Category: Pop Culture

Supercharging Altoids (R)

Back in 2006, when Wrigley bought out Altoids (R) brand mints, they replaced the peppermint oil with artificial flavor. Although they soon resumed using real peppermint oil, the mints have never been as strongly flavored as they once were. So here’s how to supercharge Altoids (R) so they taste as peppermint-y as they did prior to 2006:

Go to your local health food store, and get the peppermint spirits which are sold as a dietary supplement. I got “Herb Pharm” brand “Peppermint Spirits Essential Oil and Whole Leaf Extract”. Note that they have changed the label since I bought mine (a one ounce bottle lasts a long time), and the new label is different than the one you see in the photograph below. Now get a small dinner plate, and spread out the mints on it.

Supercharging Altoids (R)

1. A mint ready for supercharging.
2. Adding peppermint spirits; the typical mint will absorb about three drops.
3. After adding peppermint spirits to one side, let the mint dry out (this could take 15 minutes).
4. A mint flipped over waiting for peppermint spirits to be added to the other side.
5. A supercharged mint drying out and waiting to be eaten.

Once you add peppermint spirits to both sides, the mints are somewhat damp and fragile, and it’s best to let them dry overnight before putting them back in the tin.

(If you want to know more about artificial flavor in Altoids, I wrote about it back in 2006 here, here, and here.)

Old Time Religion

Recently, I heard some new verses for the parody version of “Old Time Religion.” Here they are:

Yoruba religion, a.k.a. Orisha devotion:

Let us pray to the Orishas,
Not the ones who are too vicious,
Just the ones who grant our wishes;
And that’s good enough for me!

Ancient Egyptian religion:

O we sing the praise of Horus
Like the Dynasties before us —
A three thousand year old chorus;
And that’s good enough for me!

Worshiping at the altar of Wall Street:

The mighty Dollar is my Savior,
She controls my ev’ry behavior
Whether I spend her or I save her;
And that’s good enough for me!

BlogDec0915I was particularly interested in these verses because they happened to be about three religions I am currently studying. And lest you think I’m kidding about Wall Street being a religion, you might want to check out Scott Gustafson’s new book At the Altar of Wall Street: The Rituals, Myths, Theologies, Sacraments, and Mission of the Religion Known as the Modern Global Economy (Eerdmans Publishing, Sept., 2015), in which the author “argues that economics functions in our current global culture as religions have functioned in other cultures.”

A gift to science fiction fans

The New Horizons fly-by of Pluto is the best gift you could ever give to this science fiction fan. Like many science fiction fans, I’ve traveled to Pluto many times in stories like Heinlein’s Have Spacesuit, Will Travel, or Larry Niven’s World of Ptavvs (well, in that last book you don’t exactly travel to Pluto, you just watch it get blown up). After all those imaginary journeys to Pluto, seeing photos of the real planet is just about as good as it gets:

BlogDec0415

Lots more photos of Pluto on the official Web site of the New Horizon mission here.

ARC-5 radios

We’ve been cleaning up Dad’s condo, and I got the job of going through nearly 70 years’ worth of amateur radio gear. I found some lovely old radios, including these military surplus ARC-5 series “command sets.” I don’t know when Dad got these. He was licensed as W2YLY not long after he got out of the service; he might have gotten these while he was still finishing college, but I’m guessing he purchased these around 1950 after he got his first job (he doesn’t remember any more).

ARC-5 radio BC-459A

Plenty of ARC-5s are still on the air, and W1IS is helping us to find them a good home. I like to think that some day I might wind up contacting one fo Dad’s old radios.

Personal computer, c. 1983

My sister and I are doing some organizing in our father’s condo. Dad’s a retired electrical engineer who saved almost everything, and he has several decades worth of electrical gear. Including this:

Sharp PC-1500 Pocket Computer

It’s a Sharp PC-1500 Pocket Computer, which apparently ran the same operating system as the famous Radio Shack TRS-80 computer. What you’re seeing above is the computer nested in its docking station, which has a little printer built into it. For memory, you hitched up a cassette player, and at top left there’s a special computer memory cassette. There are several boxes of software — not sure how that worked — plus a keyboard overlay (on the ground in front of the computer) which goes with one of the software packages.

Abby remembers this computer well, because Dad had a biorhythms program that fascinated her.

Easy face painting

Some of our high school youth youth advisors went to Kids Carnival today, the fun event organized by the University AME Zion Church as a way for people of different races and ethnicities to get to know each other a little better while having a good time. Our youth group offered to do a face painting booth. We lucked out in that Elaine, a high school senior from the Palo Alto Vineyard Church, joined us — she is a fine artist who has her own business doing face painting for kids’ birthday parties. We let her do all the hard designs (Ice Bear, a Death Eaters logo, etc.), and we used our own easy designs.

Our designs turned out to be easy enough that children can do them (we let some of the children who came to our booth use our paints to paint designs on each other) — yet they’re satisfying and look pretty good when you’re done. I’m posting them here in case you want to use them next time you do face painting in your congregation. Except where noted, our designs are meant to go on cheeks or backs of hands. We had copies of the designs where children could look at them and choose the one they wanted. One last suggestion: it is worth spending extra money for good face paints; we bought the cheap ones, but when Elaine let us try hers, we saw that they were far better.

Face Painting 1

Face Painting 2

Face Painting 3

How to fail sex ed

One of the wonderful people who teaches comprehensive sexuality education in our church sent along a link to a post on Imgur headed: “Two years ago today, my then 14 year old sister got suspended for submitting these answers for her sex-ed class. I’m so proud of her.” Then there’s a photo of a worksheet titled “Objections to Condoms.” Kids were supposed to come up with possible responses to various excuses for not using condoms.

So, for example, one of the excuses for not using a condom was: “Condoms are gross; they’re messy; I hate them.” To which this creative girl replied: “So are babies.”

Condoms are messy -- So are babies

Mind you, a couple of the replies are just plain unconvincing, e.g. — Excuse: “I’d be embarrassed to use one”; reply: “Look at all the fucks I give.” Yeah, whatever.

But some of the replies, while very snarky, just might actually work in the real world, e.g. — excuse: “I don’t have a condom with me”; reply: “I don’t have my vagina with me.” This is not a good response to put on a worksheet that a public school teacher has to read; but a snarky early adolescent girl who needs to use a little humor to get through to a boy might find that reply useful.

This brings up an interesting point of educational philosophy. A core element of my educational philosophy is to start where the learner is. Some early adolescents learning about sex and sexuality may be most comfortable using snark and f-bombs to talk about sex. Of course we want to move them to a more reasoned form of discourse, a way of speaking that will allow them to talk about sex with potential partners openly, humanely, and with emotional intelligence. But we may have to listen to their f-bombs for a while before we get them there.