The end of the calendar year is a perfectly good time to go through your kitchen cupboards and look for anything that’s seriously well past its “best before” date. Consider the jar in the photo above. That’s not peanut butter, caramel, or dulce de leche — it’s Miracle Whip from about 30 years ago!
Here’s a little more context, courtesy of the Things Found In Walls – And Other Hidden Findings Facebook group:
The New Yorker: Jeffrey Sachs on the Catastrophic American Response to the Coronavirus. “Where does the United States stand in this? Well, the United States has done the unimaginable, and that is to try to cut the functioning of the W.H.O. in the middle of the pandemic. So I’m not looking for American heroism. I’m looking for the United States not to be among the most destructive forces on the planet right now.”
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How to start a new job, in a new country, in the middle of a pandemic: Justin Giovannetti moved from Canada to New Zealand, and then COVID-19 happened. Here’s his report from November.
It starts when you’re always afraid: This is a 2013 piece by Greg Fallis, and it’s about a phenomenon that’s only ramped up since then. “The United States has become a nation ruled by fear-biters. A lot of our social policies are grounded in fear, and much of that fear is totally unfounded. We’re afraid of terrorists, so we find ways to weasel around the law in order to round up the people we’re afraid of and lock them away forever where we can’t see them. ‘Indefinite detention’ and ‘enhanced interrogation’ are other forms of fear-biting.”
The case against telecommuting: Face Time, a New Yorker article published back in the halcyon days of March 2013, uses the case of Yahoo!’s then-CEO Marissa Meyer’s ending of telecommuting at the company. The article does say that telecommuting is workable in companies with healthy cultures, but there was a trend away from it, and management at the time was all for bringing everyone back to the office. It makes for very quaint reading now.
And finally, here’s The Emotional Journey of Creating Anything Great.
I look forward to the day when the biggest threat to health and safety isn’t COVID-19, but instead is the melted cheddar dip that McDonald’s Brazil recently introduced.
The McDonald’s Brazil Instagram account asked a question that sounded more like a question one would ask in Wisconsin rather than Brazil: “E se a gente fizesse uma piscininha de Cheddar…?” — What if we made a pool of cheddar?
You don’t get a full pool with your order, but you do get 3.5 ounces of cheese. According to Delish:
That 3.5 ounces goes a long way, according to one Instagram account that showered their burger and fries in the cheese and still had half of the bowl left. Another account described the cheese pool as super creamy and yummy, and wrote that McDonald’s hit the nail on the head with this one.
Thanks to David Janes for the find!
Want to see the worst kind of American exceptionalism, espoused by an exceptionally terrible American, say, Ted Cruz? Look no further than this recent response to Rex Chapman’s tweet that Canada is providing the new COVID-19 vaccine to every Canadian who wants it for free.
Ted, who plays Trumpism’s pathological zero-sum game of “I need to win and everyone else needs to lose”, and who apparently hasn’t quite gotten over being born in Canada, decided that he needed to take a dump on something good that would benefit millions of people and likely save lives, since it had nothing to do with the U.S.:
That’s great. Just out of curiosity, which country was it that developed the vaccine? Wonder why.
What he didn’t know is that the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine that Canada would make use of, was…
