to freeze and have started making quick trips to the store for fresh meat and produce as we need it. I’m looking forward to the farmer’s market in town this summer. We’re not gourmet cooks or fine diners, but we can appreciate the value of a homemade pasta sauce.

My only real complaint about the show is that it plays every restaurant as a success. Sometimes it’s clear that even by the end the kitchen didn’t really have itself put together, and predictably the restaurant ended up closing soon after. But on television, even the disasters are played as triumphs easily enough with a little editing, and it’s the first place the show seems a bit fictional.